The real future of rugby league in the northern hemisphere is at Toulouse, which is a club with not only local players, but also, unlike London Broncos, the capacity to draw good crowds, as we saw with the visit of Toronto in 2019.

French RL cannot produce many professional quality players to SL standard. It is sadly too small a game now. There are only a handful of french players that are first choice for their SL clubs.
The inclusion of Catalans has only seen their team stuffed more and more with English and NRL players. It will be the same for Toulouse if they wanted to compete in SL.

As for the crowd Toulouse did a fantastic job with the TWP game. However on their way to Superleague via the play offs they played York before 1,132 fans and then Featherstone before 1,068. This was very very poor indeed. This last week Tas Baitieri has come out and revealed the sad state of affairs in the french game, kids don't want to play anymore and the standard of the Elite League is also very poor.

And so we go in the ever eternal circle of people making up clubs of no substance, inventing trans-european, trans atlantic and even global leagues to put them in and then declaring what a massive success it will all be?

At the moment I am struggling to see a future for rugby league in England as a fully professional sport. The truth is that, for the vast bulk of its history rugby league in this country was semi-professional. Even when Wigan were at their height pre-superleague they still had numerous players with "proper jobs". The only thing that allowed the game to go genuinely full-time professional was an influx of money from Sky when they were willing to splash huge amounts of cash to acquire as much sport as possible. Now that the TV landscape has changed that money may not be available any longer. To me, rugby league in this country has three options - secure another reasonably lucrative TV deal (if that is even possible), make up that revenue from other sources (I can't see how this can happen at the moment) or start preparing to manage the transition back to a semi-pro game. Since the NRL is in a much more advantageous financial situation than here, that third possibility then basically kills international rugby league outside of the immediate orbit of Australia.
Would this be the death of the sport over here? Perhaps. Sports don't "die" as long as there are people that want to watch and play but I feel that our game has been artificially living beyond its means for twenty-odd years, and I worry that we are on the verge of a reckoning.

Your comment about RL being semi professional for most of its history, is just irrelevant.
Most sports, especially Union start out as amateur.

However with TV and advertising capable of offering plenty of "investment" into many sport's, which in turn allows those sports to pay their participants, which in turn increase the fitness and in theory the speed and quality of the athletes taking part.

If, however, you are suggesting that RL in the UK and Europe is no longer capable of attracting sufficient revenue to fund a full time professional league, well, that is something completely different. The question then would be, what happens to the current pro clubs and players.

The better players would migrate to Union or down under and the rest would either play amateur or semi pro sport or "get a proper job" and we would be left with something similar to the National League in France.

However, it's a downward spiral and the sport has to grow or die, at least as any kind of pro sport.

Accepting you are being provocative, why is the future of RL based solely in one town/city in France. London the capital of the UK with investment could be huge.

Everyone has valid points on the growth of the game but all seem to be missing the main way to increase spectators on to the terraces. The only way that we will grow numbers and get the big sponsors to follow is at grass roots level. Until you have teams at under 6/7/8 like union and football do then there will be no significant increase in growth. You have to have the kids wanting to play/watch and that translates to bums on seats at the top level

London is a soccer city. It will never change. No corporates will invest in rugby league in London.

Toulouse has a strong rugby history and fan base.

Toulouse is a better bet for building rugby league.

London have had MASSIVE investment and done nothing with it.

i'll be seeing a few of those on sunday when they play hull fc at brantingham park. looking forward to it

There's no such thing as debate with you let alone facts. Toulouse have no money, Toulouse's fan base was laid bare in the play off's with only 1,000 fans a game and Toulouse don't develop pro/SL quality players in any number at all, the odd few go to Catalans as they can't develop many as the French grass roots game is dying and so on to.....

The sport broke away from Union in 1896. Clubs like Hull, Leeds, Wakefield, Saints, Wigan and Warrington did this.

They hoped to expand and clubs like South Shields, Coventry, Ebbw Vale, Streatham and Mitcham, Lancaster and Liverpool came and went.

"Growth" failed and continued to fail from 1896 to 2020. It hasn't grown in 124 years [ubut nor has it died[/u - the last quarter of a century has seen it operate professionally.

It only dies two ways.

1. If the game can no longer get a paying TV deal or
2. If the game substitutes real clubs of substance for phoney nonsense clubs.