The crowd is pretty much irrelevant.
What's more important is the TV viewing figures and how much advertising the TV company can sell.

For sport in America/Canada many fan live so far away that they very rarely get to the games.

No it’s not because even if they knew earlier top quality players would still prefer to go to top clubs who are challenging for trophies rather than a nearly promoted one, regardless of it being English, French or Canadian.

If under a licencing system a team has a core of quality players signed before mid season of the year preceding promotion, top quality players will go there because they can sense that the club has prospects of winning silverware, even if newly promoted.

No they won’t they’ll go to clubs already up there challenging for silverware because no newly promoted club will be challenging at the top of the table in their first year or two in SL.

Why do you think that?

By contrast with your speculation the Burgess boys have expressed an interest in playing for New York if the club does eventuate.

This is the very reason why promotion and relegation no longer works. We follow the soccer system and we shouldn't! The league structure is modeled on soccer, the Challenge Cup comp is modeled on soccer's FA Cup even 'having' to use Wembley because it's 'tradional'! Tradition has cost many clubs existence!

Let soccer have its own system and culture and keep RL to it's own innovative and separate methods. For mine the NRL system is better. They are far pro-active with marketing, presentation and promotion of the code. They are 20 year ahead OFF the pitch! It's not down to money either! It's down to employing the right creative personnel who can deliver! We saw this with the late Peter Deakin who kick-started the whole Bullmainia thing. He had a shoestring budget (typical UK RL club chairman who stuck in their own stubborn ideas don't believe in marketing but Caisley bought into it) for goodness sake.

Or British...

The NrL was built on gambling revenue from the leagues clubs , so yes it is money , and the fact that they don't have a massive bigger sport already established on their doorstep

I think that based on following a variety of sports and seeing that the very top quality players don’t join newly promoted teams. Which is far better evidence than two guys saying they might join a team that doesn’t even exist yet at an unspecified time or age in their careers. Even if New York got set up in time for the 2020 season, at earliest they could make it to SL the Burgess twins will be in their 30’s and not the players they were.

I've got a better chance of playing for NYC in the SL than any of the Burgess Bros.......it's all gone very quiet on that front of late....maybe they're seeing how much it costs Argyle to buy a seat at the top table and how much he still has to throw at it thereafter? Is Perez still hanging around in Bradford?