Quote SEB="SEB"
Thats a very defeatist way of looking at it. Thats like saying there can't possibly be any new business ideas out there because if there were they would have already happened. Look at Leeds and Wigan - they are both extremely visible in the local communities with a huge number of amateur, junior and school teams playing RL compared to Warrington. That is a large part of why they get bigger crowds. And its why football clubs in smaller towns get bigger crowds - because it means more to more people. Lots of people in Warrington know nothing about RL and rarely come into contact with it.'"
Your examples of Leeds and Wigan are teams that win trophies and have top class players. There are lots of amateur, junior and school teams in Oldham, Leigh, Wakefield and Castleford too but they don't get big crowds.
I agree there could be new business ideas around and innovative ways of getting people to come in, but you are tinkering at the margins with those, you aren't going to get 20,000 through new community or marketing measures, unless the fans see something that they want to keep coming back to, top players, and a top team winning trophies.
Quote SEB="SEB"
But, as others have said above, selling RL to your community isn't about top class stars. Youngsters will look up to professional sportsmen regardless of how famous they are. Obviously the higher profile of football will always be a draw - but lots of football fans don't actually attend matches as its too expensive. There is no reason why they can't follow football on TV and attend live RL matches as well. If you embed RL in your communities through school teams and local clubs, people will want to support their town team too providing the club has good relations with them.'"
It is about top class stars, or more to the point winning. Are you saying that those youngsters in Bradford that looked up to Henry Paul, Lesley Vainikolo saw Rikki Sheriffe and Marcus St Hilaire in the same way?
For how many years did we hear about how Bradford were the beacons of marketing and community engagement and how they had embraced the summer era but why did their fans desert them after 2005? Surely all of those efforts in the community, over 10 years or so should have established roots that meant the fans would still keep coming.
But something happened that turned the fans away. Bradford had cracked the family thing too, in the days of Bradford Northern it was all grim old men in flat caps, but during Bullmania there were loads of those teenage girls, what happened to them? Do they still come? Ten years on some of them will have kids by now and could have been bringing through new fans but are they still interested in rugby league?
), no customer information harvested and a dissatisfied potential customer.
