It has never been done because we are artificially held back by the salary cap. With relegation being scrapped we will see more youngsters being blooded which is good because there seems to be a lot of good players with lots of potential, when they progress and get older and better a time will come when they move on to another club or another good player moves on due to salary cap or a better offer at another club, sharing the talent will only dillute the comp.

If you let the teams spend what they earn you will get the hardworking clubs being rewarded because at the minute what is the point of any club making more than 4 million? There is none because they can't do anything with it! If you take away that restraint and say you can spend half of what you earn clubs will make more of an effort to get the fans in for games and fans will buy more merchandise and go to more games because it is funding the wages for a potential new star player therefore their team gets better due to them spending the cash on the club.

Reward the hard working clubs on and off the field, let us spend what we earn!

not really. if wigan can average 14k now then put a few star players out and start getting to finals and the crowds would shoot up. 18k would be easily achievable within the next 2 years IMO and then 20k 2 or so years further on in the future….problem is can we get success and star players under the current CC restrictions and thus up our crowds?. How you can say that is cloud cuckoo land tho is ridiculous.

Wigan RL are actually marketed now, where we weren’t previously, and a lot of our new fans are new fans under the age of 18 who have not watched us in the past. I would say theres approximately 2-3 k of them every week in the SS. Get a bit of success and youd double the young fans figure overnight, and add 2k on the gate, plus the success would bring many fans (the fairweathers) back, including a couple of thousand gloryboys currently watching the pathetics!! Thats 18k straight away. I actually know a number of people who were wigan rl before but are now pathetically a shatics fan....along with a number who dont actually watch us at the moment or only keep a passing interest because we're doing nothing and are boring.

Tbh far from being at saturation point our current 14 k is actually near enough our CORE support at the moment, which has gone up from a core support of approximately only 7-8k when we moved to the JJB who would follow through thick and thin. Get a bit of success and our crowds could be mega.....Support wise wigan RL are actually stronger now than we ever have been, despite the pathetics presence in the Prima Donna League. The only issue is that our crowds will inevitably decline if we continue like the last 10 years....its a wonder our crowds havent already tbh.

Just because it hasnt been done before doesnt mean its 'cloud cuckoo land'......if everyone had your attitude we'd still be making fire with sticks and hunting our food!!


how do you think the telephone was invented?, the TV?

20k gates are achievable and are in our current chairman's business plan (if he can shift the current coach and bring in a bit of class)

The only team who getting those gates is cloud cuckoo land is wire as their little 5h1tty ground is not big enough

The salary cap is like putting weights on Usain Bolts feet.

I have justified my viewpoint far more than those that are saying it is easy to have an average attendance of 20,000 pal. The fact that no other club has done it before, or even really come close, is one strong argument that it is not easy to do so. We can all pluck figures out of thin air and I would love all clubs to average 20,000 but I can be realistic as well. For every 15,000 crowd against Harlequins, Catalan, Salford et al (which you dont even get against these clubs anyway) you would have to get a sell out 25,000 one to compensate. Now correct me if I am wrong but Wigan have only ever done this against Saints at the JJB and even then there have been far more occasions when it hasnt been sold out then when it has.

Wigan is one of the few places where RL is the number one sport and yet they have never come close to averaging 20,000. It is a fairly average sized town and just about every one that could play and like RL already does. A vast majority of these already go to games and Wigan are not going to start getting thousands more to go to games. If anything with the rise of Wigan Athletic and more and more youngsters growing up as Latics fans instaed of United and Liverpool etc ones then things could even go the other way. Yes Wigan may get an extra few thousand with more success but that will still leave them a long way short of an average of 20,000. They couldnt even get this in the 80s and 90s, way before the time of the salary cap which Wigan fans are so fond of blaming.

As I said Leeds is the only club in SL at the moment that has a chnce of getting this. It is a big city with a big population. It even has 60,000+ students in Headingley to attract. There are also great swathes of the city that are not particularly into RL. They therefore have plenty of potential converts to RL and may have a chance. However Wigan do not.

I would be happy if we actually scored off a set move.

overblown

most young kids still 'follow' liverpool or united. also you're assuming latics will always be in top division. if they ever go down their crowds will drop well down.


considering wigan has a population of around 80k i'd say we're doing well.

I know this is for 2006 but this makes interesting reading

[urlhttp://jotbin.com/articles/2007/01/14/populationattendances[/url

yeah, seen that before mate. people seem to forget that wigan is a small place and has a premier league football club to compete with. not to mention the premier league clubs on our doorstep.

Did you even read the previous posts that were being discussed? I would agree that Wigan are doing well and I would say that them and Cas do the best in SL. However that isnt really the argument and what you say just backs up what I was saying.

so why are you having a go?

Have you been watching 'The Footy Show' ?

The Australians have regularly questioned the slowing down of the game over there. The slowing down at the ruck and the constant referral to the video referee.



Wigan have won more trophies than any other British RL Club even if you don't take into account the trophies won in that decade, to claim the honours are nothing special is preposterous.