Quote: wrencat1873 " If "we" cant move the sport forward by either increasing participation and/or investment, there will, at some point, be no SL or any professional version of the game in the UK/France or N. America. Although I may agree with some of your sentiments, I believe that your solution would be terminal and despite my loathing of Toronto, as a "fit" for SL, I do believe that for RL, we either expand or die.'"
Thank you very much for ALL of your interesting post most of which I don't disagree with.
You believe we either expand or die but I do not see that relegating Leigh and shipping their players to play in Toronto which then doesn't result in a TV deal from Canada is in any shape or form expansion? Expansion is a bigger player pool and a bigger sponsorship/TV money pool. Even Perez said that!! So clubs like Catalans and Toronto are only "geographical" expansion and that means more travel costs and less away fans = lower gates. We need business expansion.
If say the game had taken off in London, Newcastle, Paris Perpignan and South Wales such that they produced an EXTRA 125 quality RL players that would be expansion. Say these five clubs all joined Superleague and French TV provided a TV deal bigger than their recent one with Paris on board and SKY decided to increase their TV deal on the basis of a bigger better and still good quality 16 club league, that would be expansion. But this didn't happen, we haven't expanded.......
What I would ask you to consider is that 70 years ago we had Leeds, Wigan, HKR, Salford, Wakefield, Huddersfield, St.helens, Warrington, Bradford, Widnes, Hull and Castleford as our big clubs. 70 years later they are still roughly speaking our big clubs.
We haven't really expanded at all in 70 years ....But we certainly never died as a result did we?? ..................... I would respectfully suggest "expand or die" is an empty slogan?