Dico,

You're right in thinking the Wrexham operation is far and above that we encountered in South Wales.

I felt cheated in South Wales by those in charge. They wanted Super League and were then not willing to give it 100% effort. In many ways the club was run like a semi-pro union club. That, in short, was nowhere near good enough and that is the frustrating thing. People will now look on South Wales as a lost cause because of this. The failure in South Wales was down to bad ownership and all the negative aspects which come with that. Unwilling to put time and money into the club and it failed without doubt.

Wrexham on the other hand is worlds apart. Good set up (from my experiences in comparison with South Wales) and actually have a clue about merchandising and spreading the rugby league word.

We also have the emergence of South Wales Scorpions, Wales European Cup successes and many other things that have come off the back of it. If we have achieved this off the back of a half @rsed effort in South Wales and finally started to find our feet in Wrexham then I firmly believe we can kick on and achieve in both Super League, to a lesser extent with Scorpions and on the international scene in years to come.

Starbug, your idea sounds good in theory. I guess where I would find flaws is that I'm not at all convinced that there is a market for non-top level RL (or any sport bar soccer) in new areas. Even in places which have had clubs for a century, if they're not at the top level, they struggle with crowds, and that's with all the advantages of history, habit and community roots. Any sub-SL club in a new area has none of those advantages, and the British public appears incredibly reluctant to watch any sub-top level sport except soccer.

Even RU, which is going from strength to strength, gets pretty awful crowds for games outside the GP, but it can sustain these clubs because it's a cash-rich organisation with the ability to devolve large sums of money even to clubs watched by the traditional two men and a dog. RL doesn't have those kinds of resources.

If we want our game to attract new players, new fans and new sponsors, then it has always seemed to me that the only hope is to establish a SL club and dig in for the long term. The only model we have of a sub-top level club with professional ambitions establishing itself outside existing RL territory is Hemel Hempstead, and after 30 years, they are still effectively an amateur side with pots of ambition and plans which never quite come to fruition, no fans, no serious sponsor and the player conveyor belt is very limited. London, on the other hand, in all its guises as Fulham, Broncos and Quins, has managed to turn the player tap on, has occasionally (not always) attracted big sponsors and decent cash to the game, and has established several thousand hardcore fans (although clearly more could and should be done to increase this).

The problem, it seems to me, is that expansion through semi-pro routes simply doesn't work, because the new club simply cannot attract the interest in its competition to generate the funds and players needed to step up. This is hardly surprising given that there's probably only 3 of the established "heartlands" semi-pro clubs who have even the remotest chance of doing likewise. So I remain convinced that if we do want to expand our game - and I think we must if we don't want to find ourselves very shortly eaten up by RU at professional level - then the only way of doing that is through expansion at SL level. Unfortunately, we have consistently demonstrated that the quality of people we have running our back offices is insufficient to manage the exercise, and so we have cock-up after cock-up after cock-up.

I'm quite pessimistic about the game at the moment. We seem to be in fairly rapid relative decline, and I'm dreading the next TV deal negotiations, because I think we could see large cuts to TV money. I wouldn't put it past some of our top clubs to then explore again the option of joining the flourishing RU competition.

Or maybe it's just having a Tory government again makes me see everyything as half-empty.

Its got to be amateur and community links.
Crusaders are opening their academy in Shropshire, hopefully a bit of development work could go into a few clubs there

Good post and I agreed with most of it. I think the above point requires some qualification though. Several AP (formerly GP) clubs are struggling financially and the whole thing is kept afloat by an international game with little room for expansion and that often runs alongside the domestic league programme (devaluing the latter IMO). Leicester and Wasps have won 12 of 14 pro championships so it is hardly very open either.

As RU adjusts its rules and old tribal grudges fade into history, who knows? I can't see it for some time - the subcultures around the sports are still so different.

Top down hasn't really worked either , why / , as you say it takes time , that means money , lots of it

Has it been tried at lower tier properly ? , thing is you get 4/5 times as long for the same money , or you get 3/4 times as many goes at it for the same money

You're pessimistic ? , we're suicidal

The RU competitions are facing the identical problems we are - if anything on a bigger scale. The size of losses in their premiership dwarfs anything in SL. The broadsheets have been full of stories about the decline in crowds in the premiership so far this season - a cumulative 43K for the opening round of matches in September, for example. Three of the clubs are looking at potential location changes in the next couple of years.

The second tier seems to be struggling even more than our championship - only Bristol & Worcester seem to have any chance of bridging the gap and Bristol were very close to administration in the summer and axed most of their squad. If (as seems likely), the top clubs pull up the drawbridge and form a closed shop, I'd say it was just as likely that some of their clubs would think about jumping ship.

Funding cuts from Sport England seem absolutely inevitable - that's going to hurt RL before Sky do.

I'd be happy to have another expansion team in the championship as long as they are there to play in the championship and not to just hang around until they are shoved into SL. If they are there with the same rules and on the same merits as the other teams then I would be happy with a new away trip, new ground, new fans etc. Brilliant!

If however, they are just there to be fast-tracked into SL it is hard to get excited about and is damaging to the league.

Be interesting to see how Tolouses attitude to spending money / signing players changes when their exemption from relegation runs out as they have lost several of there better players from last year and don't seem to have replaced them with any quality. Can see them finishing bottom 2 this season and getting somebody relegated from 9th.

Would you be ' happy ' with this ?


Quote capacity non/lower league football stadium maybe 40/50 miles from the heartlands [ maybe the west midlands , somewhere like Stoke ] they set aside 300 K per season to set up and run a club , they encourage some Lancashire/Cheshire SL clubs to provide 4/5 dual reg players , they give the club a 4 player oversea quota , find and pay a young ex SL player as a general manager/coach and enter this club into Championship 1

They commit to 3 seasons with a provision for another 3 financially , but they make this club excempt from being promoted to the Championship for as long as they are providing over 100 K funding Expansion sensibly all out in the open without rushing things and without upsetting your existing members

?

I guess, to make my post shorter, a sceptic might say that if we can't run a workable club in Blackpool, or get any decent crowds in places like Oldham, Swinton and Featherstone, when they're playing in a semi-pro competition, what chance would a similar club in a new area have, given it doesn't have the history/culture that these older clubs have ?

Yes I would perfectly happy with that situation. I could also see it working even if it takes a while. However if crowds didn't take to it and they continued to need extensive RFL funding even after 5/6/7 years, how long would they continue to get this before they either remove the funding or try again in a different area?

But yes, I do like the idea.

Yes, we need to prepare as a game - particularly amateur clubs - for the sudden disappearance of a lot of our development officers in the next two to three years. I think one huge achievement which Lewis isn't given enough credit for was getting us onto the list of major sports for Sport England funding. I wonder whether, when the funding is cut, we'll see proportional cuts across the board, or whether they'll just trim the sports so that the usual favoured establishment games are protected while everyone else, including us, goes hang.

Is there any real ' marketing ' of those clubs going on , or are we all just expecting people to turn up ? , which then brings me onto another ' Rant ' , ' pet initiative ' , ' moan at the RFL ' , depending on your outlook

Sometimes ' history ' can hold you back , which then brings me onto another ' Rant ' , and so on and so on

By "favoured establishment games" do you mean sports like Union and Tennis that the BBC etc seem to show favour to?

Olympics.