Toronto deliver no new TV revenue....they are just a new home for £1,8 million of the SKY cash and has been players unable to secure a job at the other 30 or so full time pro teams on the planet.....Sky don't care if Toronto v Boston or Wakefield v Salford is their schedule filler.......outside of Soccerball, everything else is secondary......as for Boston, or NYC, Florida, Hamilton or Timbuktu......unless someone is prepared to throw £20,000,000 at a project over 10 years, that ain't happening......

Yeah but the NRL deal is with fox so it's fox who are dealing with all the production etc etc.

No idea about NFL and NBA but they are flush with cash so the production and infrastructure will be solid.

Do you really think the RFL/super league could go alone and introduce a subscription model without TV behind them.

There is no way sky would come up with the same figure when giving our UK tv coverage a value, if Featherstone, Wakefield and Leigh were in Super League instead of Catalans, Toronto and New York.

I've got the NRL online subscription and I think it's good value and I love it, I also bought Eurosport online for £30 for the year (£25 last year absolute bargain) perhaps Superleague could tender the production contract and fix a contract for 3 - 5 years. The other problem with the production side is the video ref, it could remain as it is, i.e. transported from ground to ground, or they could create a similar system to the NRLs' bunker room (or name it 3rd eye). This would mean that all of the games would need to be televised each week to pay for the annual overheads. Therefore we could all watch 2/3 games each Sat &Sunday and a match Thursday & Friday but that would probably mean excluding the 2nd tier games, which would miss the point of relying upon a subscription service. Broadcasting matches from Canada would fit nicely. For the sake of a subscription service the league would be better structured as a giant superleague - 20-24 teams. It's a hard predicament to solve and make all parties happy but there are other options available.

We are a filler sport......and a cheap option at that........if we had a stand alone streaming option we would need 250,000 people paying £15 a month to make it work....we can't even sell out a world cup final FFS......

So who would Sky prefer in SL?

 Featherstone, Wakefield and Leigh?

Or

Toronto, Toulouse and Catalans?

How many new Sky subscriptions would they sell in Toronto or France ... and New York for that matter? Secondly, will a person who is not into rugby league especially care that, say Toulouse, are playing? Currently, its basically the same level of player at Leigh (or at least it was) and half of Toronto’s squad at one point was ex-Leigh! Would Sky viewing figures go up dramatically - enough to materially improve the next deal?

However, the piper calls the tune. They should be asked what they want and if they want a league full of plastic teams from Honolulu to Timbuktu then they can gladly have them.,..

Possibly BT would be interested in aquiring the rights to the Championship come 2021. At a mere cost to sky at present of £2.9m per season not to show any league games, would be well within BT's budget.

Its not entirely about subs, its about ad revenue from companies targeting a wider demigraphic than the traditional supporter who spends his quids on bingo and in the local Pound shop.
We need to attract the affluent, the ethnic minorities, women and children because the said traditional supporter won't be around forever.....

Toronto, Toulouse and Catalans

Good choice Kevin.

Presumably we only want to attract affluent women who will have affluent kids? And as for ethnic minorities, according to the 2011 census 5 percent of the UK population are from. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. How do you suggest we involve them in the game? Sell the concept of Toronto or New York? Set up a team in New Delhi or Karachi? Bribe them to play the game?

Looking for real and actionable suggestions and not just the usual vague generalities.

Media reporting that all SL clubs except Leeds have voted for a 12 team league, 1 up, 1 down, 29 games regular season plus Magic Weekend and 6 extra games (no detail on how this will be decided) Top5 playoff format again.

Championship to be 14 teams, with 2 going down, Champion to be decided by playoffs. League1 to contain 12 teams, 1 up automatically, 1 via playoffs.

HullFC's Adam Pearson has told League Express "“If it doesn’t get agreed then I can’t see the Championship and League One clubs getting as good a deal again,”

Wakefield chairman Michael Carter has already shot that story down on twitter saying there’s “way too much untruthful c**p being peddled out there”

I think its more him saying that SL can't decide how the Championship league works.

The RFL can however, and if SL want to get rid of the S8's then it obviously means the Championship format changes. Michael was on SKY before his game saying he was confident the S8's would be gone. They must have been pressure from SL onto the RFL to make these changes. Otherwise how can he be confident over something they have no control over? Particularly when Championship/L1 were pretty certain where they stood on the issue.

I think SL's put pressure on the RFL to force the changes through, Ralph wants the infighting to stop, so to try sweeten the Ch/L1 clubs, he's offered to save one championship club and promote 3 from L1.


I've said all along i agree with the SL chairman that the S8's need to go, but rushing it through will see tje new structure have many of the issues the S8s had. Loop fixtures are a farce and making the season even longer is solving nothing.