I'm surprised you've heard of Cumbria.

you would think so would you not.

There's no common vision as to what the RFL and SL think the top end of the game should be - look at the messing around with playoffs/super 8s etc and the lack of agreement on a system for next season.


Thursday and Friday night games make it more difficult for fans to go to games if they have to travel. One of the great thing about our game was families being able to go on a Sat or Sun for a reasonable price. My club (Warrington) have (or will have by the end end of the Super 8s) played 15 home games this season - none of the Super 8s is on a Sat or Sun and 1 home game all season was on a Sat/Sun plus 1 home game on a bank holiday and 1 at Magic weekend. That's pathetic. It is all very well chasing Sky's money and allowing them to dictate the schedule but half empty grounds make the game look terrible.

Increasing attendances is also massively beneficial to the clubs as well as for some clubs ticket income makes up a substantial portion of total income. It costs around £7m to run a SL club looking at the accounts of Wigan/Wire/Saints. If you say the average ticket price is £15 and a rough average attendance of 10,500 then gate receipts are around £157.5k per game which over 15 games (plus cup games) is £2.3m. Capacity of the HJ is approx. 15,000 so we're missing out on another potential £1m per season. Gate income is more important in RL than say PL football so we need to be better at marketing the game and getting attendances up.

It's worth correcting this to say "the clubs don't do marketing". Lots of people talk about marketing and how "the RFL should do more", but I would bet a pretty penny that Bristol Bears did not get any marketing support from either the RFU or Premier Rugby. They will have done the whole thing by themselves.

So the million dollar question: Are RL clubs just too lazy to do it, or are they just inept at it?

I'm not calling out any club in particular here. All clubs are guily of under-selling the sport to different degrees, but the game between Leeds and Castleford at Elland Road demonstrated that the sport can sell an event when the host club (and to be fair, Castleford did their bit as well) can be bothered to do it.

But it's just frustrating that whenever the debate about marketing the sport comes up, the focus automatically falls on the RFL when it really should fall on where the blame actually lies - the clubs. Like I said, Bristol probably had zero support from the RFU and zero support from Premier Rugby, but they went out themselves and did nothing that any Super League club shouldn't be able to do. Just look at Bristol's social media presence - it is literally full of content and it's getting tons of audience engagement that (admittedly based only on the evidence of one game) is translating into ticket sales. In the last 24 hours, the only Twitter post from Widnes is an advert from their official gumshield sponsor. That's the difference - in one code a lot of the clubs [ican[/i be d, and in the other a lot can't.

1. During the 2017/2018 AVIVA Premiership, London Irish played 11 "home games, none of which got below 4,000. Their Lowest gate was 4,457, which puts your "Tumpesque" and therefore false claim in the correct light.
5,502 - 6,188 - 7,538 - 7,775 - 10,019 - 4,457 - 5,250 - 15,274 - 7,848 and 7,628 were the declared crowds at Reading in their relegation season, delivering a true seasons average of 7,748. To be clear, that puts them ahead of Saldord, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Widnes in terms of regular season attendances, whilst putting them 150 behind the 2017 SL Grand Finalists, Castleford and only 270 or so behind the hoards of HKR!



Let me get this straight
Secondly......that abysmal London Irish average that you tried to promote as being raised from your imaginary 4k to 12k on the back of one event in another Trumpesque off the cuff remark is just Wrong......The Exiles, who were terrible and rightly relegated averaged a mere 10% fewer fans in attendance of their reading games than SL managed as a comp in the 2018 22 regular game season.

So to answer the OP.......yes, we really are that far behind, even when you surgically remove attendances to suit your bitter and bias agenda as Easty tried here.

When we started as a Summer Sport we held all the cards and all the SKY/PAY TV contracts and relationships.......without a doubt we dropped the ball and we have yet to regather it. Union will always carry more debt, but in the vast majority off cases they can afford to. Wasps, crippled with terrible crowds and ever mounting debt made a tough decision to move to Coventry.....looks like that is paying dividends now with the average crowds being 17,641, or in other terms triple what they used to get at Adams Park. This is an example of the evolve or die mentality our sport needs......if we let the smaller clubs hold us back or if we bemoan change, then the decline we are experiencing will continue.

Why would you not count games held at Twickenham? Any club in Rugby League or Union can choose to take a fixture to a major stadium.

Because it makes the poster in question feel uneasy?

Well said Call Me God.

To put it further into context PRL (Union's top club league in England) has been offered £275m for 51% of the league by CVC (former owners of F1). Regardless of whether you think CVC did a good job with F1 or whether it is a fair price (some Union club owners are desperate for cash, others think it is a gross undervaluation!) I don't see anyone rushing to SL with a similar offer.

The problem is that the existing fanbase was not enough on its own to sustain the club. It was simply a case of "do something or die". That is very much the position that RL finds itself in in many respects. We have supporters demanding that the door to Super League is left open and that clubs chase success, but the financial performance of many of our clubs show that those support bases cannot sustain that. Worse still, they're actively opposing attempts that the sport makes to try and make itself sustainable because it harms their team's chances of delivering the success that isn't sustainable.

Wasps had to do something in order to remain a competitive, viable club, and moving was one of I'm sure many options that they considered. When you consider the cost/difficulty of building a new stadium in the South East commuter belt, the local competition (competing for the same local audiences as Harlequins, Saracens and London Irish), I can understand why they saw the opportunity of an under-utilised and available stadium close to the second-biggest city in the UK.

Yeah, I get that for some local supporters, that sucks, but as heartless as it might sound the club has to keep itself relevant and viable. Wasps has been a somewhat nomadic club for most of its modern history - playing at Loftus Road and Adams Park, and taking bigger games to MK and Coventry. It comes down to what the sport and the clubs want to be - progressive, foreward-thinking and successful, or looking back at how good things used to be. History is what people cling to when they can't look forward to the future.

WASPS wouldn't exist if they hadn't moved...... But you'd prefer your club died than evolve? 7.92724609375:5