Leigh possibly, I doubt Featherstone would. Featherstone would be looking at around 4k.

Ignoring the OP and his usual tripe, good win for Huddersfield last night. May be a decent outside bet for at least making the GF?

Making the grand final, yes. Winning it , no. Saints are better at playing our type of game than us, and have far more quality in their backline.

LeBron has a somewhat of a point but that isn't the fault of Huddersfield. They gave away free STs one year and still got no fans.

Fans don't win you games or prizes though and Hudds this season are great to watch and having already made one final could well make another. They also have far more homegrown talent than a lot of other clubs. They would 100% be given a licence and so they should be.

The problem LeBron alludes to with crowds is game wide. Nobody gets what we could consider to be a "good crowd" for the level of competition. We are supposed to be a top level sport but then you switch SS on and the games are being played in front of empty seats and in some cases in stadiums that are worse than non-league football grounds. The stadia is a bigger problem IMO than the crowds.

I've always been a fan of licencing because I don't believe the talent pool is there for sides to step up as shown by the fact that usually the team coming up go straight back down and rarely compete. However, for licencing to work it has to be done properly and with no brown envelopes. If your stadium isn't good enough then the message should be "go away, fix it and then come back next time" not "do you promise to build one some time before the second coming of Christ"

IMG need to find a way of getting more fans into grounds, of course they do, and for me starting by making the grounds respectable is step one.

I grew up in the Fartown area of Huddersfield (Fartown is a district of Huddersfield as well as the name of the old ground) and the failure of Huddersfield to draw crowds even after a relatively successful last 15 years is something i can share insight on. Huddersfield suffers from 'the lost generation' and shows how dependent we are as RL fans on the RL bug being passed between generations. Huddersfield in the late 70's and 80's were often bottom of whatever league structure existed at the time and were down to crowds in the low Hundreds rather than thousands. There was literally a generational gap and RL was not passed on (often from father to son) during that period. Most of the other top SL sides have never had such a prolonged period where their team was so poor. The consequences of this period cannot be understated, as they are still being felt to this day.

It appears that whatever the club does those family groups that abandoned RL during that time or more likely switched to watching soccer will not return. You certainly cannot say that Ken Davey and his marketing team has not done everything possible to try and get a new generation to support the team, and there are some promising signs with the demographic of supporters now shifting to being younger. When i started watching in the early 90's, 80%+ of supporters were aged 60+ and still remembered the glory days of the 1950's, Pat Devery, Lionel Cooper et al. As those supporters died off (literally!) they were not replaced due to the missing generation and getting over that hump still eludes the club to this day.

It would be interesting to see if and when Halifax and Bradford would be readmitted to SL if this would occur to their support base, or if it could bounce back to what it used to before they dropped from SL.

Don’t understand why a supporter of another club should be concerned with the Giants crowd size? The Giants are in the playoffs on the back of their on field success. It makes no difference to any other club, as long as they can operate on the income they receive from the TV deal plus any other income they can generate.

he doesn't care, he will be whacking off to the number of bites he has received as that is his only purpose on these boards

Because it’s not a good look for a game that wants to take itself seriously

It matters not if it’s only one man & his dog watching, our game is only viable as long as SKY are prepared to put up the money. We had a a well supported game when our teams were full of part time players playing a game that was a lot more exciting than the present offering. Going full time has done nothing for our sport. What has put the skids under our game is the progress in Australia who don’t have to compete with the overwhelming media dominance of football & who have no interest of anything other than the NRL.

This blokes as rough as s

Fax would get 2 or 3 times that many in superleague but we aren’t one of woke rfl favourites!

Edited for accuracy.

Who do you think brought in IMG?
……… careful now whilst you think it through……..

Which sky aren’t. That’s the point. They want out

channel 4 are doing a better job anyway. and will bring the game back to a wider audience if they market it better in a regular slot.
What is not good for the sport is hordes of supporters fighting amongst themselves, bricking coaches, or those saints fans letting off flares or chucking stuff at players on the pitch eh wolfie.......
you can have a go at the numbers at huddersfield but one thing you cant do is have a go at the behaviour of our fans. wakey and salford have fewer fans than huddersfield and still cant behave so you cant argue its because there are fewer.