Goulding’s 13-team Super League would look like this: Newcastle, Cumbria, one Hull team, West Yorkshire, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, London, Catalans, Toulouse, Toronto and one of Ottawa, New York, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh or UAE.

That means Goulding would see teams like Wigan, Salford, Leigh and Warrington merge to become Manchester, with St Helens and Widnes essentially rebranding to Liverpool.

Castleford, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Featherstone would merge and Hull FC and Hull KR would become one.

I personally am not supportive of this concept as I prefer to watch my hometown rugby club but I think it will be an interesting debate amongst supporters if only to get their different views

Is that not just the original plan with a few overseas clubs chucked in?

No just the ramblings of a gobshoite
He’d fight himself if he couldn’t find someone to fight with.

Has been suggested a few times in various guises and has always been kicked into touch, forced mergers will never happen. Even when the possibility of a place in the top league was on offer areas like Cumbria (where RL had been in decline for many years) could not agree to mergers so what chance teams like Wigan/Hull/Saints/ Warrington etc.

The Goulding one is even more strange - Leeds escape unscathed but other traditionally big clubs are merged very odd.

It will be very interesting to see how clubs come out of the current situation - mergers might be one option in some places but I suspect there will always be considerable fan resistance (even to the death of clubs rather than a merger for some people).

His idea of just having big city clubs a non starter in the eyes of those running the game and indeed supporters, but it could be possible that some clubs may now find that the time has now come for them to merge and form bigger and stronger clubs to recoup some of the finance that will have been lost in the situation and the sale of grounds being one way of getting capital and getting the game on a more stronger financial footing.

Rugby League is not a rich sport with only a small numbers of clubs owned by rich people and it cannot continue like it is at present.

Personally, I think the time has come for all the clubs in the North of England to merger in line with the local authority areas which were set up in 1974 to form bigger and stronger clubs as the present three divisions with thirty odd professional/semi professional clubs will be even less viable in the future than what they have been prior to the present world wide virus situation.

If clubs and indeed supporters resist the change, I fear for the future of the game as a major rugby sport.

Absolute whopper is Mr Goulding!!

He's only 25 years behind Maurice's vision for the game.

And judging by the protests at the time and no doubt even today, so are many of its supporters where mergers are concerned!

They had forced mergers in Australia and as a result, their game has gone stronger with clubs more spread out while we have carried on with having too many clubs in the same catchment areas with poor facilities and playing in out of date grounds.

Swinton being a prime example, situated in the City of Salford, never had a ground of their own since selling Station Road and now playing at the ground of Sale RU which is in the borough of Trafford.

Oldham is not much better, sell their ground at Watersheddings where they got decent crowds and now play at a former little football ground and watched by a fraction of what was its support.

Not to mention Batley and Dewsbury situated within a stone's throw of each other.

Its time that some of the smaller clubs face reality and stopped clinging to the past!

That sounds like a sure-fire way of killing the game. I support Wigan because I was born and bred in the town. I wouldn't feel any affinity with any of those franchises and would be lost to the sport. If the folk of Manchester loved RL so much, Salford would get more than 2,000 fans each week.

Back in the day, I thought there were some genuine opportunities for mergers. The Cumbrian clubs, for instance. the likes of Batley, Dewsbury and Hunslet. But as soon as people started talking about Wigan and Saints, Wire and Widnes, Hull and Hull KR, it became ridiculous. At the time these were some of the biggest derbies in the competition and to lose them on the off-chance 'big city' franchises would take RL by storm would have been a ridiculous leap into the dark.

But even these smaller ships have now sailed, I fear.

The problem the game still has is that there are too many smaller clubs hanging on by their fingernails. Even Phil Clark, who's a total buffoon in my view, said a couple of months ago that a lot of our smaller clubs should no longer be classified as professional because they quite clearly aren't even though they continue to use up resources.

Unfortunately Aus also had two major broadcasting networks fighting to throw money at a sport which had no real competition in it's heartland. Mergers and new teams might have made some sense in 1990 but not generally today. We possibly missed a trick when Union showed that there was a market for a quality rugby side in the Midlands and we have managed to make a reasonably successful start in London into a failure. Now that we have P and R we have undercut the financial stability of the sport and there does not seem the likelihood of new British teams being able to reach the top table.

Its not about the bigger clubs like Wigan, Hull, Leeds, St Helens, Warrington etc but the smaller clubs like Batley, Dewsbury, Featherstone, Hunslet, Keighley, Leigh, Swinton who get poor crowds, are situated in then shadow of the bigger clubs, no ground and struggling to survive in the now harder economic times.

It is obvious that some clubs will have to merge of they will simply go under, especially after the preset virus situation.