Likewise those clubs complaining about poor crowds due to a lack of away fans. They're had 12 years to find a solution to that problem - they should stop leaving it to others to fill their grounds for them.

Whilst it is the responsibility of all clubs to properly market their home games and maximise all of their revenue streams, particularly on match day.
12 years ago, I dont think that ANY club would have foreseen the possibility of 3 overseas clubs and London in RL's second tier and the drop in revenue that comes with it.
When you factor in some of the additional cost of travel etc plus the need for any part time players to take time off, this becomes a real test and the major thing is that there is nothing extra in contribution form the RFL to off set these increases in cost and considering the shoestring that many clubs live upon, there could be some serious ramifications.
Of course 2 of the 4 will be wanting to escape the Championship at the end of next season but, this may not happen.
We still get back to the fact that the "expansion" clubs have to bring something to the party and not merely dilute the domestic game and I say this as a person who does see the need for the game to grow.
It's imperative that The RFL do their bit to increase the TV deal.
If not, we are sacrificing the domestic game for the good of The French and North Americans.
In the long term this may be a price worth paying.

However no other business model would take on substantial extra cost and deliberately reduce their income, without some reasonable prospect of medium/long term gain.

RL is gambling like hell on a brighter future, without any certainty of success and you wonder what the drivers of this are or, whether the games management are sitting in a quiet room with their fingers crossed.

that is the problem and I do not think the people in charge can run a up in a brewery never mind rugby league it is time for a clean sweep of them that are in charge and I for one am in favour of all the over seas teams its a pity we can not get the aussies to put a team in that would be good

I agree with a lot of that, and this is where there is a real lack of joined up thinking from all sides, and where we have the clubs and RFL seemingly pulling in different directions. I suppose that's understandable - a lot of clubs are in self-preservation mode because they see expansion as a threat rather than an opportunity - but without leadership, we let the tail wag the dog. We let clubs vote to give real-terms pay cuts to our talent, to flog out talent with more and more fixtures, and vote to cut reserve and academy teams.

I've said before that we can't simply expect to get more from Sky simply because we ask for it. We have to look at what value we're actually offering Sky and, if I was sat on Sky's side of the negotiating table, I'd see a sport with falling crowds, a competition with a receeding geographic spread and played in only two of the major media markets in the UK (there's a reason Leeds United are the most televised Football League team on Sky Sports), a competition that is losing or struggling to keep what little "box office" talent it has, a sport watched by audience demographics that have limited appeal to advertisers and a sport with a diminishing profile. Am I going to pay more for that?

And that, to me, is where the clubs AND the RFL both need to sort themselves out. I actually don't think the consumer side of the RFL's marketing is [ithat [/ibad - far from perfect - but the real problems are in the commercial marketing side.

However, the RFL can only "sell" the audience that the clubs are providing and on this front, its where the clubs are failing. They're talking to the same audiences that they always were, saturating the same markets, and we're losing supporters along the way. The RFL really needs to be setting its marketing goals, and then insisting that the clubs deploy or follow an focused strategy to support that.

I see clubs failing to use the tools that they have available to them effectively - I spoke to one SL club that was spending 60% of its social media advertising budget on advertising to fans who were already buying the product - I've spoken to two other clubs that don't even have a social media advertising budget - those are real missed opportunities to build their audience and drive sales that have just gone begging. You can't blame the RFL for that.

I couldn't agree more - the closest we got to a unified brand and marketing strategy was the 'Extraordinary Rugby' thing that happened a few years ago; it wasn't perfect, but it was effective, and a strong theme - and many clubs followed suit by producing their own personalised campaigns that mirrored it in look and style. But as is often the way when amateurs deliver this kind of thing, it fizzled out and hasn't been seen since.

I tend to agree that the RFL should take control of the brand and strategy, and issue SL clubs with a very strict set of guidelines about how to implement; charge them for it if need be, and pay for a very skilled marketeer to sit at the centre of the game - that could do wonders, given that there's so much to sell the game on - but clubs either can't or won't do it themselves.

Interesting to note on the expansion topic that I have read the Times, Guardian & the Telegraph comment (though gritted teeth no doubt!) that RU's latest foray in to America was a complete flop, crowd of 6k in Philadelphia for Saracens-Newcastle and a dog of a game, hardly worth the teams bothering the fly there. So to be fair to the RFL its not only them trying and failing at expansion.

Meanwhile 3K turned up in a 46k stadium in South Africa for Southern Kings first home game in the Irish/Welsh/Scotland league and that's with the usual RU crowd rounding!

However based on past experience the RFU will probably analyse what went wrong and either try again with a bigger budget or work out what went wrong and try again somewhere else, whereas in RL we seem to just quickly think of another idea and do the same again. Even when we have some success we don't follow it up, Catalan got an 18K crowd in Barcelona one year but haven't been back??

I actually think the 'Different League' campaign is a good one. I also liked the NRL's "Make History" campaign but I think the NRL has things a little easier, particularly as far as digital is concerned. Because every game is televised, it has so much more content to work with. The RFL tries, but with just 2-3 games being properly filmed each week, it's much harder. Last year, Rangi Chase's flick-pass should have gone viral, and had the game been televised by Sky from all of the different angles, it would have. Instead, all we had was one fairly poor quality angle from the TV gantry - and the opportunity was lost.

On the wider joined-up marketing, the difficulty is that the clubs know their markets better than the RFL, and they have their own business priorities (quite understandibly). Leeds, for example, are clearly looking to attract more premium audiences - they're increasing the number of seating tickets in prime areas to do that and, with limited capacity next season, they have no need or interest in handing out cheap tickets. Other clubs may have different priorities.

What I'd like the RFL to do is almost set an ABM strategy for it's commercial side. Say to the clubs "in three years time, we want to attract these sponsors to the Super League" and then KPI the clubs on growing their reach to and engagement of the audience groups that those sponsors aim for. We have affluent areas of North Yorkshire and Cheshire on our doorstep, yet we struggle to engage those audiences. Similarly the RFL needs to set hard and ambitious KPIs on audience volume and on commercial revenue at club level.

This is where franchising should have been a good opportunity for the RFL to set the agenda. Unfortunately, it used the wrong KPIs and they were easily fudged. The attendances KPI really should have been a "ticket revenue" KPI, to mitigate against clubs fudging it with cheap tickets.

Again, this isn't about neglecting the audiences or sponsors that we have (and whilst Kingstone Press is hardly a blue-chip brand, it is clearly a very engaged and enthusiastic sponsor and that is something we want to keep), it's simply about growing our appeal.

All down to Sly that one..As I have said before,they may be regarded as the saviour of the game,but in the same context are actually the demise of it.

Well in that respect in Aus, the NRL are basically the equivalent of the Premier League and we get that in this Country. With it not being the most followed sport in the Country, how could we really show all the games? Only way atm is Sky to give RL it's own channel then have kick off times and days to suit but that isn't going to happen after they've already messed with the Sports channels to try to keep customers happy. It's hard to think of a way to get it done. You wouldn't get any joy with the BBC that's for sure.

Maybe in the future when the Sky contract ends something can happen and we can go to market again. Also with online streaming becoming more popular we could see that avenue open up.

Maybe we should take a look at what the AFL are doing?

rlAFL V NRLrl