As a club we have to stay as a grade A or high B rated club.

I assume the club has kept on top of the social media and community side of things, the stadium side we score highly on but at the moment there’s no real scope for improvement there as far as I’m aware.

So as realistic targets you’d say that on the pitch you’d hope we get off to decent start and continue to play well enough to stop a mass exodus of fans and keep at the 7.5K average attendance threshold that we score high on now.

I’m not right up on the criteria so anyone who is, what improvements results wise in 25 would make us score more on the criteria for 26? Or is the on field performance stuff just over 3 years? If say we did manage an 8th place finish would we score any higher?

I think we actually lose points on the stadium over the capacity and attendance difference .

Makes sense, what’s the cut off figure? I know in 2023 the club posted an average attendance of around 12.5k off the top of my head which would put us around 50% of the stadium, but we’d have got the grade A off 22 figures that I’m sure was lower?

Also I’ve never seen it confirmed but people have said that IMG gradings are based on actual attendances not the figure the club announces. Obviously the club announced 9K for the Salford/Catalan games but it was obviously much lower, that could have an impact.

Regardless of how the gradings are scored, it would be nice to be going into the big home games next season with clubs who bring a lot of away fans if we are playing well enough to attract some floating fans rather then just the bare minimum who’ve already paid for a season ticket.

For me I'd say 6th is realistic with this team and coaching setup. You could argue Salford and Leigh have over achieved this year and neither have signed anyone special to help them stay in the top six so I think we're capable of replacing them. The key thing is we need to be beating them in the regular season

I don't know how IMG go about grading as it seems to be still a grey area but It does seem strange that a large first class stadium looses points whilst we have the forth best attendance average in SL .

Leigh have signed Armstrong and Nui that could be real special players at SL level in the backline, and I assume they have a quota spot to replace Moylan they seem to have a knack of coming up with good imports. They’ve lost a big chunk of the pack though.

Don’t disagree that Leigh and Salford on paper might not be too far away from us, but we’ve also got Leeds and Catalan who will look to improve massively. I think we’d need a huge chunk of luck in our favour and relying on others having bad luck/bad seasons to make to make the play offs IMO. If nothing else we are a bit of luck though.

Think I would describe that as optimistic rather than realistic. Saints and Catalans finished 6th/7th this year with 15 wins each (think Wire may have been the same in 2023?).
For us to go from 3 wins up to 15 is a sizable improvement in a single year, especially with virtually a new set-up and team at the start of the year. Will we need a 'bedding-in' time before we see improvements?

I don't think it's impossible for us to finish 6th, but I do think we would need a number of factors to go our way for it to happen. If the likes of Leigh, Leeds, Salford are inconsistent and we can make significant improvements then maybe 6th would come to pass, but I'm not sure we will find an extra 10-12 wins on this season that we would need to make.

Recall I made the same claim for us finishing 6th at the start of this year (based on the same premises as above) only to see it spectacularly blow up in my face before we had even reached Easter!! So I am a touch wary about sticking my neck out that far again!!

I hope you are proved to be right in this, it would certainly put some much needed feel-good factor back into the faithful, but having been burnt too often in recent years I'm erring on the side of caution on this. I just feel 6th is too big a step upwards in one move, especially given where we are starting from (almost rock bottom).

When you say we’ll lose points, do you mean we’ll lose points from the initial awarding because our attendances have dropped since and now under 50% (or whatever the cut off point is) usage of the stadium or just that we didn’t get the points in the first place?

If it’s that we didn’t get the points in the first place I wouldn’t worry, we scored highly on the stadium and enough to get a grade A despite scoring low for on the field performance. If we have a team that’s in an around competing near the play offs (most accept that as a realistic expectation) everything else should look after itself. Just hope they’ve done enough to make us competitive.

Id class realistic progress as being able to leave work at 3pm on a Friday before travelling over the Pennines with at least some confidence it won't be a wasted visit

Does anyone know what our scoring was in each criteria? I know the overall score but did it ever get broken down? I have listed below the max scores of the criteria's.

Fandom: 5
Performance: 5
Finances: 4.5
Stadium: 3
Community: 2.5

So the max score is 20 and you need 15 for a Grade A licence. We scored 15.05 so we're on the edge of Grade A and we're bound to have lost performance points after this abysmal season but have we possibly done enough in the other criteria's to gain what we lose on the performance side?

My understanding is that we've dropped a place in the performance table (below Cas I think). This equates to a loss of 0.118pts (according to an article I read a few weeks back).
If that is indeed the case then unless we've improved our score elsewhere we are looking likely to fall below the A grade threshold.

I guess the positive from this is that we can't fall much lower within this particular criteria score, think only Wakefield can realistically overtake us over the next couple of years, so we should improve this aspect fairly soon, hopefully!!

Any losses due to poor performance will be countered by gains in other areas . We can all see just how much the club have been active in the social media because of the points on offer for its use .
I also agreed with TS about the clubs that have strong academies should also have points awarded .

We can't afford another dismal season next year , That could see us in real danger of been overtaken .

Even if we drop to gradeB we will still be one of the better GradeB's. We're also not the only club with issues, crowds and performance down at Huddersfield for example.

Overall there aren't a strong set of Championship clubs ready to step up. Bradford example have lost a lot of the fanbase and it remains to be seen if Odsal can be profitable. I don't think the clubs want Toulouse right now due to the travel costs, and can't see SKY being keen either as they can't sell subscriptions in France.