London broncos turned over £4,000,000 a year up to 2013.....thats for a poor side too.
£4 million is the.number needed to.be a viable club in sl

London broncos turned over £4,000,000 a year up to 2013.....thats for a poor side too.
£4 million is the.number needed to.be a viable club in sl

That should still be an achievable sum. With the new Sky deal that went through, don't clubs in SL now get £1.5 million off Sky? Add to that an average home crowd of 10k at £20 a head and you're there.

What it needs is for clubs to improve their marketing and be better engaged with their community so people will want to show up and cheer the team on. The trouble is, too many teams for too long have just happily coasted along at whatever level they're at.

Union is not all the land of honey and roses. London Welsh got a crowd of around 2k at their first Premiership home game of the season last weekend, in the heartlands of their sport. How they will be able to survive paying £5m+ in salaries without significant private investment is a big question?

1/ Crowd was 2,700....that's "around" 3,000 not 2.
2/ There is no Union 'Heartland' as such.....especially not like League which is now 100% along 1 road in the north when you discuss top tier.
3/Private inestment is how the majority of Union clubs survive. saracens have a naming and sponsorship deal that's bigger then the ENTIRE SUPERLEAGUE.
4/ Union is as much of a basket case as League is in the UK, but for a whole different set of reasons. The difference is that you can be assured that the game as a whole will leverage a great deal more from the exposure of next years World Cup than we managed to from 2013.
5/ comparisons with the bigger and more popular code always end badly on these boards and as such, they are pointless. London welsh play in Oxford.....they and their club and fans are from Richmond 54 miles away and yet they still attract crowds that London Broncos can only dream about. belittling their efforts doesnt make superleague any better,.......it just smacks of insicurity.

Ferocious, at the time I made this thread the other one didn't exist

I'm all for being level headed and cautious given recent financial disasters at some clubs, but the time is coming when League really needs to introduce the marquee signing and/or increase the cap. The catious approach is leaving us behind, way behind. Its becoming a game of all or bust...take the risk RFL!

When you say Marquee signing is that a Union player you are thinking about?

I for one am very happy to keep RL a working class marginal sport if it keeps me from having to pay 700 quid a ticket to watch a game with a load of prawn sandwich rugger types.

Although I agree we need to grow the sport, you should also be careful what you wish for. I for one am happy that we are an accessible, salt of the earth sport without multi millionaire prima Donna players and billionaire owners

Yawn-ion

Why do posters on so many RL sites feel the need to keep me abrest of what the Puntmonkies are up to, it's bad enough that after the ID merger London did with Harleqinns, all my e-mail addresses get "Bombed" by both 'Quinns and the Aviva people with Shi-ite I don't want without everyone here doing the same.

Same stuff that's been said about the Premier League (soccer) ever since it started. And soccer clubs have gone bust. And some Union clubs probably will in the future, but, thanks to the profile, there's money sloshing about these sports, they're attractive to sponsors, etc. and so one way or another the sports do just fine - either a 'bust' club gets bailed out or it makes room for another one.

We've got the whole thing a***-about-face. We're obsessed with protecting individual clubs who frankly should be the responsibility of their owners. If you can't afford it don't spend it. As a sport we can still protect clubs with less money from getting swamped in competition terms by using very tight squad limits - Mr. Megarich only damages the sport if we let him stuff *the bench and extended squad* with overpaid players who ought to be out there in others' first teams.

By allowing the central body to get mixed up in controlling individual club finances, we diminish the profile of the sport *as a whole*, which ultimately leads to a smaller pot of money swilling around the sport (fewer good sponsors, etc) which in turn eventually hurts the very clubs we were trying to protect. The cap, for all its damage, hasn't even protected clubs from going bust.

Rugby Unions Premiership clubs are collectively losing between £20M and £30M per season and have been for at least the last 5 years. Saracens alone have had one year losses totalling £7M while The owner of Sale RU is on record stating that he has poured over £20M of his own money into the club and cannot continue to fund it at that level on such poor crowds. Bath and Gloucester, two of RUs flagship heartland clubs are also surviving on the back of a wealthy owner and are also losing over £1M a season.

So what's their answer?
Increase the salary cap!

They are once again walking in the footsteps of Rugby League who long ago learned the bitter lesson of chasing the dream by throwing lots of money down a bottomless pit.

You've every right to prefer RL that way. It's just that we can't really have it both ways. If we want significant profile and media interest, we need cash, simple as.

So what do you think will happen? One day RU will 'go bust' and the sport collapse? No. Some rich people will lose money, then some more rich people will come along and probably lose theirs too. All the while, RU fans get to watch the top 'talent' (yep, beats me, but hey, they seem to like it) in their sport.

Or maybe it won't happen as you predict and some clubs will ultimately pay the price for overspending.

In fact it's already happened in the case of Richmond who rode the wave of euphoria under the newly professional RU competition but when success didn't follow their owner pulled his money and the club ceased to exist.
It sounds very much like Kennedy is on the verge of doing the same at Sale

It will only take a Bath, Leicester or Wasps club to go bankrupt and the sport will have to curb their spending like every other UK sport other than Soccer.