Btw, the requirements for a hackney carriage are to "be of sufficient seating capacity to carry a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 8 passengers".

At least you know where I am from, unlike you who thinks he is from France when in actual fact is from the urban slums in Lancashire.


Intellectually challenged???? Please feel free to tell everyone here my education qualifications....

You will be surprised by my CV.

But in your language John from Chorley , have a set of balls and Inhofe from the revolting person a you have created..

Nobody likes you here, you haven't grasped that yet

If all we can expect is some help with travel costs, then there is little point in the inclusion of either French or N. American clubs.
However, if their inclusion allowed an increase in funding, either to be spread among the SL clubs or to the wider RL family, then , it becomes worthwhile.
Why would 2 x 10 club conferences, with the top 4 of each making up an end of season play off, not work ?
If it was an East / West split, it would certainly help with Thursday / Friday evening travel (apart from the French /N. American fixtures and it would breathe some new lif into some of the challenge cup fixtures, when say Wigan or Saints played Cas or Leeds etc, as the fixtures would have some "rarity" value.

Conferences would certainly be preferable to SL1 & SL2

Conference set-ups, where you play your own Conference H&A, and the other Conference H OR Away, would possibly work.

As a fan of a Yorkshire team, I wouldn't want my team missing out on scheduled games against the likes of Wigan, Saints and Wire.

Widnes can right off though.

The alternative of a possible top flight including 3/4 N. American clubs and 2 French clubs, will leave room for maybe 6 British clubs and you dont have to be a rocket scientist to work out who they will be.
The possible irony of Cas and Wakefield eventually playing in new grounds, whilst having been effectively demoted, is a very strong possibility and the same would apply to Widnes, KR, Salford, Huddersfield and as said previously, this would kill the game in the UK.

Country wide conferences is the way forward. 12 in the UDI Yorkshire conference then, which should suit the traditionalists:

KR Hull (the agreed merger of Hull and KR to form one club), Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Castleford, Featherstone, Batley, Hunslet, Doncaster and York.

And 12 in the in Tuther Area conference:

Wigan, Warrington, Widnes, St Helens, Salford, Leigh, Swinton, Oldham, Rochdale, Workington, Whitehaven and Barrow.

That should suit most. However as it’s conferences playing we can have more with the play offs afterwards. So the third conference is the Not on my Bus Pass Conference:

Toronto, Catalan, Toulouse, Newcastle, North Wales, South Wales, London Skolars, London Broncos, Bristol, Coventry, Hemel A (Dewsbury), Hemel B (Hemel).

The futures bright if rather aimless.

The current SL clubs would never agree to a conference setup, as the TV money would then be spread across 20 teams rather than the current 12.

I think we all agree that we need to get some more money into the game, and tbh it's not going to be via paying fans. Maybe to a degree for individual clubs, but not collectively across the board. We can't attract major sponsors, and we can't pretend that RL will suddenly become so popular a spectator sport that this will ever happen. So, that leaves TV deals.

Sky have the monopoly in the UK, albeit Premier have dabbled but I doubt they have mega money to contribute. The game has some history in France, but surely a domestic league (rather than just one or two teams playing in an English league) would attract more TV sponsorship? Ditto for USA and Canada (without the history). The major TV companies there aren't going to be interested in a couple of teams playing in a European competition.

The key for me is that we need to find a way of making the game attractive to watch, as well as having worthwhile competitive leagues. We can't make wholesale changes to the rules of the game (unless we want to divorce ourselves from world RL), but (imo) it would make sense to give more funding to teams at the bottom of SL (and any promoted teams) to help level out playing standards.

From a TV perspective, it makes no difference whether the teams playing are from major cities or a small town in Yorkshire. What matters is having competitive games where the outcome isn't pretty much known beforehand.

Will it happen? No chance. But what I still can't comprehend is what the "master plan" is for RL in the UK/Europe/Northern Hemisphere? The easy answer to that is "there isn't one", but whatever we think of the Red Hall team, they must have some thoughts for how this is all going to pan out. Or don't they???

oh dear!

the merged academy is down to lack of players coming through from junior level, the talent pool is getting smaller across the game, not just in hull, but we still have an academy under the COH banner, some clubs dont even have their own!

you'd be happy to risk losing nearly 20,000 fans from game? hell, why not merge widnes and saints too, same distance and time to get to each ground as it is fc and kr!

Well Leigh in there twice, not much difference is there. Let’s hope Leigh being promoted at the end of this year bring their own TV deal. Did KR expand the TV deal?

you just being stupid or is this normal? leigh and kr fall under the SL deal with sky