10 teams isn't enough for a top flight competition. We're struggling to gain any attention, coverage or sponsorship as it is. We need a bigger competition which has wider appeal, not a smaller one.

It strikes me that the whole 2x10 SL idea is [yet another] sop to the chairmen of clubs who permanently exist around the bottom of SL/top of Championship. They're neither competitive nor net contributors to the game, and they never will be, yet they act as a barrier to prevent clubs which MIGHT be competitive or net contributors from even reaching the top table. This sounds like someone's cunning plan to shift them out of the top flight in the first instance by making out they'll still be able to scoop up the cash, and then when they're out, it'd be easier to shift in clubs with more potential/appeal.

Not a great idea IMO. I'd prefer a line-in-the-sand approach where a new 16-team SL is formed from 2019, requiring all clubs who want to enter to submit their bid to be assessed for inclusion. So a return to licensing. Any club with ambitions to join the top flight in future would have to build and plan to take part in a future regular bidding round.

If we continue to structure our game in order to cater to the desires of small clubs in areas where there is already saturation, then we will continue to shrink.

So, we will be sold the idea on this allowing 20 full time professional clubs, with promotion and relegation between SL 1 & SL 2.
But, how much of the available funds will SL1 take and what will be left for the rest and the harsh reality is that we will actually be relegating a further 2 clubs from the top flight.
This will do little to allow the "expansion" clubs to compete at the top of the game and as other posters have suggested, it also looks like the entre back into "franchising", with the possible future "International SL" being the ultimate goal.

THe big clubs have wanted to reduce SL for some time, so that they can take a greater share of the Sky monies and hey presto, here it comes.

In the words of Jim Bowen, Great, Super, Smashing, come and have a look at what you could have won.

Yes I did read it. The bit you underlined was referring to the past.
Yes there is a semblance of p & r. But the clubs promoted will be on the back foot given that everybody will have had at least a season of cash. So creating a yo yo effect which does nothing for the league.
And the only clubs at the top will be the one with benefactors. So in practice it won't be much of a p&r.

You could argue your point about money the other way around. SL already get most of TV money, add on ticket, merchandising and corporate packages. So why do they need the £100,00 that could be a lifeline to other clubs? If they that desperate for it, perhaps they should do more marketing of there own clubs.

Think you're right about the clubs involved. But then we're do Newcastle, Coventry (as Wasps), Bristol, Dublin who are all intrested in franchise SL. the other American clubs come in.
If you start them in league 1, it becomes even more of a joke league. Or do you kick more clubs out of SL 1/2 for them?

I still have reservations about the whole American thing.
If it works great.
But we seem to be thinking that a country that already has 4 mainstream sports (and that's just at professional level, not to mention the high school, college leagues), where other sports like RU have been trying to get a foothold for years. To be our saviour, and through all this money into the sport. Like I said great if it works, but it's going to take along time.
And I can't help but think, that by then they'll have there own league set up, and won't be needing us.

Based on Catalans performace the last 2 seasons, they wouldnt and shouldnt be included in the list

I'm fairly sceptical about the North American venture. I see why it's easy to be cautious about its prospects.

However, I think we need to view this in context: our game, as it is, is dying on its feet in this country. Participation numbers have crashed. Crowds are stagnant at best. Our paymasters at SKY are apparently looking to reduce the funding. We're struggling to find any sponsors, let alone blue-chip ones. And the showcase of the game - the super league - has seen a huge contraction, losing our only club in the capital, and one of our few genuinely 'big' clubs at Bradford. Along the way, we've also lost Paris, Gateshead, Wales and Sheffield. The single example of our sport growing, rather than shrinking, at the top level, is Catalans, and they were 80 minutes from being relegated last year in favour of a second club in Wigan. If that had happened, Rugby League's top flight would have been smaller geographically than at any time since we went fully professional in 1996.

There will be people who deny this, and I guess if you're a few streets away from Saints, Wigan, Leeds or Hull you might argue that you don't see what the problem is. But outside of those few spots (it's not even an M62 corridor any more - just a few areas along it), the only reason people haven't noticed the game is shrinking is that they don't notice it exists in the first place.

