Imagine if the rfl had £500,000 kicking around to market the game and promoting the game countrywide..but they haven’t have they because the game is skint and hasn’t got two ha’pennies to rub together...

If you want to run a successful Above the Line marketing campaign across the country, then £500,000 isn't going to be nearly enough money.......but what is to stop the RFL or SL chairmen appointing someone to come up with ideas of how to "organically" market the game where the biggest expenditure is the time of some club employees and a hell of a lot of Media schmoozing.
£500,000 will get you a spot in the ad break of Corrie........once....but every club being targeted with adding 1k to their average attendances and being rewarded for doing so would add 156,000 or 11% to the SL average and get us back over the 10k mark as well as delivering an extra quarter mil to each club in ticket revenue......what is needed is a plan that EVERYBODY buys into and carries out their part....

Well apparently they did have £500k lying about, but it's about to get invested in Greggs

And absolutely massive suits.

The problem is that for the RFL to invest that £500k, it would be a long time before it sees a return on that investment. The RFL sells tickets to just a handful of events, it can only tender its media rights once every few years, and its commercial opportunities are hamstrung by the audience the sport is offering due to the way the clubs market themselves.

Now if the clubs invested £500k, that's a different story. The clubs are the ones who sell the tickets, who sell the merchandise and who sell the corporate packages. They are the ones who should be investing in the marketing of the sport, instead of expecting the RFL to do it for them.

Yes there is an onus on the RFL / SLE to promote "the season" and the brand Super League but when it comes to the actual nitty gritty - the getting bums on seats, selling shirts and reaching new audiences side of marketing - it's on the clubs. The clubs are the main point of consumption, they're the "shop window" for the sport and they're the ones with the most to gain from that investment.

I don't understand why people are more than happy to let the RFL take the bulk of the blame when it is the clubs that are under-investing, the clubs that are under-performing and the clubs that are ultimately at fault.

That £500k should be getting invested at grass routes level, even just £500 at an amateur club means a hell of a lot, so that's 1000 clubs that could be helped out, that's before you look at the rest of the money the RFL have in the bank.
I recently found out that in assets And bank BARLA has in excess of £1.5M, why do these organisations need so much money in their accounts if they are working for the good of their members, this money needs to be finding its way to grass routes or the game will die a long a painful death. Without amateur clubs there is no player pool. Without a player pool there is no game.

As of the 2015 annual report the RFl had over £10m in cash in the bank excluding reserves and excluding creditors which amounted to another £10M.
2016 and it would seem the RFl handed out £7M in loans and the cash in hand dropped £7M with creditors owing £17M, the massive increase in costs seems to have come from 'administration' which jumped £920,000 from £10.55M to £11.47M.
Profit on ordinary activities dropped from £200k to £6k in one year.
Sorry but the RFL is mismanaged and wastes money as well as paying massively over the recommended pay rises by the independent auditors for its directors and CEO. This extra-ordinary pay rise was voted for by the panel made up of those directors and CEO of the RFL!!

To suggest that they can't afford a bit of money to invest in the game is not only ludicrous but also that it would take them time to get it back is failing to understand how the RFl generates its money from the sport and it isn't simply just through a few events!

I'm not suggesting the RFL can't "invest in the game", not am I arguing that it doesn't have problems. But that doesn't absolve the clubs, who are private entities in their own right, from not marketing themselves properly.

The onus is on the clubs to grow crowds and ticket revenue, to sell merchandise, to sell corporate packages, to find new commercial partners, to expand their catchment areas, to find new audiences that advertisers want to reach and to increase their revenue.

I can't think of any other group of businesses where people expect somebody else to do their PR, sales and marketing for them, and yet rugby league clubs seemingly get a free pass from supporters.

McDonalds?
Every branch of this chain in the uk is a franchise with the corporate entity not only paying for, but rolling out a strategic marketing plan across all mediums



I can see a similarity with RL but we don't like to use the word franchising

Marketing costs are ultimately built into the franchise fee. The franchisees are paying for the brand, and McDonalds is reaping a direct proportion of the revenue generated from that marketing. The RFL, by comparison, isn't creaming a percentage of every club's ticket sale profits.

Like you say, if we want to get into a position where the clubs become "franchises" in the strictest sense of the word, it might be comparable. But I can't see many chairmen going for that.

Do you ever see football fans kicking up a stink at the Football League because their club isn't selling tickets, or do Sale Sharks fans blame the RFU for their empty seats? Why is it that RL fans direct their anger at the governing body, and away from the clubs? After all, it's not the RFLs fault that Salford can't sell tickets, or that Huddersfield have to sell tickets well below market value.

But the RFL profits are derived entirely from the work done by the clubs, in that if the clubs didn't provide the entertainment, there would be no RFL. As the governing body, there is a duty to promote the game they govern, using the money they have obtained from governing the game.

How a lack of proper marketing can be justified in the week that Nigel Wood trousers half a million quid from the game is beyond me.