They don’t have the Premier league over there which is the biggest syphon over here, then we Have RU to compete with,and the flat cap brigade at the RFL all out on big dinners leaves nothing left for our sport, Big Nige needs to go and take that puppet Barwick with him.

They have the AFL and RU to compete with though.

The AFL TV deal and subsequently salaries are still higher than the NRL.

Premier League and Championship football, Rugby Union, Formula One, Cricket (inc T20) and now even UFC & Boxing are sports that Sky, BT, ITV, Channel 4/5 will all pay way more for than Rugby League...only really RU, Aussie Rules and maybe F1, Cricket to compete with over in Aus. RL is a much bigger sport for the south, north and east of Australia.

What it seems was our last TV deal was rather rushed, either that or BT were not remotely interested in competing with Sky for Rugby League.

this...and they don't have Hemmings and the rest of the sky sports crew which is frankly priceless.

Good for the game, but very bad news for Super League. I can envisage good players preferring to be reserves in the NRL rather than first choice in SL.

The quality of their reserves is amazing as well, watched a few games this year and it’s probably on par with SL.

yeah they have all that in Aus aswell, aswell as a smaller population, its just marketed far, far better over there and was never neglected and let to sink into the small sport.

I think the biggest issue we are going to have is player drain. They will have a minimum wage of £70k and an average wage of £200k. Just looking at us they could probably double the wage of the likes of Burgess, Gelling, Manfredi, Bateman,& Farrell and still pay them less than their average wage.

On last season's form, they'd be lucky.

With the possible exceptions of Manfredi (if he ever plays again) and Bateman (though he's done little in the WC so far), none of those players are NRL standard.

That said ... if they play to the best of their ability, which as Wigan fans we are desperate to see, then it's a different matter.

It's a real Catch-22.

If players want to go let them. It’ll make SL even worse quality than it is now and then finally the RFL might do something about it.

Like what though?
The game over here can't afford to play those sort of salaries, if we try then the game will be bankrupt in less than a decade.
Somehow we need more investment, the next t.v deal needs to be a very good one and the men at the top should be starting to look at and negotiating sooner rather than later otherwise Sky will just walk in with a take it or leave it offer, and we know what happens then.

amazing how we became World club champs seeing as they are so much better man for man that the British game......

We are a salary capped sport and we all understand why. The issue is the difference in the size of the cap. If both competitions had an equal cap then we’d at least be able to compete for the best players. As it stands, the slight increases in our cap mean very little. We still have the same pool of average standard players to choose from but they’d be paid a bit more. Unless we can compete for top quality players, the standard of our game has little chance of improvement.

to be fair the like of Whitehead and Hodgson werent great in SL but are killing it in the NRL

That's true, but why is that?

Arguably, better coaching in the NRL, and certainly, being surrounded by better players. Which brings us back to the same problem...