I think this is another great idea from The Doc www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/leag ... 2xcdq.html

I think this is another great idea from The Doc www.smh.com.au/rugby-league/leag ... 2xcdq.html

100% agree! I'm not the biggest fan of some of his ideas or rants. I really like this and think its totally feasible.

The travel will be devastating. I don't see it working. But there are much better ways to develop an international footprint. This scheme won't add or strengthen a single RL nation outside the big three.

It makes much more sense to have more French teams in SL. Toulouse should have been admitted ages ago. Marwan Koukash would be better advised to focus his efforts on getting Nigel Wood to admit Toulouse to the Championship and then focus efforts on a third French club being admitted such as Avignon. Ultimately there needs to be a team from Paris as well. Koukash could help this French development.

In Avignon there are a couple of Moroccan players. Using his Arab connections he could use Avignon as a pathway for Moroccan and Lebanese players, whose development he could help fund in their own countries. I don't mean that Avignon should be a wholly Arab team, just a place where Arab players get a good look in, and thereby enable Avignon to be promoted as an Arab sympathetic team in Lebanon and Morocco, where the club can have its SL games telecast from Europe every week. That will boost the game in France, Lebanon and Morocco. The scheme that Marwan is now proposing will not.

Haha, the man can't turn salford around despite chucking millions at them and he thinks he can turn the NRL global? He does like to see his name in the paper doesn't he?

He at least tries to think outside the box, even if his ideas are flawed, as I have shown above. Compare with Nigel Wood, who can't even think inside the box!

There's thinking outside the box, then there's just dreaming up nonsense ideas and getting them in the media for some publicity.

you do realise he has had one season and has had more roadblocks chucked at him than a brothel being established next to a church.

A better way would be to start a kind of champions league. The world club series is a good start, but I'd like to see 4 Superleague and 4 NRL teams in a season long comp.

Two groups of 4 then semis and a final.

The difficult part is finding a slot for 8 extra games in the calendar, plus travel.

An English side playing over there just doesn't appeal to me at all.

I think those saying the travel is too much simply haven't done the journey enough. I've done it a $hit ton of times it gets easy, business class will be even easier. The idea with the week of is perfect all NRL teams have them in the season.

Has he? Like what?

Unfortunately it would be a non starter, 4 teams would be operating on almost double the salary cap - it would be like the top 4 SL clubs taking on the top 4 championship clubs

This sort of scheme would be more feasible than lots of what you might think more sensible ones in that it could much more easily attract major sponsorship. The link hints that airfares could be covered. I think it entirely feasible that hotel costs, enhanced TV and advertising revenues, etc could cover the additional costs. It would, however, require a leap of faith and the giving up local obsessions by the British "rugby league fan."

Limelight is all this guy cares about! Sooner he disappears the better!

It's a ridiculous idea. Koukash, like a lot of very rich men, is clearly used to getting his own way. But this would please no-one: ESL would be (fatally?) weakened as the best English talent flocked to the NRL side, where would the team's support base be in Australia, the travelling cost (in money and time), and so on.

And supposing this putative NRL side wasn't a big success, but ended up in the lower half of the table, attracting dwindling crowds? You know, like Salford...

And,in fact, in the vanishingly unlikely event of this proposal going ahead, what would be the long-term prognosis? Eventually the team would start to recruit Aussies and Kiwis, and, just as the NZ Warriors aren't all Kiwis, this team would in the few years be of mixed nationality and hence indistinguishable from other NRL sides.

We certainly want and need more competition between NH and SH club sides. But expansion of the WCC, and a few NH sides in the Auckland Nines, are more realistic and plausible starting points.