Toronto have given up home advantage and will play Toulouse as a 7th game at Magic Weekend?

Now the cynic in me thinks this a fiscal decision, as Toronto would have had to pay for flights from France to Toronto as their contra-sponsor doesn't offer that route and they are probably exempt from paying for any travel cost for Toulouse now, whilst the conspiracy theorist in me also thinks that this might be a trial run for the future, with both teams possible contenders for receiving a licence, should we revert back to licencing.

to be honest I think we will go back to Licencing and the sooner the better at the moment teams that come up are miles behind other teams in getting better players

It took us relegation to assemble a better squad than we had in SL

Licencing is gone, we tried it and it failed. I was a big believer in it, but I was wrong.

Licensing done the way the RFL did t was wrong. Licensing done properly can work.

your opinion would of been different last season well you was in the championship had the rules changed last season

I'm a Bulls fan so if anyone should be saying licencing failed, it's me. But I don't think it did. My club was simply mis-managed and would have sunk regardless of the system. Widnes and Catalans both came through under licencing and are both still here. Admittedly 2017 wasn't great for either of them but for the most part they have held their own in SL.

I think Toronto will want some assurances should they make it into the top flight. The last thing they will want is to 'do a Leigh' and go straight back down again. We all know the RFL follow the money so I wouldn't be surprised to see licencing come back in some form in the near future.

What about a hybrid system? I.e not all 12 (or 14) teams have licences, just offer licences to those who are integral to the success of SL? Set criteria in terms of revenue, attendances, having an academy, decent ground, maybe a degree of leeway for non-heartlands clubs. Make those clubs exempt from relegation, and the ones who aren't achieving in terms of those criteria will need to prove themselves on the pitch. For example:

14 teams
Catalans, Hull FC, Leeds, St Helens, Tolouse, Toronto, Warrington and Wigan (Licensed)
Castleford, Huddersfield, Hull KR, Salford, Wakefield and Widnes (Non-licensed)

Everyone plays each other twice, top 5 play offs. Bottom non-licensed club plays the top Championship club in the MPG. Use the extra space to fit in mid-season internationals against Fiji, Tonga etc if viable. Not sussed out what I'd do with Magic, I like the concept but hate that it creates an unbalanced fixture list. Using it for a Challenge Cup round could be an option, but then you have the risk that the draw may not produce many exciting games some years.

Licencing 'done properly' would result in a 5 or 6 team SL.....

I too am in favour of the right version of licencing.

Licencing should raise standards. We have allowed standards to slip at club level and it is hurting all levels of the sport.

I'd love to think that this sport could thrive with a form of promotion and relegation that was based on on-field performance, but the realities of modern sport mean that we're a long way from doing that in a way that's sustainable. We have too much disparity in how well clubs market themselves, too much disparity in the revenue they generate, too much disparity in the talent that they produce and too much disparity in their ability to pay that talent. These are all things that only licencing is going to address and it should be used to bring those below the standard up to the required level.

It's no secret that I'm a believer in expansion. I'm a believer in expansion because I simply don't see a situation where certain clubs in certain locations can sustain the sport at the level it needs to be at. We can't keep decrying the fact that we're only attracting sponsorships from online bookies, payday loans firms and tinned mushy peas, but keep insisting that the future of the sport is in deprived towns where the local High Streets are packed with bookies, pawnbrokers and fast food outlets, and keep marketing to people who think it's outrageous that they're asked to pay £20 for a play-off semi final or asked to jump on a train to Newcastle or London for a major event.

The old licencing system was too ambiguous, too easily fudged and it lacked transparancy - it has as much credibility as Angela Powers' "Guide to Super League Baby Changing tables" from way back when. WIth the right objectives in place, with the right KPIs and with the right purpose, it can work.

The problem with licencing (going on the last time). Is that it didn't raise the standard, it didnt lead to more younger players coming through (you could argue that more have come through in the 8's), it didn't bring the crowds in. And it didn't improve how clubs marketed themselves (they got lazier). And the sponsorship wasn't as good. And it nearly killed the lower leagues (exaggeraten slightly I know).
And there's nothing to say this time will be any different.

