www./news_3108-cat ... nsion.html "Thanks to these facilities, our budget will increase. We have been in stagnation for two years due to the low capacity of our stadium, the lack of hospitality boxes, and the size of our club shop. "

www./news_3108-cat ... nsion.html "Thanks to these facilities, our budget will increase. We have been in stagnation for two years due to the low capacity of our stadium, the lack of hospitality boxes, and the size of our club shop. "

"a corporate box" either it is going to be a very big box or isn't going to make much difference! Will be good to see their stadium finished off.

A true success story in terms of 'expansion'. I remember at the time many dissenters proclaiming their failure within three years but they have been a great addition to SL.

This also highlights the benefits of having a local government on board to help its premier sports team's, recognising the benefits they can bring to the area. Hopefully the Dragons can go one stage further this season.

Too true. That has been very notable in Perpignan.

Anyone who has been to Perpignan will have noticed the enthusiasm that the locals have for their club. Granted, some of that is invariably due to the fact that a season's worth of English supporters have around €3m in their collective back pockets but even so, it's very clear to anybody that has visited that this is very much a "rugby city" - far more so than some of the supposed "heartland" towns. Every time we've been, the locals have been very happy to talk about the Dragons.

ffs, how many more times? How long does RL have to be played somewhere before it becomes a heartland? 70-odd years is obviously not enough.

Great to see such a forward looking club. Well done Le Cats!

great news for the game, Catalans can easily average 10,000 IMO

are they doing a game in Barcelona again this year?

Very good news, I don't see any reason why they can't continue to grow further.

I for one appreciate France as a good as a heartland in rugby league as Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria, NSW and Queensland. Some people soon forget that rugby league was once banned in France so it was obviously making an impact in order for it to be banned.

www.worldstadiums.com/stadium_me ... utus.shtml

www.worldstadiums.com/stadium_me ... utus.shtml

If people keep pretending there was no history behind Catalans then they can keep justifying dumping clubs in new areas and hoping for the best!

this is expansion RFL style. zero input into the infrastructure required to sustain a top level club. nothing going into schools development or helping promote the amateur game in these areas.
where do they think the players will come from?
its a classic inverted pyramid scenario, top heavy with no foundations. thought the people running the game were intelligent business people

surely you're not that naive?

les Cats or HKR?

OK, I worded that badly.

Yes, Perpignan is a heartland. The point I was trying to make was that there were plenty of posters on here banging on about how <enter Northern slum town here> was more deserving of a place in Super League than Perpignan.

As a visiting supporter, I've noticed a hell of a lot more enthusiasm for Super League than I have in plenty of towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire that we "couldn't possible leave out because of history / tradition / blah blah blah".

Both!

Most of that anger was because a club was displaced rather than the league expanded to be fair

Although your northern ' slum ' analogy isn't very nice is it , it was these northern ' slums ' that invented the sport you claim to love and support

The fact that most of them were and are slums seems to have passed you by.

They game was set up by people who lived in mill, coal and engineering towns. Most of the players lived in those towns in slums and not on the big house on the hill.


however Bramley Rhino is wrong in that it is not the fact they are slum towns that hold the game back but the parochial attitude of those who live in them.

If people really cared in these towns they would go and watch their local teams. even in SL the attendances at all bar Leeds, wigan and Hull are poor compared to the populations.

I would argue that most of them are not as real Rugby towns as leicester and Limerick

The fact that you cannot pick where you are born seems to have passed you by

It was the bloke in the big house on the hill that set up the club and paid the players

It is not the Parochial attitude that has held anything back , for the vast majority of the 115 years the sport has done quite well , what has changed is society in general , to watch sport you no longer have to put your big coat on and spend the best part of the day outdoors , you just click the button

As for the rest of your points I wont disagree

I dont agree with this, Leeds has a population over 1 million, Hull over 700k and Wigan well over 300k. St.Helens is around 170k, but gets at least 70% of the the attendances of those 3. By population i believe Cas is the best suported team in the league.

but yes many of the ' smaller ' clubs do much better % wise than some of the bigger ones

Doesn't change the fact that Perpignan is clearly a rugby town ( league as well as union ) and is definitely 'heartland' for RL. Anyone who's been to the bar opposite the ground will see instant French RL history - pity the Wire game is at the union stadium this year.

london is RL heartlands too

I think for about 78 years from 1896 to about 1974 the game was doing well.
the problem is it never pushed on. We obviously did not develop better coaching, facilities, awareness of the international game etc which is why Australia dominated and ruined the international game because they were so good and everyone else was crap. Only now is there an awareness that the international game is vital to the longer term.

For years RL went of TV after the floodlit trophy and that programme on ITV etc.

Yet no one seemed to notice the significance of it. Rl goes off the telly and soccer takes over.

Other sports have changed faster. RU saw what league was doing and played games against Wigan to show the parochial / ' Traditionalist' RU types that the game had to change and it did. We have had no one with any vision in RL until recently.

RU has changed more in the last 15 years than RL has in 115.

Things that have been obvious in soccer still seem to be debated in RL now.

You will not find one big soccer team saying how they missed the old ramshackle grounds with 200 foot of terraces open up to the elements in place of bright shiny new stadiums except in bloody RL where they still argue why do we need a new stadium.