I concur, the logic of financially punishing a club IN financial difficulty is strange

Strange is an understatement. Its among the most stupid things any sports governing body have done ever.

It's what happens when you run with too much discretion and too few rules - nobody knows where they stand and you get weird compromises and fudges.

Bradford feel hard done to and at the same time much of the rest of the RL feels they've been very generously treated.

TBH, the technical details are boring in the great scheme of things - all that I'm really interested in is who, if anyone, has a clue how to make RL in the capital interesting and successful. Otherwise, what are we actually rescuing and why? Just to repeat the same depressing story all over again? To copy verbatim from what I wrote in another thread (and which isn't of course an original idea at all) - the only thing worth trying IMO is the followingSince you mention London, I'd let them have no cap and sign as many Aussies as they like and call it London Australians. (c.f. London Irish, etc in the other code). Let NRL clubs send players to them on loan too. Then help Skolars grow organically with a load of financial support to eventually become London, er, 'Londoners' I suppose. Then in about 5 or 10 years we might even have a 'London' derby

There seems to be a misunderstanding.

Most Bradford fans, whilst clearly not exactly 'happy', are generally ready to accept the loss of money as the price for SL membership, but it's the fact that the money was shared amongst the other clubs which grates. It could have gone to support the amateur game or maybe junior rugby - it could even have been have been given to a club like London who might have more need of it, but no - like a pack of scavenging hyenas they divvied it up between themselves.

TBF not all SL clubs voted to divvy up the money between themselves. How did London vote?

But the RFL presumably had no say in it as we are constantly being told that Sky money belongs to the SL member clubs and they decide how it is distributed.

A reasonable point.

However, hyenas need to eat and due to a lack of strong governance and clear rules, there is a grab what you can, devil take the hindmost culture. It isn't pleasant, but it is understandable.

I've always assumed (based on very little evidence, admittedly), that it was an attempt to indirectly recover oldco debt from the newco - which SL clubs (assuming they were creditors) were uniquely placed to do. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me (though I'd be pretty deeply unhappy if I were another creditor). If it is purely a 'punishment', then I agree, putting it in to the grassroots would have been much better.

Many of the 'hyenas' are in no need of extra money and are fat enough already, to be fair.

Neither the SL clubs nor the RFL were creditors so far as I know. A number of clubs [and one club chairman] certainly gave money for which we're very thankful, but giving doesn't make you a creditor. A loan was owed to the RFL but that was taken from the money they paid to buy the lease on the ground and the later monies which the club received were simply early payments of Sky money which would have come to the club anyway. Either way round, to the best of my knowledge, the club owed a balance of £0 - to the rugby fraternity.

I've no idea whether there was any attempt to balance the lost revenue with the [external] debts of the old company; it would seem an odd idea if there was, since the whole legal framework around admin and winding up is predicated on being able to sell the company, debt free, as a going concern.

It might have made some sense, certainly in the justice side of it, if the newco had been a pre-pack deal [with the same directors coming back, minus the debts] but in the case of a newco formed by a totally different set of people I can't see any point whatever in being punitive - at the end of the day you want to encourage new people to come forward and 'fining' them for the sins of the old lot seems a strange way of encouraging anyone.

At the end of the day, the deal was done but I'm adamant that better uses could have been found for the money than having a big shareout amongst the SL clubs.

One of the problems I see with London Broncos (apart from the mis-management and under funding) is it has very little identity. People have no doubt mentioned this before but London is a vast place, to simply call something London and expect people from that vast metropolis get behind it is stupid. Some of the boroughs in London are like large towns and people identify with the locality of where they live rather than just "London". If you were to ask someone from Tottenham where they were from they would probably say Tottenham rather than London or before London. A team in London needs to set down some roots and stay long term, take on the local name and build a local fan base. It's difficult to predict, but I'm guessing if they'd have stuck at it in Fulham and were still there now, they would be in a much stronger position. Apart from Football, people really only tend to support the sport teams in their local district, even in London.

The impression I got was that Guilfoyle squeezed running costs for the end of that season from the SL clubs - they were obviously pretty keen to maintain the 'integrity' of the competition, preventing liquidation mid-season. Could well be wrong, it was all a bit murky.

Because licensing was (supposedly) based around business sustainability more than anything else, then what to do with a newco was inherently controversial. Mainly because no contingency was made for it. You might want to encourage people to come in to save Bradford, but go too far and you're discouraging investment in other clubs. Ultimately, that's why licensing had to be binned.

Bradford were unlucky in some respects. Wakefield were able to make a positive out of 'new company, fresh start' PR. And people were maybe distracted by the subsequent implosion of Crusaders. By the time it came to Bradford, Rangers had gone down that path to the lowest level of the SFL and it was seen more as debt-dodging. You want to encourage investment, but for the reputation of the sport you also want to encourage deals with creditors - rescues rather than reboots.

I think that argument is a little circular and perpetuates the misunderstanding of what licensing was intended, and indeed ever could, achieve.

Licensing was never about being better than Bradford, it was about being good enough. Nor was it about stopping clubs going bust, but giving them the best platform for stability and growth.

Now some may argue that Bradford, Crusaders, Wakefield proved that licensing didn’t do those things. This would be quite specious reasoning because there is always a risk of bankruptcy and no system can legislate for poor management. It may very well have been the case that Club A that would have replaced Club B in a P+R situation would have also gone bust, as well as clubs C and D who were overspending to try and avoid relegation and Club E also went bankrupt overspending chasing promotion

In that context whatever the game did to save Bradford couldn’t discourage anyone from investing in no other club, because no other clubs participation in SL was dependent on Bradford dropping out. It was dependent on it whichever club that was being good enough to be in SL.

Besides, once the decision was made that Bradford were staying in SL, whether we gave them less TV money, the same, or even more, didn’t have any real effect on anyone outside SL.

To remove the money from Bradford was a short-sighted, self-interested, counter-productive decision. It made no sense whatsoever to take a club with money problems and cut their funding in an attempt to solve these money problems.

It is telling that the decision to remove the money from Bradford, effected nobody, and benefitted nobody other than Bradford and the 13 clubs who voted for it who all got free additional money. This is where the governance issues arise. It isn’t necessarily a strength, rules or even really competence question. It is where the decision lies and who is fighting which corner. SL clubs should never have been the ones in charge of whether to remove money from one of their member clubs to distribute between themselves. Nor should it be down to the RFL to decide what is done with SL money as a large part of their responsibilities (and some would argue current power base) lay outside SL.

There should be an independent SL board making independent SL decisions. It is all very well Ian Lenegan demanding more autonomy and independence for SL, but independence from whom?

Gargoyle more than squeezed costs, he made the entire coaching staff and office workers redundant for the last couple of months and the majority continued to work , without pay, until the end of the season. Not even sure how you can do that as it's the [ijob[/i which is technically redundant, not the [iperson[/iand it's fair to say the 'jobs' quite definitely remained.

I do know that money received from a number of clubs who donated gate receipts was sent to the hardship fund set up by the Bullbuilder supporters group to help support those thrown out of work, rather than to the administrator or the club itself. As a mere fan, I never heard even rumours of other payments coming in. The responsibility of either keeping the business running or liquidation was in the administrator's hands so I assume they had no option but to pay some bills if they didn't want to liquidate. There was certainly no statement from the RFL saying that they had put any funds into the club and I guess their intention to purchase [and resell] was the limit of what they actually intended to do.