Quote Sadfish="Sadfish" I always feel that with expansion, we have 33 million people in the north of England and we should be trying to push more into Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Liverpool regions that further afield. '"
The problem there is that we're probably at market saturation in those areas. That might sound weird given the small attendances, but we need to take account of the fact that soccer dominates sport in England to the exclusion of almost all else. The issue of social class has been raised above, and it's very relevant, in that the middle-class sports market offers strong support for other sports than soccer, notably cricket, tennis and rugby union. These sports are fostered in private schools, and draw on well-funded facilities and administration based around historically wealthy governing bodies sustained by huge national sponsorship deals and major international events. Other sports are also increasingly relying on participants from middle and upper socio-economic groups, including athletics and swimming.
The working class sports market, which is overwhelmingly where we draw our players and fans from, is much more dominated by soccer; it's almost a sporting monoculture. Call-Me-God may have a caustic style, but he's right in saying that our demographic is not being replaced. As our old fans die off, and our player base retires, we are not replacing them with new fans or players, because soccer is hoovering up pretty much every athlete except in tiny pockets around South Lancashire and parts of West Yorkshire, while its unbelievable riches and publicity make any other sport seem trivial and uninteresting by comparison to young people. Essentially, the only thing sustaining our existing clubs is an almost hereditary habit, and there's evidence that even those communities are beginning to lose interest.
Quote Sadfish="Sadfish"However we should ensure that anyone starting up outside like Toronto gets the support they need. focus on your strengths first and the rest will come on its own. '"
I thnk, given the above, that there's a strong case that we've been focussing pretty much exclusively on our strengths for the last 130 years, and where we are is a matter of record. Our existing top clubs are probably at maximum capacity now, in terms of interest, player development and crowds. They are now in a fight to maintain that existence, rather than grow it. Looking across the entire league structure, I could only imagine Bradford and London being able to produce similar levels of support to Saints/Wigan/Leeds etc, and that would require them to be relatively successful for a good period of time. Bradford might, if they recover quickly, be able to reconnect with their own version of the hereditary support, while London have the advantage of theoretically being able to manage a decent level because you only need a tiny percentage of 8m people to do ok.
That's why, for me, the North American ventures might be our last lifeline as a professional sport. No single sport dominates in North America like soccer does here, and the class-based sporting system which hurts us in this country doesn't apply to anything like the same effect in the US and Canada. They're also clubs based in huge urban areas, where again they'd only need to attract a small percentage of the sporting public to generate scale similar to our existing best.
RL has to find a way to exist on the fringes of a sporting world in which there isn't really a gap for a working-class team sport. We're never going to challenge soccer. We're never going to have the middle-class support network which maintains RU, cricket and other second-tier sports, and developments of the last twenty years, like online gaming and on-demand streaming are not going back into their bottles. That means that 33m people might sound like a big number, but we're probably only going to realistically be able to access 1% of that, either in terms of potential players or fans. The only solution is to seek out new fringes elsewhere, establish new hereditary habits, and seize on every possible opportunity to stand out in a marketplace which strictly speaking doesn't have any space available to us.
