We've had many threads regarding poor numbers of away fans at games and the stock response is that clubs should be focusing on their own fans to maximise their attendances and this may be right.
However, there is a serious issue, when fans dont travel to the RL showpiece events and this issue seems to be having an effect on crowd numbers at the semi final double header.
Having just taken advantage of a £15 ticket, including travel to go to Bolton, you do wonder whether having 1 or 2 more overseas clubs in SL will have a detrimental effect on Magic and The Grand Final.

Although, in one sense, it would be great to see Catalan in a major final, the effect on ticket sales could be a potential disaster and this is painted against the £2 million loss that The RFL recently posted.

Can this really be good for the game of RL or, am I missing something ?

Clubs and their supporters who depend on traveling fans shows a weakness that the said club cannot or will not make an effort to market themselves. Widnes being an example. I mean look at their major jersey sponsor 'Beat the Scum, sorry Scrum'. What is that all about?? Hardly a national sponsor. Was better when ICI were on the front!

This has been an ongoing issue in the 30 years I have been watching RL. Only a few clubs do make the effort and then they are rewarded with the fruits of their labour, but this then causes the bludger clubs to become envious and jealous leading to bitterness.
Why can't the ENTIRE game work together FFS?? Is it really too hard to put aside egos for the bigger common good???

Having strong away followings is clearly not a bad thing. My issue with the "away fans" argument is that we are allowing what is a proportionally small source of revenue or potential to have an unduly high level of influence on the direction that the sport takes.

At the moment, the debate we seem to be having seems to revolve around how the sport shouldn't explore potential new opportunities for new audiences, commercial partners and media partnerships because we might see a reduction in attendance when these clubs play in the heartland areas. I think that view is extremely misguided.

Does expansion come with risk? Absolutely it does. It may be that these audiences, media partnerships and commercial partnerships never materialise, but there's equally risk in not expanding the sport that I would suggest is much greater.

Look at most professional sports and you will see that the proportion of income that comes directly from supporters has fallen consistently over the last 20 years or so. Income from ticketing and merchandise is becoming less and less significant in football, RU, the NRL and in all of the major US sports. It's still significant, but it's a much smaller slice of the pie. RL clubs haven't cottoned on to that fact, and this argument about "away fans" misses that point entirely.

It raises the question as to how this sport is possibly going to grow when advertisers, sponsors and broadcasters don't care about an audience of 3,000 mostly C2DE's in Salford? Expansion comes with downsides and risks, but I think that the upsides make that an opportunity cost worth taking. Next year Sky will complete a full roll-out of its programmatic TV advertising technology and that's going to seriously hurt this sport unless it starts appealing to new audiences.

And even with that in mind, the argument that clubs should focus on 'home supporters' is absolutely a fair one to make. These supports offer much more value over a lifetime to a club and, in a industry where supply is naturally constrained (due to ground capacities), 10,000 home supporters in a stadium is much more valuable than 8,000 home and 2,000 away in the long term.

Hardly a national sponsor? It's a partnership with the NHS so it's a bit national.

I think that expansion has that drawback of fewer away fans. But that hasn't harmed the NRL. Melbourne Storm, and North Queensland have done very nicely with their own fans dominating their home games and not traveling away. So nobody in Australia is raising this issue in deciding whether the NRL should expand into Perth.

Furthermore, this lack of traveling fans has to be weighed against the increase in sponsorship and advertising that comes with expansion teams.

Neutrals get behind the expansion teams for the big events.

The fact you had to explain it means that its hardly well known. Either that or just a rubbish logo. Slap NHS on there and we'd know. But then again, why should my monthly tax be used to prop up a rubbish team? Thats hardly going to help me when I go to the DRs.

Although there are POTENTIAL increases in sponsorship and advertising, can you point out where there has been any gain from this since Catalan joined the competition ?
Also, whilst some neutrals may well support say, Catalan against Saints, there wont be anything like as many neutrals buying tickets for the double header as there would be had say, Hull FC or Leeds playing there.
Maybe the very fact that we have a double header semi final tells us everything we need to know about the potential for travelling fans from Perpignan and just imagine what would happen if it happened to be Totonto v Catalan next season ?