The North American ventures, the sacking of Big Nigel, the scrabbling around for new structures, and even the grumpy Hetherington attack on RL journalists, are all stemming from the same place: we're in deep trouble, and people are desperately looking for something - anything - which might save us.

There is a big tension here between different goals: clubs like Salford, Widnes, Wakefield etc are themselves struggling, and so their priority is to save their own advantages and position within the game, which means fighting to preserve their share of TV money, to retain P&R to save their position at the bottom of the league, and to place obstacles in the way of other clubs which might replace them. The clubs like Wigan, Saints, Leeds, Wire and Hull are not themselves in deep trouble yet, but recognise that if the game goes down, they go down with it, and so are much more focused on what can be done to attract more TV money, more sponsorship and more attention to the game as a whole. They are much more open to the idea of expanding the game to a North American market which, while risky, at least offers new income streams, and new potential, where there is none left in the so-called heartlands.

To me, the situation is a choice between a risky expansionist "Hail Mary" venture which may not work, or continuing to do what we've always done, which will inevitably continue the decline we are now clearly in. On the grounds that a small chance of success is still better than the certainty of failure, sign me up for Toronto, New York, London, Bradford and Toulouse.

2 leagues of 10 is a terrible idea.
Super League needs to get bigger not smaller.

It's just not clear what two leagues of ten would actually deliver here.

'Super League 2' is bascially a rebranding job for the Championship - and a bad one at that. It doesn't make the Championship 'Super League', and it cheapens what is currently Super League. And as the talent and invariably the money would gravitate towards the top league, I don't see what an 'SL2' offers to anyone.

The original post mentioned a "14 team Super League with strict off-field eligibility criteria", which smells of a move towards franchising. Personally, I think franchising is the better model for the game given its current state (the old version was badly implemented and wasn't based on sound criteria), but I have reservations about the 14 team league. One of the things we should be moving towards on the field is greater intensity and making games more competitive, and I don't see how adding two additional teams from the Championship serves that purpose.

The biggest questions that aren't being answered behind any proposal that is reportedly on the table is "why?". What is the end goal in any of this? What is the end goal? What are the commercial objectives? What are the playing objectives? What do the key stakeholders (clubs, SLE, broadcasters) need to bring to the party? What does success look like?

I completely agree with Roy Haggerty in that we have more to lose by doing nothing than we do by taking a risk in North America, but those questions need to be addressed before any sort of structure is put in place. As it stands, throwing in two extra clubs from the Championship isn't going to achieve anything unless they can keep up with the pace set by the people with the vision to take the sport forward.

We're eerily close to the sort of scenario that the BDO found itself in in the early 90s and people can dismiss this as a power/cash grab by the big clubs as much as they like, but it's going to be the smaller clubs that get hurt the most if that sort of scenario actually plays out. It's no accident that we've had three clubs spending a combined five weeks in Australia this month, and it's no accident that all three took sizeable commercial and business development teams with them.

If there is to be Stadia criteria then surely Cas will be alright but Wakey might be in trouble & where do Toronto stand given that they have to play half the season away before half at home ?

If there is to be attendance criteria then you would expect Salford, Widnes & possibly Huddersfield to be in trouble ?

I make that 4 current SL Clubs + the expansionists wet dream who might not qualify if those criteria are rigorously imposed.

Salford might yet go 'Pop' even before any restructure if reports are to be believed.

Anyway, strikes me as a rebranding of SL & Championship with a cut in Club numbers, the haves will have more & the have nots will ultimately have less.

Where this leaves CH1 Clubs is anyones guess, but my guess would be for a good few to go to the wall.

Nothing to lose..... apart from clubs who produce a pathway for countless past and present gb/England internationals in a time when we don’t even have a reserve grade. Nice one

Huddersfield? Bradford?

Forget them in a 10 team league.

Hudds have zero potential and Bradford will NEVER return to be the force they once were.

However, Hudds (and Wakey and Cas), keep doing it where it matters - on the field.

You can dump Widnes any time you like though.

Not sure how true they are, but there are rumours that Cas's new ground is in trouble and has been put back 18 month due to lack of investment.

