Indeed.

What if four clubs made no tangible improvement to the French national side? Increase them to six? Eight? Reasonable questions to ask, given that they're probably worse now than prior to the elevation of les Catalans.

Jean,

All this debate presumes we are happy the the current structure of the game whereby a group of officials, sitting in a room at Red Hall and acting like God, decides who is chosen to play where.

No new, big hitting financial backers such as your "rich patrons who now support rugby union in France" will put their money at the mercy of such a system.

I agree that say four French teams in the top division would be great for Rugby League in Europe. But,the way to achieve it first involves re-structuring the game in the way I have previously outlined, including:-

1. Automatic one-up, one-down promotion and relegation betwen the leagues (Super League, Championship and Championship One)
2. No limits at all on spending by Clubs, including the scrapping of the Salary Cap.
3. All clubs to be managed as limited companies ("Societes Anonymes", in France).
4. Severe penalties if Clubs get into financial difficulties:-
- Insolvency event short of liquidation (eg 'Administration' in the UK) = 6 league points deduction
- Go bust (Liquidation) and related transfer the club's business to a new legal entity = relegation to the bottom league.
5. All clubs to prepare Audited Accounts to a 31 December year end & submit to the RFL by the following 30 June.
6. Limits on the number of players a club can register (50, with minimum 25 that qualify as "Under 21"icon_wink.gif
7. Minimum of 13 of the 17 players named for each match to be EU born or trained
8. TV (Sky etc) money to be paid into RFL HQ and distrubuted:-
55% to SL Clubs
25% to Championship clubs
12.5% to Championship 1 clubs
7.5% for central purposes (elite traning, youth development etc)
9. All grounds to have a Safety Certificate. Then mimimum standards that relate only to required facilities for away teams, officials, medical & media. No need to set unrealistically high capacity for specators. Club directors are well able to understand that the higher crowds they achieve the higher will be their revenue.

Once that is in place, the RFL can stand back and let the directors of the clubs get on with it.

Then your rich patrons at Avignon, Lyons or wherever can put teams together that can join Championship 1 and will be good enough to win promotion two years running and then they will be in Super League. That success will "build more success".

A clear, transparent route to the top that will attract their investment if they are so inclined.

That isnt really the case though is it.

But if we got to the stage where we could support 6-8 french sides then the logical conclusion would be a French conference of SL, but that is a long, long way away. 2-4 is a decent medium-to-long term aim.

I'm sure you know that a good chunk of the Sky money is already distributed to clubs below Super League.

In conjunction with the proposed reduction of the numbers of teams in Super League, my proposal would lead to each Super League club receiving the same amount of cash as now.

1/16th goes to the championships clubs, 1/16 goes to the RFL. That’s 12.5%. It’s a pretty big jump form 12.5% to 45%
No, you are proposing 4 or 35% of the current SL clubs receive massively less tv cash and play in a lower league in front of lower crowds, with less visibility and as such less money, whilst the other 65% either play fewer games or play the same teams numerous times with differing home/away records.

Virtual terrace - rls version of the nuthouse

To expand on that, Why don't we take Catalans Sky money and divide it between the other English SL clubs. Then let the any French teams negotiate their own TV contracts. That we can have as many French teams in SL with diluting the funding across the the English based teams. Uk skysports tv customer fund the UK clubs and the same for the French! Just a thought!

For the same reason Leeds don’t sell their rights for what they are worth, and leave wakefield to sell their rights for what they are worth, we negotiate the rights as whole, not individually.

2 clubs plus decent scouting by English SL clubs of French Jnrs. There is only 1 NZ team in NRL.

I don’t think it is realistic to expect 15/16/17/18 year old kids to be moving to a different country, with a different language, for the fairly derisory wage our young players are paid.I don’t think it is realistic to expect 15/16/17/18 year old kids to be moving to a different country, with a different language, for the fairly derisory wage our young players are paid.

I think that NZ desperately needs a second team and they would have one if the ARL were not scared stiff that the Kiwis will win even more competitions if they had an increased talent pool. Given you are pro Perth then I am not sure you will agree with me

Having more French players in England similar to Kiwis in the NRL would help. You would hope Super League would have some sort of initiative for this in the future.

Back to France, 4 pro sides is not impossible in the long term but perhaps not the next decade or two. I would start off with getting it up to 2 with Toulouse. A club with great potential and would provide some great rivalry with Catalan. Anyway I am not sure who the third or fourth team would be, there are no candidates even near the correct standard at present.

In the end steel sharpens steel. If England want to compete against NZ/Aus then we need to have competitive games against our neighbours. So strengthening France and possibly Wales is a must if we wish to improve. This isn't going to happen with just Catalan.

You realistically need around 40-50 FT prof players in SL plus a decent standard 2nd tier to support a constant flow of new talent before either France or Wales is going to compete against the top 3. We are a long way away.

Not 15/16/17 yr olds perhaps, but nobody was suggesting that, 18/19/20 yr olds perhaps yes, if they are ambitious enough to want to be proffessional RL players

You will now tell us that by that age it is too late to make the grade