If we had Catalan, Toulouse, London and Toronto at Magic next season, what would happen to the attendance and what would the ramifications be for the RFL's coffers.
The same applies to The Challenge Cup Final and potentially the Grand Final, although the latter does seem a bit far fetched.

Apply the same question to a scenario where Magic Weekend is contested by clubs from parts of the country that major advertisers and sponsors have little-to-no interest in. What are the implications for the RFL coffers then?

In a lot of cases it's possible to reach the sort of audience we speak to for less than £50-per-thousand - and that number is getting lower and lower. That's the reality of the advertising and sponsorship market we are in and the main reason why we are so attractive to online bookmakers is predominantly because they tend to be excluded from those forms of advertising.

At the moment we have one French club in SL. That French club have generated their own commercial partnerships with French companies that may never have been involved in the sport before (Renault, Air France etc). Yes, they are sponsors of the Dragons and not the league as a whole, but to say that "Super League isn't sponsored by French multi-nationals so why do we bother with Catalans?" is like complaining that we aren't sponsored by Coca-Cola because we have some clubs near one of their bottling plants. The more we increase the sport's footprint and audience reach, the more attractive it becomes.

I also think we need to stop seeing this as a zero-sum game. If heartland clubs can do what's necessary to increase our appeal to advertisers and broadcasters, fantastic. I just don't think that they can. Wigan's last publicised accounts show a drop in sponsorship income of £680,000. Unless that was a very tough year for Uncle Joes Mintballs, it should be the canary in the coal mine that one of our most prominent clubs is not an attractive proposition for sponsors.

One of the reasons why RU doesn't have the same discussions, despite being relatively geographically confined (in this country at least), is because it reaches those hard-to-reach audiences in affluent parts of the country in and around the London commuter belt. We've got affulent parts of the country on our doorstep, but our clubs aren't reaching those areas.

RU is the sport of The Establishment and in England it's largely based around the capital and whether we like it or not, the game is way, way better connected than RL.
Also, the face that it commands so media attention, give it a huge advantage when talking to sponsors.

RL is looking to improve it's media appeal and who knows, our expansion into N America and further into France should help in this area but, nobody quite knows and IF we keep on taking the wrong options, the current system being yet another of these, it wont matter how far and wide "we" are spread, because the game in the UK could well be dead.

This post just stinks if anti expansionism, from a suppoter if a club who jyst about manage an away folliwing in the low hundreds, complaing that otjer sudes only bring fans in similar numbers. And rely on the big city neighbors away support to bump up the average crowds.
I hope Torobto and Toulouse come in and shake it up a bit.

have you been drinking?

And as I said, that's the risk. The problem is, the game in the UK could well be dead anyway if we don't take that risk. How do we get this sport into a position where we can generate commercial and media investment by insisting that we should only offer those investors what we are already offering them?

I completely understand why people insist on saying "focus on the heartlands", but what does this actually mean in reality? We've had 120 years and more to "focus on the heartlands" and here we are, with declining participation, falling crowds, an aging audience, falling commercial income in comparison to other sports and more and more clubs in financial distress. So what does "focusing on the heartlands" mean? Giving out more central funding (much of which seems to go purely on paying off HMRC debts)? Giving out more cheap tickets? Betting the farm on Eddie Hearn?

To bring it back to the original question, that's why I think that this obsession with "away fans" is the wrong point of focus. As a sport we are probably generating as much direct revenue from our fanbase as we can - look at how our support base only supports international fixtures if the discount codes come out. The sport needs to follow the lead of pretty much every other successful professional sport and look for revenue beyond that fan base. Again, how do we do that by simply insisting that expansion won't work, cannot work, and by offering nothing new to those investors that aren't interested in what is already on the table?