You can not judge them all equally!

One of the objectives is expansion, and no of the heartland clubs will get "judged" on this!

Its not a competition it is an application for a franchise, and as such the franchiser will pick the teams who he feels best suites his business and its goals.

To put it another way if Wakefield have a great business plan that can be "proven" to be too good to refuse then the RFL would not refuse it, the problem you have is how ever good AGs plans look on paper now, they are just plans and the RFL will have to judge much of your application on history!

One final thought is that the whole process is a calculated risk for the RFL.

i think that it would be pretty easy to prove that:

if team A owes you £700k, and team B does not

you cannot claim to be impartial.

i think it would cost the RFL a lot of money to prove otherwise.

Been saying the same for many months and that point needs challenging.

Tbh it's a ridiculous state of affairs, that they are relying on Sky money, to pay the RFL back, I mean, if you told the whole story, to someone who didn't know what was going on, they wouldn't believe you.

Legal action is baseless, pointless, and a waste of a consultancy fee.

I don't see how it's baseless, all the points have been brought up on this thread and other threads, theres a lot inconsistencies from the original agreement that we signed up to. It most certainly isn't pointless, with this system in place our chances of ever returning to the top flight are so slim it's a case of nothing to lose. For me we need to keep in the top flight at all costs, Are you happy to see us just been a permanent championship club, end up with the same fate as other ex SL clubs like Oldham and Workington? Be a feeder club for the SL teams?

Where Wakefield Trinity for god sake, were one of the founding fathers of the game are we happy to be treated as victim of injustice and roll over and have our tummies tickled by the RFL. Someone needs to stand up to this corrupt regime that runs the game. If we have any chance of a successful case we should go for it and hopefully put an end to this corrupt system and return to good old Promotion and relegation. We can make the whole system look unworkable and get back to real rugby with P n R!

Exactly, we can huff and puff all we want but at the end of the day the RFL will pick who they perceive to be the best, unfortunately its their bat and ball so they make up the rules with some flexibility to allow them some room to manouver.

tell that to sheffield united, still got relegated but got millions in compo following a successful civil court appeal as i recall.

The point is the RFL say all clubs are working to the same criteria for a franchise...there isn't a seperate criteria for the so called expansion clubs (well not a public one). So from a LEGAL point of view they are on very shakey ground. Their explanations for the franchising could be very interesting.

They get away with it by ' weighting ' different positives differently , all subjectively of course

The first team to contest a franchise decision will find themselves playing against Selby Warriors within 3 years and losing.