What do we think the minimum standard of stadium should be. Minimum 10000 capacity with 2500 seats for a start.

What are the current requirements?

12,000 with 5000 seats IMO

This old chestnut keeps popping up on here, has no one realised that in Europe soccer is king it soaks up most of the cash from tv yet a lot of clubs outside the top four or five can’t compete with the best & a lot are sailing close to the wind with finances. We have to except that our game did alright when the vast majority of players were semi professional as union did when they were supposedly amateurs. There is just not enough revenue from advertising to justify better tv contracts. Yes we can all dream of the day when our clubs could pay million pound wages to our stars but it will take a massive shift in sporting culture in Europe for that to happen. What will make our sport strong is a larger player base spread over a lot larger geographical area. The aim should be to get evenly matched contests at every level of participation with leagues who’s winners are not predictable. To that end we may well end up with a semi pro set up again? The down side is that union & the NRLl would take all our top players & it would kill off the international game.

We should all follow the Giants model with 25,000 seats and 5000 fans, all with cheap season tickets, those empty grounds will propel the sport forward so fast it will be unbelievable.
There are 5 clubs averaging over 10,000 and 2 more quite close to 10,000. Of course the other sides need to do more and should be trying to attain the 10k average but the reality is that due to prolonged lack of success, they are a little way behind the others.
However, with the possible exception of Bradford, who have the POTENTIAL to be a bigger club at some point in the future, there is no other club outside SL that will hit the 10k mark.
We could always go with a 7 club top flight, it would be great, NOT.

How about minimum standards like: decent toilet facilities (including running water), HD CCTV (capture mugshots/incidents of unruly fans) etc before demanding minimum capacity. Not all clubs can even achieve the basics atm.

Indeed. Are these published anywhere?

Do they still apply?

I would guess not since plenty of SL clubs have grounds that seem rather below par.

Rugby Union has gone from 8518 average to 15065 average in 15 years. They only have one league winner each year same as Rugby League.

The clubs outside Super League that could average 10000 are Toronto and Toulouse.

Before SL you would have been hard pushed to find anyone that would say Bradford could've got an average of well over 10k but they did it. I reckon plenty of clubs could do it if they had the marketing expertise and a budget to throw at it.

exactly. The idea that Rugby League cannot get more in sponsorship due to Football is absurd.

RL won't generate more sponsorship because the advertising industry has changed to make it incredibly cheap to reach the audience that we have to offer. One of the reasons why we are so attractive to bookmakers is because they are largely prevented from accessing those cheap forms of digital advertising.

For many football clubs it's the same story. Huddersfield Town and Burnley are appealing to Asian bookmakers because advertising gambling is banned in large parts of Asia, and they can't advertise on many digital platforms in the UK because they don't have UK Gambling licences. These companies aren't paying huge amounts of money to circumvent those restrictions (I believe OPE pay about £1.5m to Huddersfield Town).

Missed my point all together! I am not talking about equalising down. just making the point that our sport as most sports that are not of interest to the vast majority of the worlds population or the mass market in the USA or Asia can not get the type of TV revenue we need to pay full time players or make the profits that will bring in investment. We are a small niche market who on the whole are watched by people who are not in the highest income groups that the advertisers are courting. The only thing in my opinion that will make our sport entertaining is for equally matched matches with tight results at whatever level you choose to watch. Wether that will help to spread the sport is anyone’s guess, but getting the game spread wider & more people playing the better. If people don’t like watching games that are not played in super stadiums by highly paid players then we are sunk anyway.

RL is fe-ked because of its fans jealousy and lack of vision. We attract a wealthy benefactor then spend the remaining years of his/her tenure slagging them off, despite the millions they have put in - that really encourages the next guy.
Image is critical and an ageing fan base, decrepit half empty stadia and giving tickets away/on the cheap places our product in the bargain basement for income - unless we can get a huge tv increase we will not change this perception, Hearns or not.

5k minimum capacity.

2k seats for Super League clubs.

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