Well the Bulls have a fans forum next Wednesday evening. I have no doubt that questions will be asked about the sale and what that means for the Bradford club.

My first thoughts on this was that it smacked of the RFL favouring a certain club.

However if the RFL are looking at the bigger picture then it may offer them a venue which they can develop into a facility that could be upgraded to become the sports main stadium for internationals cup semi finals, and dare i say it the Grand Final.

At present RL has to go begging to soccer clubs to borrow their stadia for major events, be they at Wigan, Leeds, Hull, Manchester or Huddersfield.
If the RFL were to invest in redeveloping Odsal then long term it could become a moneyspinner.
The presence of the Bulls would pay the bread and butter day to day running costs, then major events held there would be pure profit. These wouldnt necessarily be just RL events they could be pop concerts and even the odd soccer semi final.
To make it work though we would probably need to see the stadium ramped up to a 50k or even 60k arena. To do this would probably take over £100 million, something the RFL dont have, but which they may be able to get access to via Government regeneration funding of sorts. It would also probably need doing in phases perhaps over a decade or more.

This x 10

Good post

Which would make you wonder why the council would wish to sell it?

Yes we can go round and round in circles, but generally properties with sitting tenants are not the ones on the market, those with no tennant are

So as I originally said, if the RFL have got a bargain, and are hoping at some point in the future to develop that bargain for the good of the sport ( and Bradford profit from that as a result ) ? then fine, but if this was just to protect one club?

Because Bradford council are skint. They cocked up redevelopment of the city centre which ended up with one of the main shopping areas being turned into a hole in the ground. They've thrown a huge amount of cash at a lake by the town hall with dancing fountains that will be full off rubbish/shopping trolleys/dead homeless within 3 months of them taking down the fencing that's currently round it.

Not another one to fill in!!

oh no, it's already been filled in, had grass put on it and laughably called a "city park"

I doubt the council has sold the freehold.

I suspect (and go check out the latest filing at Companies House for evidence in support - clue: look out for the word "underlease"icon_wink.gif that the Bulls have "sold" (probably for sod all) their long lease (from the Council) to the RFL.

I suspect then that we have a new underlease between the RFL and the Bulls, and that is the real background behind all this. Especially the financial terms and timings.

The RFL has a long track record of engaging when SL clubs have issues - either financially, or by facilitating/not blocking. I suspect this is merely the latest.

But I speculate.

Well, clearly, a million pounds worth of work on our stadium will have had to have been cut out from somewhere so we would have gained that work.


I replied to the salient point. You claimed that the RFL was not saving Bradford and then went on to explain how it is saving Bradford. Your post was in reply to mine which was claiming that the RFL is saving Bradford. How then am I replying to only half a sentence and how is my disagreement with what the RFL is doing trolling? Others have disagreed, are they trolling too? Or is it just that as a Bulls fan you think this is great but perhaps fans of other clubs perhaps might not think it is so great, and for many reasons?

Some of the money the RFL has 'invested' in Odsal will have come from the pockets of fans. If this purchase had been for investment reasons in a stadium not linked to a Superleague club (licensing, licensing) then while I would be nervous about such expenditure from the governing body of a minority sport, I would be able to see the virtue of it in the long term.

However, this is not an investment. Odsal is in no way an investment. It is a big financial black hole, which is presumably why the Council wanted rid of it. And the RFL has not purchased it for the sport but to save the Bulls from being homeless. Well, as I said, there were - and are- countless other clubs who need saving (Leigh, just recently) and the RFL has not stepped in to save them.

This move by the RFL is poor on so many levels.

When did Bradford become one of the sports premier clubs?

Their history bares little comparison to that of Wakefield who obviously aren't deemed as a Historic and iconic club.

Bradford had a great 7/8 years of SL and people get brainwashed by it because to someone like Richard Lewis the sport only began in 1995.

The real question here is how do the RFL run a fair and equitable franchise application process when they are in a compromised position such as this?

If the BCC felt they needed to sell Odsal why couldn't the Bulls move to Valley Parade?

Spot on.

There was no reason why the Council would need to sell Odsal. It was costing them nothing, and was let on a very long leasehold at a peppercorn rent so would be of little interest to a potential buyer and therefore hardly likely to be a saleable proposition.

I don't think you should be looking at the council for explanations.

A move (again) to VP would probably be the death of the club anyway, IMO.

Maybe the same way the process is fair and equitable when one group of clubs survives and thrives primarily because of the largesse or backing of their rich owners - which could be pulled overnight - and another group lacks such advantages, but also is not under the shadow of that huge elephant in the room?

Because that stadium has nothing to do with RL, the Bradford council or the Bulls.

Besides which, that stadium isn't even owned by the club who play there and the rent that Bradford City pay has been reported as close to crippling the football club