ATM: Hull FC
St Helens
Wigan
Warrington
Leeds
London
Catalans
Huddersfield
Bradford
Widnes

But if (or when) Cas/Salford get their new grounds, then I'd prefer them over the last 2 on the list.

It does make me laugh when players & coaches come out and say lets just drop the league to 10 teams. The 'RL community' were up in arms when 13 Crusaders players were told to find a new club at the last minute but these same people are happy as Larry to say to 70-100 full time players that they've now got to find new jobs as your clubs are deemed not worthy of super duper league. How many of these clubs would stay full doubt time? I doubt many, if any could afford to.

The RFL have made a rod for their own backs. Clearly the comp needs something happening to make it more competative but I don't think just culling 4 teams is the way to go. If we had 14 team spending the full cap with youth development at the forefront of any teams operation then in a few years the league would even itself out, it's just how the RFL and the clubs themselves go about bringing in the finance needed to do this.

depends on which 4 teams we were getting rid of, and what we were turning away. Im not sure we gain anything from having Wakefield in SL at the moment.

But those two things aren’t the same, which was the point I was making. It is idiotic to pretend that a 10 team league and a 4 team league are the same thing. They aren’t. Its like arguing why have 14 teams, why not 20? Why not 30? Why not 200? Why not 1? Because apparently however many clubs we have in a league is exactly the same which is clearly nonsense.

The 10 strongest off the field otherwise what's the point?

Wigan
St's
Leeds
Hull
Hull KR
Hudds
Warrington
Bradford
Les Cats

one of the remaining to make up the numbers

The "spend the full cap" thing is all smoke and mirrors.

Yes, we would ideally have clubs spending the same but you also need the players to justify it. It is no good having Wakefield / Quins announce "we're spending the full cap" unless we have enough quality players to merit that sort of spending. Otherwise, we are just inflating the salaries of average and poor players.

and reducing the number of professional developmemt academies, with player pathways to full-time careers from 14 to 10 will definitely get us more British players of quality. Not.

where?

So you think you can dump 4 teams from SL but the size of the player pool will remain the same? How can you argue that you need a SL presence in the expansion areas in order to get people interested in the game yet believe that where interest already exists you can lose the club but maintain the interest?

Because that player pool would become of a higher standard, losing alot of the players who arent quite good enough and the overseas has beens and never weres, wont be in SL. The ten teams who would be playing would all be better, meaning the competition would be better and of a higher standard producing even better players and we get a bit of a virtuous cycle going on.

As for the expansion argument. The difference between losing say London is, if we were to lose london, anybody who supported RL, or anybody we wanted to attract to RL would need to travel hundreds of miles to find a pro club. If Cas were to go people would need to go 0 miles to find an SL club in Wakefield. If both were to go you would need to travel between 10 and 15 miles to find a pro club. We are much more likely to be able to attract and keep people who have to travel between 0 and 15 miles to see a game, than we are able to attract and keep people who would need to make a round trips of 500 miles to see a game.

In a crafty Senator Palpatine type of way, get someone rich to build a 12-14k stadium in Normanton, tell Castleford, Wakefield and Featherstone they can all ground share in this nice new stadium(because they'll always false promise on their own stadium), thus losing Bell vue, Wheldon Rd, Moyles stadium or what ever its name is. Give them a few years under their own identity then just merge all 3 into [iThe Normanton Feathery Wild Tigers[/i eliminate 3 clubs and create a 'super'[sic] club.

Its Post office Road and i don't think fev are the ones that have been telling porkies for years.

Maybe 4.8 million invested in the Championship academies might make up the difference , at around 200K a year you could run a decent junior set up

It's still only 2 small covered stands, they'd look nice in their own [size(Normantons)[/size new stadium