Quote: Rugby Raider "I do agree. The perception of RL is very poor, with it primarily being a minority sport played along the M62.
Obviously our game doesn’t help itself, with self interest trying to leave a door open for villages/towns of Featherstone and Batley to get into SL, as opposed to targeting new regions and cities and supporting their development within SL. (e.g. London).
We can’t deny other sports just market themselves better. Twickenham looks a picture with 80,000 packed in it to watch England compared with our recent international at Wigan and Leeds when less than 20k turned up.
Our product is far better, yet Rah Rah fans will happily pay more and turn out in huge numbers to watch it take several minutes for a scrum to be reformed multiple times, before celebrating like there’s no tomorrow because their team has won a penalty for a technical infringement on something that no one understands.
Still don’t think we have the joined up thinking to transform te sport, however I do think the introduction of IMG has made clubs focus on improving things off the field. The game needs a major sponsor though and increased revenue to allow salary cap increases to attract better players to SL.'"
They only turn out in huge numbers for International games thats one reason why several RU clubs are in financial difficulty.
The other reason is big company name sponsorship for the stadium and the International game..The International game also takes out of the sports funding four times the money than the club game.Thats a huge diifference.
The RU international games at Twickenham are more to do with tradition than quality entertainment.
The game now is a better product but even in the past years when the game was drab and boring the fans would still pack out Twickenham
Rugby League on the other hand not only suffers from a lack of big company sponsors but an inept Governing body who have no idea how to market the sport.
£500,000 spent with the speadsheet Charlies IMG for little meaningful enhancement for the game would have been far better allocated to a Marketing budget given to a young hungry marketing company
