Pretty much everybody agrees that Super League becoming more competitive would be a good thing – whether for the entertainment value in the season or for the chances of the international team. So, is it?

I have looked at the three seasons where we have had 14 teams in the league to see if there is any evidence for a more competitive league. Note – for this exercise, I discarded the points deductions for Crusaders and Wakefield and looked at the points that would be gained from results only

Evidence for more competitive

In 2009, Leeds won the league with 21 wins from 27 games providing 42 points and Crusaders were bottom with 6 points. A top to bottom differential of 36 points

In 2010 the difference between top (Wigan) and bottom (Catalans) was 32 points and the same was true this year with 32 points separating Warrington and Crusaders

Interestingly in all three seasons, the team finishing second from bottom attained 14 points

This season, in the top 8, there are 17 points separating Warrington in first place and Hull in 8th while there were 20 points separating Leeds in first and Crusaders in 8th in 2010 (it was 16 points in 2009)

Another interesting stat is the points separating 4th to 8th to see if that part of the league is more even rather than the just the top teams. In 2011, 5 points separate 4th Huddersfield) from 8th (Hull FC), while in 2010 this was 11 points and 9 points in 2009

So, from a league table perspective, there is some evidence to suggest that there is a slight evening up of the competition

Evidence for less competitive

One element that stands out for me is the points for and against ratio that indicates the winning margin of games. In 2009, Leeds finished with the best for and against with 352 and Crusaders the worst with -517, a difference of 869 points. In 2010, Wigan had a positive for and against of 511 with Salford the worst at -409 (920) and in 2011 Warrington ended with +671 and Wakefield -504, a difference of 1,175 points

To see if this was an anomaly, I looked at the difference between the teams with the second best and second worst for and against and it was 572 points in 2009, 743 in 2010 and 847 in 2011

So, the conclusion to be drawn is that from a league perspective Super League is a little more even year on year and yet in the individual games we see more heavy score lines creating greater points differentiations between the best and worst teams

Pretty good post and pretty accurate so can't argue.

You would have hoped that after 3 years of no relegation the league would become closer, it hasn't.
Who would put their mortgage on either Leeds/Wigan/Wire/Saints not winning the GF in 2012?
The comp is split in 2, those that will win it and the rest.
We must look at our premier comp to provide the player quantity and intensity needed to compete at international level, to do so we need to move to two divisions of 10 clubs with imports strictly controlled, imo max 2 per club. The second tier would be FT with circa £700k sky money and p&r between the two.
We need central contract subsidy to ensure the best stay within the game, paid from the sky money eg 25 players sharing £2m is £200k per club less, but the clubs producing the talent benefit those not lose out.

I agree that the competition is getting better and a little bit more competitive but we still have poor quality players in the lower ranked teams. This is always going to be the case but this can improve with better coaching to help develop better talent.

We need to reduce the amount of imports in the league to give young English talent a chance. Young players need to express themselves on the pitch and not be so robotic (for me when a young player comes in they looked scared)

One problem preventing a more competetive league is the poaching of players by the bigger clubs. An influential half back like Rangi Chase or Danny Brough makes all the difference to a team like Cas or Wakey but the big clubs come along and either offer more money or a better chance of silverware and international honours and its impossible for the smaller club to compete. Last year Cas lost a home grown international and a former young SL player of the year to Saints and Hull, the rumours about Chase leaving for Leeds/Wire/Wigan have been going all season. This isn't sour grapes- Cas, Wakey, Salford etc will take players away from lower league clubs in the same way but it means the successful clubs remain successful whilst the smaller clubs are prevented from progressing.

I don't know if there's an answer but this I think is one reason why its hard to see any clubs in the bottom 6 becoming regular top 6 contenders in the forseeable future.

The sport needs to develop an academy system so the youth development is no longer done by the clubs. Have regional academies and then a draft pick from those to the SL clubs. This could perhaps even be linked to the Championship so the players are getting competitive games as well.

That way each year the best young players would be going to the bottom of the SL table and improving those sides.

At the moment it's impossible to go from bottom to the top in SL as there aren't sufficient quality young players to improve those lower sides.

Great in theory but the standards of coaching and facilities to take that kid to the next level are poles apart between top and bottom. If your kid was a world beater at 18 you would want him at at a top club, not at Wakey/Cas/HKR/Quins etc.
Until we have all clubs spending the cap, believing they can win the comp, with great coaches and facilities then it can't happen.

I think the answer is to persevere with Franchises and allow clubs at the bottom of the pile to build up their businesses. Only then are they going to be able to consistently and sustainably spend to the cap.

Going back to the OP, I suppose in a way its difficult to say that the league is less competitive by looking at results. We get a lot more higher scores in SL than the NRL do, but take the Wire-Wigan CC Quarter final. That was a massive score and on paper it looks like Wigan thrashed Wire. They didn't, they just had the upper hand for the first twenty minutes, the next 60 was a closely fought battle, which Wire could have taken. You look at a lot of matches this season and, I think, you see that a lot of close, competitive matches that end up with blow out scores. I think its got more to do with how we play the game here and also teams getting more efficient at attacking.

The other thing is I don't think, overall, this has been a particularly good year for SL. Cru and Wakey went into admin, which affected their season's performance. Bradford are still struggling to get it together. Salford's recruitment was disjointed and they had backroom conflict. Quins, are completely rebuilding. Rovers, Cas, Catalans and Hull have had periods form, but have also had sizeable periods where things really weren't working out. Leeds and Saints have just battled through, but not been anywhere near like we know they can be. A lot of teams have underperformed, but its a reflection more of their individual, internal problems than anything else.

Next season, after a big shake up at most clubs should be very interesting. Look at Catalans; they finished bottom last season and this season they did the double over Wigan and if a couple more results had gone their way they'd be in fourth, possibly pushing third.

Wire, Hull, Catalans, Huddersfield?

I think the other key element is the depth of the squads

In the first third of the season, we saw a lot of what could be described as upset wins and a lot of very close games. As the season has developed, the clubs with the greater depth in their squads have started to come to the fore. All teams will suffer injuries and how teams cope with those will have a significant effect on their final league position

What we need to hope for is that as the squads develop over time, this period of competitiveness increases until we see the vast majority of the season being made up of close games and unpredictable results... as the NRL has evolved into

This will take considerably longer than a single licence period and should be something we aim for in a 5 to 10 year strategic period

To prevent players being poached in numbers by larger clubs from smaller ones we need to look at the club trained rules. We also need a points system per player biased towards club trained and geared to prevent such poaching.
Club trained age need reducing to 18 rather than 20 as now and minimum of club trained players on the 17(say
The points system would prevent clubs being able to poach other teams quality players in numbers.

Sorry, didn't mean to put a smilie in there, I meant to put 8 as a minimum number in the match 17.
Apologies.

Who would put their mortgage on one of those teams to win it? Nobody, because it could be any one of them. In recent years we've had a choice of two clubs - now we have four. That, coupled with the OP's point about point difference between top and bottom (and he forgot about the docked points for Crusaders and Wakefield this year, meaning the gap in win-draw-lose points was actually 4 points smaller this season) indicate the league is getting more competitive.

More competitive? Possibly. Improving? No