I started watching in the late 80s. In my lifetime watching rugby league, the sport peaked in two eras.

First was mid 90s just before Super League, around the time of that 94 Kangaroos tour. There were legends of the game in both hemispheres. Still my favourite ever time in the game.

Then when Super League came in, there were a few years of disruption especially in Australia, but also a lot of iconic players either retired or went back to rugby union when it turned professional. The standard really fell in the late 90s. But it started to pick up again around the turn of the millennium.

Second peak was mid 00s. It was around the time we had Andrew Johns. The quality of Super League, especially at the top end, was fantastic. There were three absolute powerhouses in Bradford, Saints and Leeds. All of them were big, physical and could play fantastic rugby. I remember thinking then that the sport was really heading in the right direction and Super League / summer rugby had been a fantastic success.

Then there was a steady decline. It was slow at first and for Wire fans we probably got distracted by our era of relative success under Tony Smith. I really started to notice the decline of the game after the great Leeds team broke up and their legends retired one by one. There was nothing really there to replace them. There were well coached teams in Wigan and Saints but the quality of player was way down on what they had before.

This is the longest downward swing that I can remember. For many years RL fans used to complain about the lack of ambition and advertising from the RFL. We used to say that the game was so good it would sell itself, all you needed to do was introduce somebody to it and they would be a fan for life. I don't believe that now and haven't believed it for a long time. It exists really as a part of culture in northern towns and club loyalty is what is keeping it going rather than the great product on the field.

That last paragraph is best I’ve read in a long time, it really sums up where we are and I believe a lot of fans will think the same.

We had Stevo and Eddie telling us it’s the greatest game ever and now Carney and co bigging it up big time but I’m starting to think they do it to keep in a job they really can’t believe it’s that good. But you have got it spot on and it’s painful to admit it. We do get some great games to watch from time to time but a lot of times you walk away thinking what was that.

Just watched the Wire v Wigan match from 88 some of the passing in that game and on that pitch was way better than some of the stuff we see today *sigh*

Sally Cinnamon’s Law is similar to Godwins Law in that any conversation will end up including the Death of Rugby League.

Though I did watch the 88 game the other day and did wonder where our great game had gone.

It's true, RL fans have talked about the death of the game for decades. And there have been times when I feared more for the existence of the game and Wire as a club, than I do now.

I was very uneasy when Super League was first being created. All that talk of mergers. I feared that even if Wire survived being merged at that point, it would be thin end of the wedge and down the line we'd be the "Cheshire Wolves" with Widnes/Saints or whoever. Australia was a mess, with two separate competitions, half the league ineligible to play for the Kangaroos. At Wire for about 7 or 8 years prior to Simon Moran becoming majority shareholder we seemed to be permanently on the edge of financial crisis and going under. The continuing existence of the sport and the club are more secure now than they were back then.

Also for a while after union went professional there was an idea that league and union were locked in a battle from which only one could survive, or there would be an inevitable "merger of the codes". Every time union signed a league player it was seen as a sign that league was losing. This peaked around the time Robinson, Sailor, Rogers, Tuqiri and Harris left. The rugby league press was obsessed with this.

There was a kind of "culture war" in rugby league circles between the populists (too many overseas players here/lets focus on developing our youth/rugby league is a northern sport whats wrong with that/keep Murdoch and his pieces of silver out of our game) and the 'woke internationalists' (its a family sport too much swearing on the terraces/lets expand the game to Oxford/Wales/Scotland/France/Germany / look at all the fantastic global development now they are even playing rugby league in Kazakstan / next world cup should have 48 nations!).

A lot of that debate has lessened now in fact there's a lot less debate about the game in general. It's just grimly continuing along and the older fans can all remember times when the quality of play on the field was much better.

Good post. RL won't die as such but more clubs may become semi-pro. The expansionist zealots seem to have given up. The game seemed to do well under Richard Lewis 2002 - 20012 (he negotiated the best ever TV deal we had). Then we had uninspired inside appointments of Watkins -> Johnson -> Rimmer -> Sutton.

Normally when you say the game was better in the past you get a barrage of "the players couldn't compete with the athletes of today". No doubt fitter now, but better to watch - I don't think so.

Going on from Sally C.

We don’t give enough credit to Peter Higham, of any at all.
He kept the club solvent and ploughed so much of his money in.
He left writing off £1m when the consortium and council came in.
And other board members too wrote off their investment into the club.
I’ve spoke with him at length about Wire.
He is crazy mad about Wire.

To us old duffers it is a shadow of the old game but the current generation seem more interested. Average SL attendance in 2000 (7500 approx) 2024 (9200) - and all games were certainly not on TV in 2000.

Yes there's a danger of looking back at the old days with rose tinted glasses and one thing which wasn't great was the attendances especially in the pre Super League era. The game was carried by a few key derbies and rivalries and you would have excellent atmospheres in games against Wigan, Widnes or Saints. But a lot of the games you'd be shivering in the cold and rain in front of small crowds against Featherstone or Oldham or Barrow.

That first peak era I described in the 90s was based around a very strong international game (albeit of only 3 teams) with all time legends of the game coinciding at the same time, and a powerhouse Wigan team. There were definitely cracks beneath the surface which is why there was momentum behind Super League and summer rugby. I think we'd seen how football had transformed from a hooligan-dominated sport with lots of problems in the late 80s to a Premier League of all seater stadia and international superstars, and hoped Super League would give a similar boost in RL.

To an extent it did, but whereas the Premier League maintained its strength, Super League went on a slow backward slide.

We shouldn't ignore two big economic developments - the strengthening of the Aussie dollar in the late 2000s and the huge increases in TV money in the NRL which meant that we lost our ability to bring in the Jamie Lyons and Matt Kings and created a drag the other way with the best British players signing contracts in the NRL.