Totally agree finish bottom off you go..finish top you get promoted.. Its reward for a seasons hard toil..and justice if your bottom of the pile...no 2nd bite of the cherry...seems logic to me

All true, particularly the last bit - if you've got falling attendances then making the games more difficult to get to (by playing Thursday night) isn't the solution! It is all very well saying that we need the TV money but we also need money from fans coming through the gate - most SL clubs are far more dependent on attendances than say a PL football club.

The Middle 8s at least made things interesting for the lower half of the SL.

So what are these "six additional fixtures" that are going to be played after the regular season and before the play-offs? I may have missed it, but in all the articles I have read about the restructure, there has been no mention of how these six fixtures will be decided upon. Whatever it is, it doesn't solve the problem we've had for years now (thanks to Magic Weekend) that the regular season isn't a level playing field. I'd have much preferred a 16-team Super League (and we're actually at a rare point in time where there might just be enough depth for that), with home and away fixtures equalling 30 games. If you still want a Magic Weekend (and I don't), simply make it a regular round of fixtures played at one venue, with teams giving up their home advantage in alternate years.

Except of course promotion will be decided via a top 5 play off, the same format as the SL structure- so although unlikely the team fifth in Champ can be promoted

From memory, it will be odds v evens based on league fixtures the previous year

1 v 2, 6 and 10 at home and 4, 8 and 12 away.

2 v 3, 7 and 11 at home, 1, 5 and 9 away.


Also it appears that the Magic fixtures will NOT be against any of the teams in the loop fixtures to avoid over saturation as in Wigan v Wire this year.

To me the loop fixtures offer an opportunity to go on the road again. Responsibility for the marketing and projection of the fixture to be by both clubs with the revenue being shared. After all as I understand it the intention is to improve and project the competition and this is a way to do it.Possible venues to be at those interested in hosting at RLWC in 2021
Saints v Wigan at Coventry
Cas v Wire at Villa Park. Etc

Rogues, you have seven additional fixtures here, is that correct? I thought that the season was 29 games next year, I assume that includes Magic Weekend, and six others, plus 22 regular season games?

Ignore me, I should read stuff twice on a Sunday.

The problem with deciding the loop fixtures based on league standings from the previous season is that form can change massively from one year to the next.

Loop fixtures FFS. The reason we have to restructure the league every few years is that the RFL continue to add unnecessary confusing complications. Can we just have a 15 team league, home and away fixtures and magic? In trying to think outside the box all that ever comes to the fore is the limitations to their ideas.

They don't want to split the money by 15, each club would get 6.666% of the distribution instead of 8.333% plus there are barely enough players of the required quality as it is.

But I agree the structure is a mess. I'm not sure Magic is all that either. The aggregate attendance is less than the games played seperately.

I agree they could do the cup quarter finals as magic weekend. May get a different crowd with a big day out for some championship sides etc. I hadn't really considered the competition money, it's not the end of the world and the extra teams are likely to be toulouse, Toronto and perhaps London, it's an expansionists dream. I don't think those teams would detract from the competition (so long as it's not a Paul Rowley Toronto side).

So many meaningless games

LOL yeah we all knew at the time that the proposals were daft and would get chucked out after a few years.

There are always going to be trade-offs in any system. A lot of fans I expect would love the return to a simple league season but that would lose the end of season playoff games and associated revenue and also for all but the top 2 or 3 that would make most games relatively meaningless. In football it works because they have a tiered system of reward: winning the league, qualifying for the Champions League, qualifying for the Europa League and once you get below that it's not too far off the relegation battle. We don't have the same financial incentives here especially at the bottom as it's hard to get relegated and there aren't enough teams to support a 3 up/3 down system, you would just get the same clubs yo-yoing up and down.

The playoffs and Grand Final do bring in revenue and excitement to the game and realistically no matter the moral purity of the arguments for rewarding the best team over the league season with the title, it is not a reform that the administrators are going to make, because they would lose too much other stuff.

So that leaves us with a playoff system. The Aussies have used a top 8 for a while, in recent years they've moved away from the old McIntyre system to one similar to ours from a few years back, but without the daft Club Call stuff. The top 8 does keep the season alive but it puts too much emphasis on injuries/form at the end of the season and means the early to mid season feels like going through the motions. Remember in the peak TS era when we had a great team who played fantastic rugby, it still felt a bit empty watching Wire sometimes because most games we were going to win quite easily but it was just about waiting for the playoffs as that would determine our fate. Meanwhile Leeds were generally in turmoil with all their fans calling for Brian McDermott's head but they also knew that come the end of the season they would have a good chance of winning.

You need a playoff system to be pretty hard to win from 5th or 6th, ie you need a run of hard games winning away from home. The problem with the top 8 was Leeds from 5th always had a nice easy home opener to the playoffs, 5th v 8th, to build some momentum then the next week they played one of the clubs above who was coming off a loss and would view playing Leeds in an elimination game with dread, before the semi finals.

The first two playoff systems that we had, top 5 from 1998 to 2001 and top 6 from 2002 to 2008, were decent systems. Not easy to win there from 5th or 6th but at least you have the prize of getting to a playoff and having a shot. We did in 2006, when we came 6th and went to Headingley to beat Leeds with a drop-goal, which meant we progressed, but to progress to the Grand Final we'd have had to beat Bradford and Hull away.

The original top 5 system was the best for giving incremental rewards to each team who finished higher.

It's the TV money that would have to be watered down to fund 3 additional SL clubs. Although I am in favour as we will have a normal league where we play everyone twice. If the watering down was applied to the salary cap it would be (£1.8M/15)*12 = £1.44M). Maybe average players like Matty Russell won't earn £90K per annum anymore.

I'm all for the Magic concept to be the CC quarter finals, but Sky would not have it as they don't have TV rights. But no reason why we could not court the BBC with such a multi-game proposal again (like the semi-finals this year)