Clearly it is a good strategy to invest in the academy and develop local players as the foundation for the team.

It puts the club on a more sustainable footing but doesn't really address anything in terms of attracting new fans.

Nad, have you possibly thought that they were dictated to by the centre itself!? They are managed centres with lots of organisations and businesses wanting to be in there! It was something it could have been nothing. Ideally it should have been sat afternoon, but it wasnt. They can't just pitch up though!

Local players are more likely to bring local fans in!

Really, where is your evidence for that alone being more likely to bring in fans ?

If a local lad plays locally then yep his family his mates are more likely to come and watch him. Evidence, LMS did you ever see how many of his family and mates just come to see him. Tony Clubb was the same.
Have chatted to mates of KD who have started watching again since he came back.
So yep have seen the evidence of local players bringing people through the gate.
Get them coming and they spread the word.
So If it's new fans to the game it's local players that will generate interest. If you want the dormant RL fans in the region to start coming back only way that will happen is by being competative.
What's my evidence of that? I know London based saints Leeds Warrington fans, came to Broncos week in week out when we were competative, stopped coming when we were a team losing badly and in champ.

Right, so you are really only talking about friends and family. I can see how that might add a few to the gate but it is hardly the basis for a strategy to grow the fan base.

Absolutely, the only time slot EBC had unbooked was 2 hours on a Friday morning. When did Broncos phone and ask, the night before?



Make all the excuses you want, but the club is absolutely abysmal in this regard. Always has been.

17 local players bringing 10 family members would bring in an extra 170 people. Well, that's a new scrum half paid for!

"Local players bringing in local fans" is the kind of thing you expect to hear from a shinty club in a remote village in Scotland. Or a genius like Ralph Rimmer. For a professional sports club in one of the world's biggest, richest and busiest cities it's suicidal.

Based on northernbloke's theory, LMS must have brought about 2000 mates when he was playing for us

.

you can't spend it twice

Using your "logic", when Mr Hughes leaves us, we will have a squad full of local players but no way of paying them.



Also, we could have 8 or even 17 local academy trained guys on the park and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to the reality that nobody other than our existing fan-base either knows or even cares. Mr Hughes steadfastly refuses to market the club, instead believing that if we build it they will come and this is despite a decade under his stewardship that has seen us drop 75% of our fan-base caused by exactly that strategy.

Apologists on here and elsewhere will doff their caps to him, but the reality is that he has run us into the ground and we are more reliant on him now than we were a decade ago and I am at a loss as to how that is seen as anything other than a negative.

The claim that Ealing Broadway only had that particular window open is a perfect example of the mindset of your average London Broncos/David Hughes fanboy.......it was a badly thought out strategy, poorly executed and an utter waste of time and (hopefully not too much) money. Whe last in Lodon I stayed 350 meters from Trailfinders and my host had not a clue that the Broncos Played there......she is a Kiwi, who loves her sport, is a Quins ST holder and attends Ealing games when Quins are away.......how friggin' hard is it to arrange for the Academy squad to leaflet drop 3,000 homes near the club?

Although it is the season he really needs to do some marketing, Hughes won't because most of the Northern SL clubs will bring anything from 500-1000 extra paying guests to Trailfinders for every home game . So he'll probably care less about marketing and promotion of the club more than he usually does with that many extra visiting supporters.