Apart from in Aus, RU has both a stronger club and stronger international game throughout the rest of the world.

The SC not rising is indeed a bad sign, and I do feel that RL players deserve more money than they get. However, the cold hard reality of the matter is that if Warrington barely made a profit at all in a cup winning year, while spending to the full cap allowance, then it says one of two things to me

1) The SC level originally was too high for clubs at the time to sustainably afford (this works on the assumption that turnover is higher now than it was 10years ago)
2) The RFL and clubs have done little, or nothing, to increase revenues and turnover in a decade.

Neither case is a palatable one.

If you make a good Curry open an Curry house, you make a good steak open a Steak house.

The future of the game? It has lasted 100+ years with "small northern towns" and did it without full time players. Not saying I do not want to see the game grow I certainly would love to travel to Devon, Nottingham, Edinburgh...etc to watch a good competative game against HKR. I would love to watch Australia take on England at a packed out Wembley.

I just can not see where or how you expect these things to happen when the general public do not see the game as an entertaining sport. And the majority of people that do go to games as I say are not prepared to travel so the international game relies on where the games are hosted.

It certainly isn't hard for me to hear your opinions but it seems you would rather pin your hopes and dreams for the game on something that just isn't going to happen or certainly not for a fair few decades.

Just a slight edit for accuracy.

No-one has suggested we dont play rugby league.



But thats all the game did for 100+ years, survived, Do you want to go back to a semi-pro game played in front of 2 men and his dog in tiny dilapidated stadia between parishes in small northern towns? Because those are our options, we cant keep the status quo, the world doesnt work like that, you cant stay the same. We either try and expand or we retract.

I would rather try and fail than accept a slow lingering death while the game regresses.

But as you say people in Devon, Nottingham, Edinburgh dont seem to want to watch our game. Why would they? almost all of them couldnt pick Jamie Peacock out of a line up, couldnt point out Castleford or Wakefield on a map. Why would they affiliate themselves with a game played in places they dont know by people they havent heard of? Especially when there is a game which is pretty similar with players they have heard of who seem to get the pick of our players anyway.

The AVIVA Premiership has a salary cap of £4m for every player at the club, with most clubs having around 40 senior players. The Super League is £1.65m for the named 25 man squad.

There are many senior pro's who just play in the A League which is their reserve league, along with youth team players also looking to break into the first team. Basically the cap is bigger, but spread over more players, but it is undeniable that the top players do earn alot more, and a fringe player may only earn a fraction more than this colleague in the quicker game.

One and its Quins RU. Everyone else plays way out of London.

the salary cap is indeed £4m BUT the players get their international appearance money on top. Ashton might get £200 K from Northants but in the next season i guarantee he will double if not triple that.

I also think that they ," earn" extra from sponsorships , endorsements etc. being given a ferrari to drive is a nice little perk.

so when you talk about wages for a player the extras in RU are enourmous in showing the discrepancy.

Edited for accuracy.....but don't tell dally messenger on the NRL boards...he'll start crying to the mods about Union Trolls

He left a lad with a little something about him and went to Northampton in the second tier of rugby union in this country and was given a contract of £70k a year, that is on a par with an established SL player, and a wage that Wigan were not prepared to match for someone who came into the team and showed good potential.

The union international game fills the stadiums and the corporate boxes. We can decry all we like about old boys clubs and the middle classes watching the game and loving it whether it is dull by comparison in terms of pace, skill and entertainment to the 13 a-side game.

Companies are attracted to the full stadiums and seeming mass appeal of a global game, something that hopefully the Australians will invest a little in when their new billion dollar TV deal kicks in.

Union pays more and will conceivably continue to pay considerably more when you see an international game that promotes itself and then reaps the rewards with companies interested in getting involved.

League seems local by comparison, and we will continue along with a better product but one that people will only stumble upon by accident.

youve made some excellent posts on this thread

Yes ok it 'survived' for 100+ years and that was all it did, but 15 years ago we made a move into a full time professional world, something that only a few sports had managed to do successfully in the past and we were at least five steps ahead of Union which was the bigger sport and always has been. Our move forward has forced other sports to grow just as rapidly which shows we are not a dying breed we are an innovative sport living on limited resources.

You say we either try and expand but you fail to say how, you fail to have any innitiatives on what the sport could do to move forward even more than they have in those 15yrs.

Just look at how far the game has come in that short time, we've increased the playing numbers in the capital beyond anyones wildest dreams back then, we've brought two teams into the English leagues from France, we have made a big push to get into both Wales and Scotland with the Magic weekend and setting up a Welsh franchise and all this while still having the same limited resources to work with, not to mention the economic crisis the whole country has had to deal with.

