Has the 4 th new Championship 1 club been announced ?

We have Northampton , Hemel and Gloucester

Have I missed the 4 th one being announced ?

The Bradford Debtors are set to be announced as the 4th new club at the end of the month.


Not announced yet. Who are the teams in the running? I remember Coventry & Chester being mentioned. Was the other one Oxford?

it's got to be Coventry, surely

Wasn't Medway also mentioned.

Should be Bradford Bulls but thought i'd read somewhere it was Coventry.

With only a few weeks left till the end of the season , Surely they should have announced it by now , as currently there are 9 teams next year in Championship 1 , clubs will be looking to sort out budgets , fixtures and ST prices

We could do with these clubs actually fulfilling their fixtures to a respectible outcome and not getting into money troubles. Any chance of that happening? It seems a big jump from complete amateur status/nothing to Championship 1 level. The travel costs and paying players enough to attract a reasonable squad would be in the hundreds of thousands category?

Which clubs are you reffering to ?

Get them to follow the Bulls method of running a club. If they can't afford to pay wages the RFL will pay them.

If that wasn't inviting the obvious answer i don't know what would

You naughty boy starbug

I'm pretty sure the RFL will sort out the fixtures, don't worry too much about that.

I imagine that, if I were an Oldham or Gateshead fan, my decision to buy a season ticket would be based on whether I wanted/could afford one rather than whether Oxford or Coventry were the new club in the league.

Maybe they could announce who is getting relegated earlier in the season so clubs could prepare?

I thought it was Coventry or was that for something else?

Why do people keep making the Bulls joke? There's still need to be another club if they went down.

Chester withdrew their bid pretty much as soon as North Wales Crusaders joined Championship 1 I suspect as they would have been competing for the same largely Warrington based players.

Medway never even submitted an application but were told they were accepted anyway. Naturally they didn't accept as this is their 2nd year of having an open age team and they play in a local league. I'd have loved to see their reaction to the news.

Oxford were going to be team 4 but promptly folded.

Coventry, I won't comment other than to say I don't know if they'll join or not as yet.

As for which are viable, Hemel are very solid off the field though I don't know if they'll get a good enough team on it. Rebels are a 1980s style soccer club planning to ship in Yorkshiremen with bad relations with the local amateur clubs. Hopefully they'll over time become somethimg better. The All Golds IMO primarily exist to give a rich lawyer in Cheltenham a home town pro team. The RFL would have preferred Bristol. They have some good junior development started but not sure students are good enough for Championship 1 but think they'll have a lot of young Leeds players.

So as of this moment, we still only have 3

In a word yes. No guarantee there'll be 4.

It could be 3 or it could be 4.

This is very accurate!

Yeah basically what I've heard minus the bits about Coventry (would be a conflict of interest for me plus I'm not prepared to comment on an ongoing process) and generally what I hear of Rebels is very, very negative so I've taken out the more controversial parts.

Northampton Rebels have unsurprisingly folded so only 8 or 9 clubs next year.

Folded, as in dissapeared? , or just no longer in a position to step up?

Northampton's withdrawal from Championship 1 confirmed.... www.code13rugbyleague.com/2012/0 ... um=twitter

Northampton's withdrawal from Championship 1 confirmed.... www.code13rugbyleague.com/2012/0 ... um=twitter

Step up from where? They don't currently exist.

Yes sorry, just realised, they were supposidly an offshoot of the football club

What is quite incredible is the way Mr Rimmer is seemingly talking this up as a positive in the press release



So with essentially 2 weeks till the end of the season, we now have just 8 clubs in Championship 1 , it really is just quite ridiculous

The RFL should look to bring in 1 new club every 3 seasons, they should finance these new clubs properly, provide proper tangible assistance, but they should be exempt from promotion until that extra assistance is no longer needed

How do these idiots get and keep the jobs they have?

Not sure you can blame the RFL for the Rebels. The club showed a valid plan with the right financial backing. That the soccer club chairman changed his mind (for whatever reason, yet to be properly understood) can hardly be blamed on the RFL.

We, at the Demons and Knights amateur club, will carry on. Midlands regional champs. National champs at regional division level twice. 13 players onto pro club academies via us. One current SL first team regular from us, one SL U20 academy regular from us, two SL academy U18s from us. We've only been open age since 2007 and running juniors since 2008, so shows what's around here. Pity the proposed pro club couldn't make use of that.