Why would people affiliate themselves to a sport they werent familiar with in a place they arent associated with?

So quite a lot then? Im pretty sure people from Cardiff will say they are Welsh and I'm certain that people from leeds are pretty happy they are Yorkshire.
People don't associate themselves with a direction. People dont think of themselves as 'The south' i dont think that would help them.

Sheffield arent the club for south yorkshire, Doncaster probably wouldnt be all that happy with it. Similarly i doubt Widnes would be too happy with Warrington claiming all of Cheshire. Do i think it is a terrible idea for similarly atomised areas to try and work together and possibly merge together to strengthen? not in principle. If they did would it be far more beneficial for them to be Cheshire and South Yorkshire? Yes.

Man Utd are a world wide brand who would tell you 30% of Korea supports them. The claim 659million fans. Im not surprised they claim more from outside Manchester.

Because they want to watch the sport? Why do people support teams other than their home town, or the town that they live? Leeds draw support from Harrogate, York and many other places. They don't need to be called Yorkshire Rhinos to do that.
Of course, but I doubt too many people from Leeds would be interested in watching a team called 'Yorkshire Panthers' playing ice hockey based in Hull, which is the equivalent of what you're suggesting.
People identify themselves as being Southerners or Northerners.
London Broncos aren't the only club for London. Nobody identifies with their home region over their home town/city and it's ridiculous to suggest that they would be more likely to support a club because they've been given an all-encompassing name, particularly in a sport such as RL which doesn't have anything like a huge penetration. You've used NFL examples but the NFL is the biggest sports league in the world, literally everyone in America and a large percentage of sports fans globally know what it is, so having teams named after larger areas is suitable because the whole thing is on a much, much larger scale. It's ridiculous to attempt to compare it to RL. NFL isn't struggling for penetration and recognition like RL is.
Which pretty much invalidates your argument, doesn't it?
But again you're missing the point, none of those regions have huge populations, in fact it's necessary to use regional names in Australia's case because most of those areas are extremely sply populated with no real major population centres in which to base a team. Whereas London's population is two or three times greater than the entire country of New Zealand. Those 'struggling' Sydney teams are still bigger than any British sides.

I'm absolutely not against city clubs, but attempting to have one club representing a city the size of London in a sport the size of RL is nonsensical. You're treating it like a normal city, comparing it to the likes of Newcastle and Brisbane when the reality is that London's population is larger than the whole of New South Wales and Queensland combined.

Not to any great degree we dont. We dont focus on or target those areas. this is a very very small part of it.
certainly more than they would if they were called Hull.

really?

But they werent always like that, which rather than invalidates my point, supports it. NFL clubs chose to represent large cities or large geographical areas to promote growth. That growth is why they are one of the biggest sport leagues in the world.
but your opposing argument is that they would support these same teams even if they were simply named after a relatively small areas. Even some of those do have large population centres. Like perth,
Yet thats what they do in New York with the Giants, Jets, Knicks, Yankees, Mets, Rangers, Islanders, Red Bulls, City FC, In fact all bar Brooklyn Nets who had spent 35 years in New Jersey.

In fact, London, in soccer, is pretty much unique the world over in branding their clubs after smaller parts of the city and that is mostly to do with their ages and the environment in which they were founded.

Again, that completely contradicts what you're trying to say. London are also unlikely to get very many supporters from outside the area in which they're based regardless of name.

Maybe, but there probably wouldn't be anywhere near as much local interest in Hull.

Yeah, that and the fact that it's the biggest, most popular sport in the richest, most powerful and third largest nation on Earth.

No, that isn't my argument at all. But there's a huge difference between naming a team after Rockhampton, a small and relatively insignificant place with a population of 60,000, and naming a team after Barnet, which has a population of 330,000 in the middle of a city of 13.5 million. A club named 'Barnet' would represent the third biggest population centre out of any team in Super League after Leeds and Bradford, and would also be bigger than any in the NRL apart from Melbourne, Brisbane, Gold Coast and New Zealand. Barnet alone has a bigger population than the geographical region of North Queensland.

