Looking at the pros and cons of both licensing and P&R, for me licensing, whilst far from perfect, has been the better option. It has delivered a league with reasonable quality from top to bottom and genuine competition with the lower teams beating the higher ones often enough to prevent any over confidence, or to put it another way, basically there are no real 'easybeats', as the old [and presumably future] P&R systems seem to throw up.

I do wonder about how season ticket holders of the clubs who get thrown into the division with championship clubs are going to view the 'value' they get from their tickets with all the clearly very uncompetitive games that will bulk out the back end of the season. I know from past experience that whilst it is OK to win the odd game by fifty odd points, it does pall quite quickly and leaves you wanting some competition for the points.

This kind of statement really irritates me when discussing the games changes. Supporters of licensing always talk about boom and bust like it happened every year, realistically how Often did it happen during P&R??? They are always quick to use examples, Martyn Sadler even used one 20+ years ago.

Yet they always fail to mention that 4 clubs have gone bust in the short spell of licensing. Wakefield and Bradford may have gone during in P&R anyway. But you see my point.

The game was in good shape and kept on improving IMHO, I feel we have stagnated during the license system, yes clubs have shiny new stadiums, but they are less people watching and much less intensity matches and quite frankly some embarrassing performances.

If you want to see London win another 10 games over the next 3 years, then vote licensing. Personally I don't, I want to see competitive rugby.

I pay for my season ticket to see what happens on the field, not read in the paper what happens in the board room.

If you only 10 licences then London would not get one - and if they did they would have a much stronger squad than the one know of never-was-bees ex NRL players.

I'm all for licencing or even full on franchising if we had 10 or 12 clubs worthy of being in such a league but we dont,we only have 5 or 6 at most.
All licencing has done is protect failure and bring standards down

I don't really like licensing because no matter how badly the likes of London play every week, they have a pretty good chance of being kept up anyway. I think with teams like Widnes licensing has been good for them because they have slowly built up and they have a decent enough fan base, But ultimately if licensing is going to stay it needs to be less teams. Even losing 2 awful teams means theres a bit of extra cash to spread about and help other clubs possibly compete more. It can work if done properly. Which would mean the RFL pulling the plug on london too and admit they are flogging a dead horse.

P & R would be good in a sense as it would give the lower teams a kick up the back side and a reason to perform every week and try and win. (of course I'm not suggesting teams don't try to win now... but there's effectively a lot less on the line for clubs at the bottom at the moment if they lose)

The bad thing with P & R is it's most probable the team who comes up will just shoot straight back down again and spend every week getting tonked. The only way to change that is to pump more money into the championship, which is never going to happen.

Have we had the full info on what happens after the split into 3 x 8 set up.
At a rough guess if the season starts mid February, then depending on cup ties, the split will be mid August.
It isn't practical for each group of 8 to play each other home and away so I assume they'll only play each other once, which isn't very balanced.
Will we still have a play off?
Will the play off winners be champs or will it be league leaders.

Apologies if this has already been explained but I seem to have missed it.

S57

Don't know where you get that from; doesn't appear to have done Premier league / Football league soccer any harm.

Both divisions in football are full time and get millions to pay staff with. A bit different to Wigan and Batley.

This year London, Salford, Widnes and Castleford would have split to join Fev, Fax, Leigh and Sheffield.
London are the worst team in SL this year without a shadow of a doubt (if not in the history of the comp) and they have comfortably dealt with Sheffield and Fev already....the 12-12/8-8-8 plan is flawed on so many levels, but specifically on the full time v part time basis.

1 Group of players will be at work Monday to Friday whilst the others will be training, recovering in state of the art facilities and being prepared for a game at the weekend.....this is not the Challenge cup where a team will step up for a big game...this is every weekend league fixture stuff.

And that is why the entire proposal is nonesense and as such I cant even believe it is being pushed the way it is. Unless all clubs are full time and get similar levels of funding then it simply will not work. As there is not enough money in the game to raise the salary cap and sustain 14 teams then there certainly isnt to sustain the 24 full time teams that would be needed for this to work.

If the stupid split is voted ahead, that will be the final straw for me.

And yet some like myself might well be tempted back by having meaningful fixtures again

That is not to say I think this is a good idea, IMO licencing could have worked better, but it required more support for the lower tiers and a more honest approach from the RFL, but that went straight out of the window with the Crusader farce

No. Wrong. The new structure will be fantastic for the game here and if, as proposed, it is left in place for decades, the game will be stonger and grow incrementally over time.

The clubs mentioned currently at the top end of the Championship will have central funding (Sky money) 5 times more than they get now plus, with something to play for (i.e promotion), will generate higher revenue themselves. There will be 23 league games in the initial 12 team leagues each season with only 7 after the the 8-8-8 split.

We're talking about what's best for RL in this country not in Australia (where they both do what is best for them & where they obsess more with aping the USA rather than Europe).

Can you point me towards where you have got these figures and how much does a Championship club get now? After all 5 times say £50,000 is still sweet FA in terms of running a full time squad competing against Wigan, Leeds, Saints etc on crowds of 10,000+ and getting £1.2 million in Sky money. It is still nothing compared to the likes of Hull KR, Wakefield etc getting this amount of Sky money and approx 8,000 crowds. What about the clubs at the bottom end of the Championship, how much will they get in this new structure? Is this less than the top Championship clubs you mention?

How many suns on your planet?


The clubs at the top average about 2,000 attendance......the game in general can't attract sponsors, but youthink Fev v London at the end of the season is the answer 2.74267578125:5