The Problem with the game is that it doesn't know what it wants.

2021: Huddersfield Giants, Salford Red Devils, Wakefield Trinity Wildcats, Hull Kingston Rovers and Leigh Centurions are battling it out to avoid the drop. Whichever one is unfortunate enough to go, will in all likelihood be replaced by Toulouse Olympique or Featherstone Rovers..

Your average British person when asked, wouldn't be able to find Huddersfield, Salford, Wakefield, Featherstone or Leigh on a map, let alone know that Hull has not 1 but 2 Rugby League teams.

That is the problem faced by Super League and the game in general. After a quarter of a Century of chopping and changing, the game doesn't know what it is, where it should be played or what it wants.

If it's happy not to expand, then keep P&R and hope that the monotony of the same teams winning is alleviated by the excitement of relegation, but the reality is that Featherstone replacing Wakefield won't garner the same headlines as Catalans winning the challenge cup.

Choose which way you look at it, there's always going to be a bottom 5, they can't really have a top 4 play off with 12 teams in it, granted the 5 you mention are the main suspects but not always, and as the 2 championship sides mentioned they are really the only 2 worthwhile contenders, so I'm not sure what point your trying to make, apart from stating the obvious.

I'm absolutely certain that your average British person would have even less of a clue as to where to find a lot of football clubs, especially all those in London, and as for rugby union ask your average British person who Wasps and Saracens are for example, and ask them to find them on a map, once again,what's your point?

Not surprising really when the game is run by two different bodies, one being super duper league filled with greedy owners, and the other filled with part time chairman with no crowds very little money who rely on player loans to top up they're squads while at the same time the top clubs take advantage of this by keeping the fringe players fit

I don't think you could argue that the RFL hasn't tried to expand with all the teams that have failed and gone out of business, if you don't know them or can't remember them look them all up there are plenty of them, this particular sport has enjoyed success for well over a 100 years, maybe it's time some folk realised that maybe it's generally a northern game enjoyed by northern people who understand and enjoy the game, and that's all it's ever going to be.

Very good post. I looked all the defunct "expansion" clubs up from the failed South Shields in Victorian times to the mega-failed Toronto Wolfpack in modern times.........

There's about 50..... that's FIVE ZERO Yes attempt after attempt to "expand" all down the years of the games history, but nothing worked.

It's not hard to work out why. It was Northern English people specifically in west and east Yorkshire and south Lancashire who broke from Rugby Union and hoped for the rest of the country and wales to follow them. But they simply didn't. Instead many people turned to soccer that grew and grew or they stayed loyal to Rugby Union.

One of the oldest Expansion clubs is Doncaster. It's a short journey from the RL hotbed of Cas/Ponte/Fev and Wakey yet in nearly 70 years the club hasn't grown anything, just survived on a bit of private money, and a few fans through the turnstyles to buy in players from west Yorkshire. Don't Hull use them as a reserve side? Then there's Sheffield. That's going on 40 years. In these close by places the issue is if people are going to watch Football they watch Soccer, that's the dominant game. If people are going to play Rugby they play Union that's the dominant game.

If anyone wants Rugby League to survive in England you keep the Rugby League tradition alive.

You don't shut it down by blindly giving Superleague places to Toulouse, Ottawa, Toronto, Perpignan and New York thinking that that is actually expansion because these places are a long long way away, then wondering why the clubs you've relegated lose fans by the thousands and less people bother playing the game.

It's about survival and that means the obvious clubs in the obvious places need to make up Superleague and the division below. Outside that nobody is much interested as they have their Soccer and Union.........But hey let's put Valencia in Superleague

So Catalans winning the cup will somehow excite Europe into following Rugby league.

There's far better wind ups on this forum than that





As for monotony Man U, Man City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea seem monotonous to me with their ultra decade by decade dominance?

Could your "Average British Person" actually find Catalans on a map

No.

The RFL needs a pair of balls and stop being the passive patsy to a handful of clubs. The top flight of any competition is rightly perceived as a very important thing to get right, but in British RL we fixate on the top flight to the detriment of the wider game. We have to have a unified vision for the RL pyramid led not by the owners of the top flight clubs but by the RFL. I suspect that two thirds of clubs in the professional and semi-professional RL will feel shafted by a handful of SL owners. They understandably wish to protect their own clubs, but have demonstrated that this aim is incompatible with setting a strategic direction for the whole game. Some might say say that this is the tail wagging the dog, but the SL dog is withered and has rabies, but it's tail is long, pleasant and wants a stroke.

