P+R in 1 up 1 down is past its sell by date and wouldn't work unless we had more players and more money in the game. The way forward to grow the game is franchising in some form.

You may have to put some meat on the bones of that one.

Other sports, notably Football (automatic relegation and promotion, with additional promotion through play offs), Cricket, automatic promotion and relegation. even, Union has automatic promotion and relegation (although there is minimum criteria for promotion, which can "save" a relegated club).

However, IF we are to expand the game with the likes of Toronto and Toulouse, then some form of Franchising/Licensing makes more sense as it would give the "expansion" clubs time to develop.

The current system, although less than straight forward, does involve just about every club something to play for throughout the whole of the season, even though it has some obvious faults.

If we do want Toulouse and Toronto in our competition then, I agree that some form of Franchising seems a better option but, this will put us back to where we were before the current system was introduced.

Maybe Franchising, with a 5 year review and defined targets for growth etc, allowing new clubs to join and failing clubs to be dropped ?

The '3 year licence' part of the previous system was a ridiculous idea. It removed s big part of the stability and introduced a competitive element which was completely unnecessary.

The big paradigm shifting aspect of franchising is that it changes the off the field competitive focus from clubs competing with each other to RL competing with RU football cricket etc, and on the field it changes the focus to winning from not losing.

Having a 3year or 5 year time frame removes that. Also it make a no sense to delay a club who is ready for 3-5 years or prop up a club which is failing for 3-5years.

Franchising. Done simply. Add clubs when they are ready, remove clubs when the fail. Admittance on one single criteria can a club grow the pie by more than their slice. If you do, your in. If you don't you aren't.

Franchising made some clubs including HullFC lazy, we were quite content with getting an 'A' licence and plodding around in mid to low table with no fear of relegation while costs were cut from the backroom staff. When given the size of our crowds, stadium and sponsor/retail income we should be at the very least top half of the table. There is no way the 11th and 12th places we put in back in 2008 & 2009 would have been tolerated if relegation was there as a threat, the board would have had to invest.

It also was a death knell for the Championship, with no promotion on offer there was no point to that league. Whereas now there are several clubs Rovers, London, Toulouse, Toronto and even Halifax and Featherstone who would fancy their chances at winning promotion in the next few years.

It's too boring and RL likes to be innovative for media coverage which we cannot secure otherwise.

Some interesting ideas here - franchising with a twist, and here's my 2-penneth...

Grant SL franchises based on business plans and other criteria, but with rather more challenge on the credibility of the numbers put forward than we've had before. An A license makes you immune from relegation, but you automatically get reassessed if you come in the bottom 2. A B license means you get replaced by a top 2 Championship club who can meet B license criteria as well, with the same for C licenses.

Potential for 2-up, 2-down between SL and the Championship, but only if the Championship clubs have equal or better licensing criteria.

Go bust or into admin, then you're out. No points deductions, you just move down a division automatically. No parachute payments for relegated clubs either.

Lets be honest. the super 8's hasnt worked.

the bottom 4 of the 8 tend be so far behind that by the time we get to the super 8's they cant make the top 4.

we have ended up having games that are dont really mean much. Yes when we had 8 in the play offs that was a failure also as the bottom 4 of the 8 were not good enough and ended up getting hammered.

but we did have times when we saw catalan get results and actually make a run in the play offs. Leeds went all the way from 5th.

i do prefer a system where we have a chance of seeing a dark horse cause upsets in a one off game and can make the play offs exciting. the super 8's doesnt allow it.

What we need to aim for is creating a competition where we can get 8 teams in a play off which wont see hammerings in the 1st round.

What ever happens will have to meet with sky approval so i can't see the GF disappearing unless sky pull out of the deal.
There used to be a good system many years ago where it was based on Lancs & Yorks teams so there was one division & each team played about 34 league games a year.Any team would play all teams on its own side of the Pennines & so many from over the hills to make up the numbers.The competition also worked to provide county divisions because all games played against your own county opponents counted in seperate leagues to provide county champions. It worked well for years.

The problem we have is most fans in RL want every game to mean something but in reality this is impossible in any league system. Do you hear footie fans complaining, most teams in the PL have nothing to play for with months of the season remaining. If your team hasn't had a decent start and find they're to far behind come crunch time, then tough, better luck next year. What your team can do though (when there's nothing to play for) is to cause other teams damage and affect the final result.

Agreed.

The worst thing the RFL ever did was moving to a 8 team play off in a 14 team league that had only 4/5 capable of competing at the top end.ever since then, when average teams gained access to the business end of the season it opened this can of worms where it was felt everyone had to be involved.

Most, if not all, other sports seem to do ok for media coverage without making themselves look stupid/innovative.

We should be portraying RL as the hardest physical sport, played by top athletes, going toe to toe to find the beast Club in the League, Country, World and not selling ourselves as a mickey mouse sport, run by a mickey mouse administration, that cant even take itself seriously.

Nothing wrong with being innovative if it leads somewhere and improves the sport.

Perhaps it's all about marketing . RU seems to be doing well from selling itself.