which is an argument you could make for any expansion team outside the heartland areas. Hence why it has to be done when extra funding can be made available and that extra funding should come from the Tv deal which increases due to opening up new markets.

exactly,couldn't agree more

Think of the cost of something essential like travelling to away games for a Scottish & Irish team playing in the championship with no crowds generating income. Ireland won't be interested especially given the competition from GAA and an established Union base. Look how much Scottish RU clubs struggle for crowds. If your going to expand that far outside the M62 corridor you need a ready made fan base ready to go like Catalan.

Its putting pins on a map/expansion for expansions sake.

Then you're an idiot.

How many current SL clubs are sustainable? A handful at most. The licence system is seeking to allow clubs to address that. Using Castleford as an example, we have used the licence system to focus on developing young players rather than spending a fortune on players to try and keep us in SL. This has reduced expenditure and last year I believe the club posted a small profit - that is growing sustainability from a strong base and 6-7k crowds.

How long would it take Edinburgh to get paying crowds close to that? A long time. London still can't do it after 30 years. They're growing slowly, as will Crusaders, who have been around for 6 years. Developing a sustainable fanbase (i.e. one that generates revenue for the club) takes a long, long time. London have hampered their efforts by moving around, but given solid roots at The Stoop and Wrexham, Quins and Crusaders should be able to grow. They won't be seeing 10k crowds for a long time yet, and the licence system is designed to allow teams the security to start developing and growing support and local players.

On the playing front. Scotland is a RL virgin in the public conciousness. I suspect the number of schools playing the sport competitively could be counted on one hand. You need to get kids excited about the game to want to play it, then you need to have enough of those lads playing the game to an international standard. That takes 30, 40, 50 years to have a consistent production line of talent - one only a handful of SL clubs have at the moment.

You cannot build a house on sand. It has to have solid foundations on which to stand. Chucking clubs into random locales and expecting immediate success simply doesn't work. It needs time, investment and commitment. How many more PSGs do we need before some people start to understand that true expansion is unlikely to be fulfilled in our lifetime? The best we can do is build the foundations and let our children see the fruit of that labour.

If you read my previous post I said clubs should start off in Championship 1, as South Wales Scorpions have done

The clubs obviously, maybe then our game will be able to afford to keep players like Kyle Eastmond and Chris Ashton ect who are currently being poached

You say its shown that is doesnt work, but last year Crusaders had a higher average attendance than Salford, a team with over 100 years history. Surely it is time we said Salford rugby league doesnt work?

I dont have a build it and they will come mentality. We need amatuers and school's playing the game, and the new clubs to have academys to get the best out of the local talent. This can be done while the club builds up from champ 1

South Wales is a hot bed of rugby union in a way that nowhere else in the UK is. They managed to hit the ground running because of this: you only need look at Skolars or Gateshead to see that other areas find it tricky to get players sufficiently good enough to play in Championship 1. You can guarantee that either Dublin or Edinburgh would face a decade or so propping up the bottom of the table without major investment.

I don't mean to be nasty but those rugby league clubs are mostly rugby union players playing league in the union off-season. Nowt wrong with that but hardly comparable to the bigger BARLA clubs let alone semi-pro sides.



The thing that you are missing is that the Irish and Scots clubs probably don't have more than a couple of players capable of making the step up who would be willing to relocate to Dublin / Edinburgh, travel a great deal and get paid less than they get to play union.

Like this

You mean SL clubs ?

More people might have watched them ? , lets see what happens next season ?

It is not unusual for any new business to get strong intitial interest [ pubs,clubs and the like , it is if it can be sustained like interest rates crowds can go down as well as up

the vast majority of RL fans are general RL fans and will have the ambition and desire to see RL grow from the grass roots then watch it spread through the leagues,anyone who doesn't feel this isn't a true RL fan - don't try speaking for the majority on here


Happy New Year to you and all Leythers as well as any other fan who reads this