We need something that includes promtion/relegation otheerwise the sport stands still. I like the 8's, but if not them then how about a 14 team SL, bottom team relegated/1st promoted. 13th enters into a play off with 2nd,3rd,4th placed teams?

As for expansion, if done properly like Toronto are doing then it's fine, ie building the groundwork, giving fans a look at what the sports about, and of course winning. If we just drop a club into SL like Paris, that's were I think it goes wrong. As after initial excitement, there's no groundwork to fall back on. And if there losing fans will soon leave.

You can measure that in many ways, but it certainly raised standards at many clubs off the field. Warrington, St Helens, Salford, Leeds and Catalans (off the top of my head) all moved to new stadiums or undertook significant improvement works during the licencing period. That's just one example.



I'd be interested to see your working on that one. I don't have the figures to hand, but one thing that did decline during the licencing period was the number of overseas-trained players in Super League.

And what I do have figures for are participation. When licencing was introduced, participation in Rugby League stood at around 132,000. In 2016 it was 67,000. That might not be due to licencing alone, but there's no question that many clubs have neglected this important aspect in their local communities and I believe that there needs to be much more of a drive to force thinking in this regard.



I agree. And that was one of the problems with the way licencing was done in my view, rather than licencing itself. We all know certain clubs gave cheap and free tickets out like confetti in the run-up to licencing. What should have been done, and I still believe should be done, is clubs given a ticket revenue target. That would force them to market themselves properly, not to under-sell the product.



And that again is a failure of clubs, not the system. The clubs aren't marketing themselves properly, they aren't engaging the audiences that advertisers and sponsors want to reach, and that makes it very difficult for the RFL to sell the sport.



All of the problems you cite with licencing are simply there in another guise with the Super 8s or any other P&L model we've tried. What's needed is a mass of 10-14 clubs that can all broadly compete on a relatively equal footing both on and on the field. Unfortunately, we don't have that and I suspect that we never will - because I simply think too few clubs are capable of rising up to the standards they need to reach.

I think you make a valid point. But would argue that the way football is (TV wise etc), it's harder for clubs to market themselves more. You have a core support (at Rovers it's about 7/8000). The problem is marketing to new support. And then getting them to stay, that's part of my problem with Licencing. 2 many games become a dead rubber, and it's harder to market as people will come to games that have meaning, and that's when you try to get them to come back. That is also the clubs to a degree.
Weather you like the MPG or not, you can't deny that it's one of the few times all major media outlets took an intrest in RL.

Sorry. Some of my replies are in your original post. I'm about as good with technology as the RFL are at promoting the sport. Useless.

There's a relatively simple solution to this - we need fewer games. One thing that many sports are finding is that bigger events are better for generating interest than simply "more games". We do it with the Magic Weekend, and rugby union does it with things like the Twickenham opener, the Saracens games at Wembley and the Welsh double-header in the Pro14.

I'm a firm believer that we need fewer games anyway because we currently flog our top talent far too much, but it has the added benefit of making points more scarce, which should improve standards, and reduce the number of dead rubbers.

I understand that certain clubs argue that they need the fixtures but this, again, is where the sport is falling behind in the modern sports market. Other sports are moving away from a reliance on ticket revenue as an income stream, and diversifying their revenue streams - making more money from TV, from hospitality, from sponsorships, from digital, from merchandising and from non-matchday revenue. Again, that's what our clubs should be doing much more of.

As for audiences, there are undoubtedly new audiences out there to be tapped into. We have affluent parts of North Yorkshire and Cheshire on our doorstep, yet our clubs really aren't tapping into those markets - that's a failure of marketing.

And if we have genuinely saturated the market, that's why expansion becomes even more important. It's why North America is an exciting prospect because, even though they might not bring the "away fans" that people seem to think are so important it really doesn't matter than much, because if we can just tap into a tiny fraction of the North American TV market, it changes the game completely.