I also think that shrinking SL due to lack of available players and funding is such a self-fulfilling prophecy. The less clubs you put in your top flight, the less money you'll get to broadcast it and the less reach it has. I don't think dropping to 12 clubs was a cracking idea, and dropping to 10 would just be absurd.

Very well said, sir.

I think we've had this conversation before and its only until you've seen the other side of the coin that it obvious now what you wrote stands true,
it is shameful that clubs like ours don't meet to modern standards and the top clubs seem to want us to stay there at the bottom, could you imagine the tables turning and these rich clubs would fade very quickly, as your club has done.
As fans we can see it but the owners of the top clubs will always want to look after their own interests
like you say the pyramid base is declining and that is where the concentration needs to be put for it to feed upwards

I've always thought Wakey are almost in a no-mans land in terms of who your allies are, and the "Nobody loves us" status often given your fans a sense of mistrust about everyone's intentions toward you. Possibly quite justifiably. As a club you have been nothing short of staggering in retaining your SL status, and remaining solvent thanks to Mr Carter and the other chap who's name I forget. But you know deep down there will be many owners in the elite that don't want you in the top flight and in many respects your natural friends may well be among us down in the Championship. I suspect your owner is having to walk a perpetual tightrope of fighting the clubs corner and justifying it's right to sit at the top table, versus not ruffling the feathers of the sods that might want to invent a restructure that doesn't have you in it. Mr C may well have to vote in favour of things he knows are not game-wide beneficial purely because to not do so would put Wakey materially at risk.

Surely, with a promotion and relegation system, it's more about gaining promotion and not getting relegated.
The clique at the top of the league protect the big 4/5 clubs, with Leeds generally a little on the outside.
McManus and Lenegan seem to have way more influence than Hetherington these days.

RWIW, I think Hetherington is more bothered about the sport of RL than his counterparts at Saints and Wigan, who seem
way more concerned with their own clubs than the sport.

Or game has very little strategy for the medium or long term and without some kind of target to strive for, the sport will
continue to drift.

You ask me " What is your point"?
There were a few.
Relegation is futile in a sport that other than for a handful of clubs can't stand on its own 2 feet. Unlike Soccer, where players wages are insane, a SL club needs maybe £4 million a year in income to survive, but if you cut off the SKY cash now, I reckon 5 might survive. I am not saying Union clubs are any different, just that in terms of 'other forms of income' we do suck!
The location thing? Wasps play in Coventry. I know where that is on a map, but Leigh? Saracens are somewhere in North London, so London would suffice....Wakefield though is a mystery to many? I'm not being a wind-up merchant here, but ask a UK based sports fan with no affiliation to either Union or League about Andy Farrell and you'll get "my point". Again. What do we want and how do we think is the best way to get it?
As for the RFL trying anything? Do not make me laugh. They've thrown money at lost causes like Wales and even London in terms of the barnet sweetener cash, but always too late. They spent more oney on Bradford than they have on any amount of expansion. I am well aware of the number of clubs that have come and gone or are going and not many had any meaningful assistance from the RFL.
Your last point is spot on though. I came to the game late in life and I love it, but I am in a minority. British Sports fans (and probably fans in general) will watch any sport when it's on and RL is a cracking "filler" for SKY, but it'll not be any more than that until either we go all in and spend central cash to expand or we contract and make it a truly SUPER league with 10 viable clubs

[uDrift?[/u what do you mean by that?

I thought it was pretty much agreed that the sport was in [usurvival[/u mode and has been for years. The name of the game is survival unless you or anyone else can point to where "growth" lies and where the game has gone wrong. perhaps someone can tell me what this "some kind of target" is if it's not survival?

As for Leeds "on the outside" what do you mean? They have a very very rich owner who is richer than either Lenegan or McManus don't they? He chooses not to take the reigns of the sport whilst Pearson Lenagan and McManus choose to take a leading role. They aren't dictators though, every club has the same one vote.

It's the same old same old where jealousy appears to lie at the heart of the attack on the prominent rich owners who may lead the sport, but I don't see them dictating anything much?

Remember that this SKY deal has been a long one. It's the last year now, and this is a deal Lenegan, Pearson and McManus did not vote for, they actually lost the vote to people like Michael Carter Gary Hetherington and Ian Fulton. If there's no strategy then go see them and ask them about it??

They can tell you all about their "£Million Pound Game" "strategy, how did that go then??