Struggling financially, the stadium drama rolls on and on, and the crowds were still bottom 3 in the comp last year, as in the years before. They're doing better on the pitch, but that doesn't matter, bluntly. Nobody cares what happens on the pitch except our existing fans, and we don't have enough of them. If Wakefield's stadium ever actually happened, and they filled it weekly with 10,000 fans, then I would be clamouring for their justified place in the top flight, whether or not they were winning or losing more. But they aren't. Obviously not in such a dire position as Salford, but it's arguable that Widnes are in less trouble because at least they have a stadium.



Because, with the influence of Big Nigel (ex of Halifax), the RFL decided that their top priority was the possibility of Featherstone, Halifax or Leigh gaining promotion for a year in the top flight. The price for P&R, which was clearly only likely to benefit those three clubs, was a reduction in numbers in the top flight to spread the money thicker amongst the remaining clubs, plus a play-off system which I think everyone expected to so heavily favour the fully professional SL sides that actual P&R was seen as only a theoretical possibility, not a real one.

When the decision was taken in 2013 to reduce from 14 to 12, with P&R to follow, I suspect the SL clubs thought that the clubs to be cut would be London, who were in financial collapse at the time, and one of Salford, Widnes, Castleford or Wakefield, based on normal results. They didn't really want London to go, but were willing to pay that price for the extra cash and London seemed a basket case at the time anyway. Everyone was horrified when Bradford, one of the few genuinely big clubs, then collapsed and disappeared along with London, which suddenly made the league look much smaller and more parochial than expected.

We've since had the worst of all worlds. Hull KR and Leigh have demonstrated through their Yo-Yoing that even when it happens, P&R does nothing for the SL competition apart from swap two poorly-supported no-hoper teams in already-saturated markets. However, the near-disappearance of Catalans shook up the bigger clubs, because they can see that if the French follow London and Bradford, SL looks even more parochial and even less attractive to the broadcasters and sponsors. Meanwhile, the relegation of Hull KR and Leigh, who as fully pro sides weren't supposed to fall through the trapdoor, made the lower-half SL clubs terrified, because it could be them, while the possibility of losing a big, rich club like Warrington was just unacceptable to the other clubs. Hence the P&R had to go, for all the reasons which were given, and ignored, for not introducing it in the first place.

The clubs thought they'd been clever in introducing P&R to pacify the top championship clubs and more traditional-minded fans, without the risk of any big clubs falling foul of it because of the play-off system. In many ways, it was supposed to be much more of a closed shop than licensing ever was, because there was now no way for a new club to threaten the place of one of the poor performers other than the supposedly impossible play-off route. What they ended up with is the loss of one of the biggest clubs - Bradford - along with the loss of London, and the too-near-for-comfort potential loss of Warrington and Catalans. Yet while the system seems to allow for the disappearance of some of our few genuine asset clubs, it has become very apparent that the Leigh/Hull KR/Halifax clubs, while unlikely to add much to SL as a competition, are always likely to act as an effective barrier to entry (or re-entry) for new asset clubs clubs with greater commercial/developmental potential like Bradford, Toulouse and Toronto.

The system is a disaster - a genuine risk to the continuity and maybe survival of major clubs in a sport not overflowing with major clubs, but one which ensures that it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any new potential to enter the top flight. It has to change.

The defenestration of Nigel Wood was partly the lower-half clubs acting to ensure their own survival, to try and bring the system to an end. But it was also the upper half clubs trying to find a way of recreating a way into SL for clubs beyond the Leigh/Halifax/Fev group in an attempt to improve the marketability and spread of a sport which they know is stagnant and declining. I have heard that they were furious to discover, after Nigel's departure, that the play-offs were enshrined in the TV contract, which explains why no new system has yet been announced, because there'll have to be serious negotiations with Sky first.

We're in uncharted waters, and I would love to have a mole on the inside of the RFL to fill in the gaps in what I've heard/read/gleaned from various places. But on balance, even if for selfish reasons, I think the bigger clubs are trying to take the sport in the right direction. Lenagan, Moran, Pearson, Davy, and McManus are not stupid men. They want a bigger, more attractive competition, and they recognise that all the current structure has achieved is to foster the game's stagnation.