And if you finish 3rd in the FA championship you get and advantage over the teams which finished 4th, 5th, and 6th. The same in the SL playoffs. In this system your performance in the first 22rounds is entirely disregarded

Put another way, you are bottom, 10 points off 8th with 10 games to go, only 12 games into the season. You aren't realistically going to overtake 4 teams in 10 games, so are you going to go hell for leather for 80 min, for 10 games trying to qualify for a top 8 competition you aren't going to win risk fatigue and injury, or give up, keep your powder dry, rest players, put out a 2nd string and simply focus on not losing a million pounds in funding in those last 7 games?

So less guaranteed income for clubs at the beginning of the year?

You don't know that, you really dont.

This system for me is riddled with flaws.

actually the wider point I made on that was that a club could finish 9th and earn 20points, earn 6 in the 2nd part of the season and be relegated, another club could earn say 10points in the first part of the year, and only 8 in the second and stay up. So we would have a situation where a team earned 26 points in total and a much higher proportion in a much harder league being relegated in favour of a team who scored only 18 points in total with a higher proportion in a lesser league.

It would also incentivise a team with little chance of making the 8 to rest players for the 2nd part as their performance in the first part is irrelevant.

Not to mention the change in primary focus moving fro making the 8 to not being bottom 4 in the 2nd part of the league

Are you for real? If they think they can get away with reducing the number of games without changing the price that they wouldn't be trying to increase the price when there were more games.

These guys are trying to make money ffs

You could threaten them with public execution, it won’t make a blind bit of difference, somebody has to finish in the bottom four.



Yes I’m as giddy as a kipper, especially with such jeopardy of four SL sides & four Championship sides playing a mini league, I couldn’t possibly guess the outcome.

I'm confident that Groupon or Wowcher will come to the rescue of the modern day tightwad fan of discounted SL by offering cheapo deals.

Yes, but a lot more games for people to pay for.
Currently teams such as widnes get £167 for 13 games from their fans. On the new system lets say they get 11 games for £150 or there abouts, but now widnes are guaranteed another 3 home games, that's 3 x £20 or there abouts. Even if attendances half in these games, the average income from fans goes from £167 - £ 180 plus all extra revenue from food etc

for me, I wouldn't bother with a competition where the sole focus is not being the worst. I watch sport to see people competing to be the best.

If we wanted to watch a sport where the only aim is not being the worst, let's give the players LSD first. At least then it would be funny.

That assumes people will pay for those extra games, all available evidence from the challenge cup and playoffs say they won't. And the difference isn't small it's pretty big. It assumes people will pay for an SL season ticket plus the additional games when it may very well simply encourage people to pick and choose the games they do attend

Ok so the decision has been made but what i want to know is how the 2nd league of 12 will be made up.

Obviously it will include the bottom 2 from SL this year so that leaves 10 spots.

There were 14 teams in this years championship along with another 9 in championship 1. So how are the other 10 spots going to be filled? Is it the top 10 from this years championship or is there some sort of application process open to all 23 non SL clubs

Realistically Fax, Sheffield, Featherstone and Leigh will be 4 of them but just wondered what the official word was (if any!!)