On youth development the scrapping of the A teams was wrong in my opinion it served a number of purposes

1) To help a player who has been injured to get some game time before re- introduction into first team.
2) Helped develop young kids after the age of nineteen who develop at a later stage.
3) Allows promising young kids to learn the game before being thrown in at the deep end.

Once a kid gets past nineteen and has not made it into the first team then they are lost to the game.

It is not possible to have a team full of local lads and expect them to be winning cups if you base the latter on success.
What has been disappointing for me is that the local lads that have made it to first team have not stayed with for one reason or another ,when offers come in for these kids regardless of what team then the club should be able to retain these kids.

We should be asking in Hull why we cannot develop a 6 or 7 and gave to rely on imports.

As for the RFL any outfit that cannot attract a major sponsor and gives away the product for free should be held accountable for their actions and possibly be given a vote of no confidence.

Agree on the A team 100%.
ps you forget Tommy Lee

This post is supposed to be about the state of the game imo hudge has brought the state of the game to the fore, its not about who has made the worst signing or who has lost the most money. If you listen to most rl chairman the benchmark loss is 500 k per season so all teams lose roughly the same amount and this obviously can't go on. The rl need to up their game get sponsors and stop favouring the so called top four and letting them use next years and the years after that salary cap to get in top players i.e. Warrington in the last few seasons, this is short sighted and only makes the other clubs copy them because if they don't they cannot compete wasn't the salary cap brought in to stop the so called top four dominating the game, I can see the current sl in years to come reverting to semi pro because of no money.

But surely as a chairman directly involved in setting a "benchmark" loss of £500K, Hudgell is part of the problem and not the solution?

Is he hoping somehow that people don't notice this huge inconsistency and therefore why should we take his self serving views seriously?

Well, without him and the other club owners who fund the losses, we wouldn't have full time professional top flight RL in this country. At least not on a sensible or meaningful scale. They're among the most crucial stakeholders in the sport. They have a variety of views and Hudgell's is just one among them. He's arguably been vindicated over the newco-end of licensing thing. Though his assumption that letting/making them start again at the bottom would have meant fewer rather than just different SL teams wasn't a given.
And the Stobart thing he and Pearson and others were against, also turned out badly.

Identifying problems is easier than finding solutions though. Increasing revenue would be lovely but is no doubt difficult. Dividing the pie between fewer mouths is easier, but comes at an obvious cost.
And if Hudgell or Pearson are being self serving in their similar views, then I hope that they recognise that a major and inevitable structural problem will always exist - the willingness of other clubs to spend the extra income in the pursuit of success. Hudgell has expressed a preference for 10 teams in SL. If they got all the Sky money, Rovers would be not far off breakeven in theory - assuming they made the cut. But Leeds, Wigan and other cashed-up clubs would soon start pushing for an increase in the cap (which is long overdue really), and in a smaller league they'd have more democratic clout.
It isn't just about how much money there is in the sport, it's also how evenly spread it is. Smaller and even mid-sized clubs without benefactors will always struggle, on every level, against big clubs or big benefactors. Locking out benefactors locks out vital cash. Smaller, less successful clubs will struggle to grow and (understandably) there's huge resistance to mergers. Breaking up big clubs would be ridiculous. So we're stuck really.