Quote: HalfOwlHalfEagle "From being a bit of a football ground-hopper, I've always been careful when people have warned me against visiting grounds. I never judge somewhere before I've been. Looking forward to the York game.
The lack of promotion/relegation seems silly, its never going to help attendances, never going to help finances. I'm glad it is being reintroduced, there seems like such a gulf between Super League and everyone else which I don't think is fair.
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There's a gulf between SL and the rest because there is a real restriction on the flow of money into the game and, in order to compete with Australia, the idea was to focus those resources into a subset of clubs who could fulfil key criteria. Promotion was therefore limited to clubs who could prove they had the capability to handle full time professionalism and all that that entails. Australia / NZ are the top two teams in the world at RL and have no P+R.
In football terms, imagine that your TV deal was about 1% of the one that is in place from Sky and that your clubs consisted of 6 or so Premier League sides, a few from League One/Two and the rest from the Conference leagues and below - perhaps 30-40 in total.
Then imagine that the media showed little interest in football and took every opportunity it could to deride it. Imagine if players (up to 1995) who played football were banned from playing other sports for no good reason.
Sadly, just like football, some clubs have overstretched themselves and through poor management have ended up in administration. So, P+R didn't help the likes of Luton, Pompey, Leeds, Coventry, Rangers, Hearts etc.
That's the game the RFL are trying to administer so it's more complex than it may first appear.
