JESUS WEPT HOW MANY TIMES?????
£20 a ticket and £15 on beer and merchandise.....so an away fan is worth £35. At best, 1,000 is the average away support split across 11 rounds and I am being really generous here, so Toronto, replacing say Wakefield will cost a SL club £35,000.
The minimum turnover of a SL club is £4,000,000 so Toronto instead of Wakefield is worth less than 1% of a SL clubs turnover.

There are many valid reasons for and against expansion into America, but "AWAY FANS" isn't one of them.

How so Einstein?
The claim was lower gates, which I showed was incorrect....how is that far too simplistic?

Exactly and that for all teams, you take out the likes of Leeds, Hull, Saints etc.whose place realistically won't be under threat and just concentrate about the teams who would be in the firing line then you're looking at a few or several hundred in some cases.

Leigh, Wakefield, Widnes, Salford and Huddersfield averaged 5,21 last year......the others averaged 11,454......and guess where most of the anti-expansion fans reside?

The deadwood needs to be culled......the sport was happy to lose the Capital city and Bradford, one of its better supported sides to let a few pit villages dream of a year in the spotlight before returning to obscurity.
If the game wants to survive (think about what options we had for our leisure £ 20 years ago and then imagine what we will compete with in another decade?), then we need to expand to new markets.
I am not saying Toronto, NYC or anywhere else is the answer, but I can assure you that Leigh, Wakefield, Widnes, Salford and Huddersfield aren't the answer!

A league as postulated might include 4 UK clubs at the very most: London, Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh, although I doubt it'll be more than 2.

We need to get away from this mindset that clubs can only market to their postcode.

There is no reason why Wigan cannot draw support from the wider Greater Manchester area. That's an area of 2.8m people - roughly the population of Chicago.

There is no reason why St Helens cannot draw support from the Liverpool City region - an area with a population that is similar in size to Philadelphia.

The population of Leeds alone is comparable to cities like San Francisco and Seattle and there is no reason why Warrington couldn't market itself as a team for Chesire - an area with more people living there than Boston and Atlanta put together. These are serious markets, if the clubs themselves can position themselves in that way. If US TV audiences are interested in a tiny little village in Wisconsin, then why wouldn't they be interested in what we can offer if the product is right?

That doesn't mean that our clubs need to have to rebrand, but just that they broaden their appeal - something that every single club should be doing anyway.

This obsession with "away fans", and this myth that paying spectators and TV audiences have any interest in two teams fighting for the prize of being "the least crap" needs to stop.

Any club that relies on away fans for its finances really should be facing serious questions about whether it has a place in any sort of elite competition, because either they aren't trying hard enough to reach the local audience, or the local audience simply doesn't care.

The Lenagan model would retain the top supported existing SL clubs — Wigan, St Helens, Warrington, Leeds, Hull FC, Hull KR, Catalans and maybe Castleford — and ditch the strugglers by relegating them to the Championship in favour of the new French and North American clubs.

Special dispensation would possibly be given to London because of its centrality for southern development and player recruitment, and because of its usefulness as a brand name to attract corporate sponsors.

There would be an open door for future financially viable French and North American clubs, as well as a financially viable Bradford.

....no thanks. We've never had special anything and have no interest in getting favours now......if we have a money man waiting then fine, but no "handouts"......we need a fiscally viable plan!

You really think there'd be 2 Hull clubs in there?
Because I don't and I support 1 of them. I also doubt weather Cas (who go against every expansionist on here's argument of population, crowds and market they can appeal to). or Bradford (they won't be financially viable by then, and apologies to Bradford fans but even if they were could they be trusted due to there recent history ).

If Toronto, Toulouse whoever come up through the current system then great fair play to them. If they don't then tough try again next year. We shouldn't be putting in just cause they're nice places to go, it look's good in the papers, and they may bring better opportunities for marketing. Because they also may not.

As someone else has put, why aren't we looking at Scotland, Ireland?

The Warriors, Wolves and Saints would though.

Why will we fall behind? Why is the mindset that everything the sport tries is doomed to failure?

And let's not beat about the bush here. The sport is in this position because there are certain clubs that aren't marketing themselves well enough, that aren't growing revenue, that aren't developing travel, that aren't raising standards and aren't reaching new audiences. These are the very same clubs that are voting for things like a £1m real-terms pay-cut to our talent since 1999, which makes it harder for those clubs that do develop, grow and market themselves to keep their talent and progress.

Can you blame them for wanting to look elsewhere?

Bit of questionable comparisons going on there. Comparing the population of a county in U.K. to just a city in the USA. What are the populations of Georgia, Massachusetts, Washington and Illinois instead of just making it sound like American teams only get their fans from the city and not the whole State it's located.

Green Bay might only have relative small population but what's the population of Wisconsin and how many other NFL teams do they have there?

I still think it's a relevant argument. If Wigan Warriors can position themselves as a team for "Greater Manchester", or Saints position themselves as a team "for Merseyside", then that is a market that is comparable to what the American's have. People are saying that this won't work because Wigan is a small town and the Yanks won't be interested in that. But if Wigan can position themselves as a club that speaks to a market that includes one of the UK's biggest financial, creative and legal hubs outside London, that arguably is a market that Americans are likely to be interested in.

We're not talking about getting 2m Liverpudlians clamouring for tickets to the Totally Wicked, but what we should be aiming for is generating a basis of interest in 'St Helens' (or 'Saints') across that region. TV is arguably more important here, and St Helens can market themselves in a way that raises TV interest across the Liverpool City Region, that makes us more attractive to TV not just in North America, but in the UK as well,

Is that realistic? I'd say so. St Helens is 20 minutes from Liverpool Lime Street - there's no reason why a club shouldn't be engaging with potential audiences a 20 minute train ride away.

It's not when you look at the population of Illinois (almost 13m) compared to Greater Manchester instead of just using the population of Chicago.