My idea for expansion would be to take baby steps, don't go too far too soon, Places like Sheffield that have two football clubs that have failed pretty much recently could have been given more help and possibly had a thriving team back in the SL. The people of Doncaster have never really taken to RL but what about Rotherham or Barnsley? Then from there keep moving down both the East and West coasts while also trying to figure out a way of making the Cumbria expansion a success. Gateshead is another that doesn't seem to be taking off so what about moving up just a little bit? Would the Newcastle Falcons fans take to RL or would it be the same outcome as the Harlequins support base?

The RFL do have some great ideas and often follow through on them, it is the execution and over ambitious nature that has effected the game the way it has IMO. What is for sure though is that if we do not have a strong club game the international game will die even further, if we do not grow the club game international support will not grow to anywhere near the numbers Union get.

Like it or not, SL is dependent on Sky money. Without it we'd already be a semi-pro sport as we were in the 70s and early-mid 80s. And that Sky money is - in part - driven by how attractive the sport is to the broadcaster - not fans at the gate, but to advertisers and potential viewing audience. If you take Quins and Crusaders out of the mix, RL would be a less attractive sport to Sky. Sheffield/Rotherham are just a couple more northern towns. In the end the drive to keep Quins and add Crusaders was probably a financial necessity for SL as a whole.

Just on the cap, one of the reasons it hasn't been increased is because so few clubs actually spend anywhere near it. At one stage some SL clubs were spending only around 30% of the total value of the cap (David Gallop said that a few years ago and I haven't seen any evidence that the position has changed much since then). So when we compare to Union's cap its actually even worse than it looks based on the cap level (assuming most RU clubs are at/near the cap). And that's before earnings from internationals, advertising etc top up star RU players' wages.

In the case of the likes of Eastmond, in RL probably only 3/4 clubs could afford to even think of signing him - in the NRL theoretically any club could sign afford any individual 'star' player. You can further add the fact that clubs like Leeds and Wigan are probably at or near the cap and are tring to tie their star youngsters in for the long-term. If Eastmond wanted more money and Sts wouldn't/couldn't pay it, there was probably no alternative in SL. Pre-cap, the likes of Wigan and Leeds would have been sniffing around Eastmond and quite possibly he would have moved clubs rather than leave the game entirely.

Given that we don't want even our rich clubs to bankrupt themselves (as both Leeds and Wigan basically did in the 'good' old days), we have to accept that SL/RL in England simply doesn't currently generate enough money to compete financially with RU for players they are determined to get. That doesn't - or to me at least shouldn't - mean that we accept this will be the case forever. I agree with those who say we have to move on if we want RL in England to be a long-term viable sport and not just a feeder of star players to RU/NRL.

To me the only options we have in the domestic game are to strengthen the franchise clubs financially - replacing weaker ones with stronger ones and in the future quite likely reducing the number of clubs altogether. Even doing that will only help stabilise RL financially, not grow it (unless we suddenly get an influx of Russian billionaires looking for a hobby).

That really only leaves the international scene. How do we make England competitive? How do we turn RL internationals into big 'events' that even non-fans would like to attend? Like it or not that's the basis for RU's success on the international scene - competitive games that are also big events. Success breeds success in the latter - casual fans watching a competitive RU international at a packed Twickenham are far more likely to be interested in going themselves than those watching England smash France at a half-full RL ground.

I don't have the answers to that, but TBH those wanting a return to the good old days or for us to just live within our means are really asking for RL to wither and die in the long term.

You are right that Rotherham/Sheffield are seen as just another northern city playing a northern sport however the highest attendances are those that are derby games or teams from within a close proximity. The smaller the steps the more derbies we are going to see, this will bring rivalries out that should in theory increase supporter numbers. As we get further south the RL word grows and crosses each counties border, yes a slow way of doing it but what might be a more successful way of doing it.

Taking Quins and Crusaders out of the mix is something I would never do I think they have their place in the world of RL and as you say they are a needs must to keep Sky onside. What you have to ask though is, would viewing figures decrease if those clubs were not in the league? Would advertisers lose money if their company was not advertised whilst a London based club was on the TV? It would be interesting to get the figures from Sky as to how many households have the RL on each weekend down in the capital.

I don't think anyone has said about returning to the 'good' old days and most are pro-expansion but nobody seems to have the right way to go about expanding. The people already at the RFL have jumped head first into expanding to areas that have no or little RL interest and seem to think because they like a game played with a similar shaped ball they will like watching RL too. The day they realise this isn't the case is maybe the day the try and expand in areas not already top heavy with other sports in the area.