What you're failing to acknowledge that these 'suburbs or boroughs' are far larger than most cities in their own right.

But again, you're missing the fact that sport in the USA is completely different to RL in the UK, both in its scale and nature. And that most of those teams play different sports. AFAIK, New York is only represented by two clubs at each sport. Which makes sense given the size of America and the population spread that needs to be covered. There are 30 or so teams to go around 320 million people. But what you're talking about in the UK would be a London club representing a population four or five times the size of all the other teams combined.

So you think it would be more logical if all the soccer clubs in London were just called London?

So I say I don't like the 'London' moniker and the usual suspects start shouting "that's not why the club's in trouble". Except that I never once said it was the reason the club's in trouble, but don't let that stop you refuting a premise I never put.

I still don't like the 'London' moniker, and never have.

Why??
It doesn't matter what the rest of the country think, if we're serious about building a local support base and not relying on away fans turning up (I grant you, given what's gone before that's a big 'if').

Quote: SmokeyTA "People don't associate themselves with a direction. '" Many do. Some do www.thesouth.co.uk/ they're playing Gawsworth Hall on Friday. And Bingley Live on Aug 31

Quote: SmokeyTA "People don't associate themselves with a direction. '" Many do. Some do www.thesouth.co.uk/ they're playing Gawsworth Hall on Friday. And Bingley Live on Aug 31

FA

To be fair, I'm loving Headhunter and Smokey arguing, leave them alone.

I thought they were they same person. Maybe they are...

Back on topic. RFL get involved, help the London club find a decent venue and market the living day lights out of it. Also, again, enjoy the championship, it's a fantastic league, more so next year and hope you all visit the Shay!

The Club's biggest and most enthusiastic attendances were when they were called Fulham and played at Fulham.

Leeds get support from Harrogate and York despite being called Leeds and being based in Leeds. Obviously there aren't as many fans from those other places as there are from Leeds, but based on your argument there wouldn't be any at all.

In relation to London, the argument is the same, they also wouldn't get a huge amount of support from outside the local area. A team called London based in Twickenham would still get the majority of its support from Twickenham and not from East London or North London.

Obviously if the net gain was higher then it would be the right move, but I don't think that would be the case at all. You're neglecting developing a local base in favor of targeting the huge area of London and getting completely overwhelmed. RL in London is a drop in the ocean, decreasing the size of that ocean is likely to make a far bigger impact.

They haven't gone from clubs the size of London (or other RL clubs) to huge entities overnight because they 'targeted large populations'. American sports are operated on a franchise basis by billionaire owners, many of them have been relocated thousands of miles to opposite ends of the country. It's nothing at all like RL and completely irrelevant to this discussion.

There's a huge difference between Rockhampton and Townsville and Barnet. Townsville and Rockhampton are relatively remote, isolated places that probably couldn't support clubs on their own. Barnet as you've said is a suburb, with a population more than big enough to support a club and also a huge population in the immediate vicinity. Your argument is completely ignoring the different nature of these places. It's like trying to compare Fulham and Whitehaven.

So this entire argument is based not on logic, but on the arbitrary measure of whether something is a 'suburb' or not. And the fact that 'other sports do it' despite the only relevant examples (soccer in London and RL in Sydney) being operated with clubs based out of suburbs.

We do, we want as many strong clubs as possible. But 13 million people is far too big a catchment area for just one club, especially in a sport the size of RL. Even the aforementioned New York Giants and Jets playing in the biggest, most prestigious and well-known sports league in the world don't market themselves to that many people. For such a club to grow to a level relative to the likes of Wigan or St Helens would mean they were playing in front of hundreds of thousands of fans every week. It's just lunacy.

12 clubs all called London FC. Great.