Quote ="Donnyman"I'm not looking for anything but an honest debate that is based more on how things are rather than how we may personally want them to be. Your post is quite excellent in terms of an honest and direct reply, regardless of my disagreements with some of your points. I must say I disagree with you less than I did yesterday.
In general (whether these points are yours or not) I can never agree with the idea that "away fans are a bonus" and that a club has to somehow survive without taking away fans into account. I have a business based in a small town in West Yorkshire, and I do not turn away customers who may be in Lancashire. Where people who walk through a turnstyle come from is irrelevant a paying customer is a paying customer and I would not be asking stewards outside the ground to turn away fans who can't provide proof of address.
I can crunch numbers and I can maybe crunch the attendance levels for Leeds.v.Bradford or Castleford, Hull.v.HKR, or Castleford.v.Wakefield or Leeds and then project what the Superleague average attendances for English clubs will be in a transatlantic league without Cas, Fartown, Trinity and Rovers. Last year the SL average was 8,200 which is way down on the best SL year of 9,833. Our clubs attendances will go well below the 8,200 average should several teams purporting to be North American turn up here, customers are important. Customers here don't want Hull.v.Ottawa, they want Hull.v.Hull.K.R. Apparently they did a poll in Hull about the overseas clubs and about 80% of fans were against it!
I can never agree that clubs like Wakefield, Castleford (in their crumbling stadia) and Huddersfield (in their empty stadia) are expendable because they don't produce the players the bigger clubs do. I can look up the origins of players and Hull has a poor record in recent decades, and Leeds produce hardly any players from North Leeds, but like it or not the west riding clubs south of Leeds are a very important area indeed for player development and have developed players in good numbers. To withdraw SL status for these three clubs and shut down their foundations and academies will only shrink what is a shrinking pool of players already. It's no good telling us that in 20 years the first Canadian pro RL player will come along - we will be dead by then if we go Transatlantic.
To quote Eamon McManus "Toronto is a team of English and antipodeans owned by an Australian in Canada" my final point is how is it ever possible those who run Superleague will stand by and allow the league to go Transatlantic. they fought tooth and nail not to allow TWP into SL and promoted the idea of Toulouse instead, but were tied by an agreement with the RFL. Next time they will not be tied in this way.
The club owners and the fans do not want a transatlantic League. How then can it happen my friend?'"
I think it's important to stress that nobody is talking about "turning away fans away", as your analogy suggests. I do however maintain that this obsession with "away fans" plays an excessive role in the decision making and discourse around how to take the game forward. I don't think away fans are a good excuse for poor crowds, nor do I think Thursday nights are. We've got clubs who are used to the "bumper pay day" of certain clubs coming to town, and that leads to poor decision making like loop fixtures - clubs simply believe that the easiest way to survive is to play each other more,and it's damaging the product.
You might not turn away customers from further afield but I suspect that the customers you have from the local area are worth more to your business in the long term. I suspect they're more loyal, less likely to be swayed by other suppliers. That's generally how it works and it's the same in sport - a local fan is worth far, far more over their life than an away fan. That's my entire point in this - away fans have value, but nowhere near as much as a local and the emphasis should be on that, not away fans.
I disagree that clubs can't grow. What the sport has done for a long time now is look at downward trends in crowds, TV figures and profile, and ignored them. We're not adapting what offering to appeal to new audiences, instead relying on the same pool of people and the same, outdated promotional tactics. You cite Huddersfield as an example - a club that has persistently undervalued and undersold the sport with cheap ticket deals and, when it doesn't work they make it cheaper still. There's so much more they could be doing, and that applies to every club.
As for what fans and clubs want, I think it's fair to say that SOME clubs don't want Toronto and SOME fans don't want expansion, but some do and are more positive to it. What is clear is that the sport is very divided on this issue.
There is no right or wrong answer to it but my personal view is that, if the sport is going to address those downward trends, thinking that the clubs and structures that got the sport into this mess can get it out of the mess is the height of fantasy. I look at other sports and how they have adapted to the modern realities of professional sport (overcoming the same realities facing RL), and they've left RL for dust in so many ways. We don't solve those problems with protectionism, parochialism and a lack of imagination. I appreciate people will disagree with that, but I've seen a lot of mentions of "focus on the heartlands" but very little substance sits behind that statement..
