https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4u1bmhE0o4 So I’m up late, watching college football on espn and the solution to RL’s problems has come to me in a flash of inspiration. College Football in the states has a lot of similarities to rugby league in the UK. A game built on tradition spanning more than 100 years, rivalries which are equally as old. There’s a professional cousin where much more money can be made but college games actually get larger attendances. And…..they generate huge TV revenue deals. Why? Because of the tradition, the rivalries, the histories, the stories going back generations, the pride in your local team. And of course, as you’ll see in the clip - the gameday experience! I’m watching Penn State v Auburn and no-one going to this game tonight would say they’ve not enjoyed it….whatever the result. Getting so many people bought into the same thing is amazing! Imagine a “White Out” game at St Helens…..everyone wearing white, get there an hour before, get the music blasting, Zombie Nation…. “WE ARE THE SAINTS!!”. Make it so that there’s only one place to be in town on that Friday / Saturday night. A can’t miss experience. Don’t worry about London, Toronto, New York or whatever, let’s make our game the biggest event in the towns we already play in. It would look amazing on TV and we go from there. I know for me (40s), for you (60s probably) the game itself should be enough…..here’s some news..it’s not! We’re in competition, not as a sport but as an entertainment product - so let’s get it bloody set up as such. Look at the Hundred or the IPL in cricket….fake teams that have no real basis. We have such a huge headstart on that, play to our strengths. Anyway, if anyone at Saints or RL marketing want to talk about it, you know where I am

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4u1bmhE0o4 So I’m up late, watching college football on espn and the solution to RL’s problems has come to me in a flash of inspiration. College Football in the states has a lot of similarities to rugby league in the UK. A game built on tradition spanning more than 100 years, rivalries which are equally as old. There’s a professional cousin where much more money can be made but college games actually get larger attendances. And…..they generate huge TV revenue deals. Why? Because of the tradition, the rivalries, the histories, the stories going back generations, the pride in your local team. And of course, as you’ll see in the clip - the gameday experience! I’m watching Penn State v Auburn and no-one going to this game tonight would say they’ve not enjoyed it….whatever the result. Getting so many people bought into the same thing is amazing! Imagine a “White Out” game at St Helens…..everyone wearing white, get there an hour before, get the music blasting, Zombie Nation…. “WE ARE THE SAINTS!!”. Make it so that there’s only one place to be in town on that Friday / Saturday night. A can’t miss experience. Don’t worry about London, Toronto, New York or whatever, let’s make our game the biggest event in the towns we already play in. It would look amazing on TV and we go from there. I know for me (40s), for you (60s probably) the game itself should be enough…..here’s some news..it’s not! We’re in competition, not as a sport but as an entertainment product - so let’s get it bloody set up as such. Look at the Hundred or the IPL in cricket….fake teams that have no real basis. We have such a huge headstart on that, play to our strengths. Anyway, if anyone at Saints or RL marketing want to talk about it, you know where I am

I could not agree more. The game day experience being bigger and better MUST be a priority for all clubs and the RFL.

Some of us *myself included* have posted this kind of "College Football" stuff on the Leigh fans pages on FB recently. Clubs need to engage with fans & ask & listen to what we like.

Ask if there is a popular song to enter to like "Jump Around" & "Enter Sandman" used by College grid iron teams. Ask what the club can do for kids & adults alike to get us in early & spending money.

Do we want a 9's Comp ?

The big difference here is that College Football is attracting 40,000 + fans & R.L 3k - 10k !!! Easier to create a scene like that with a rammed full stadium every week.

College football is bigger than all sports/leagues over here except the Premier League.

There are no comparisons you can make to RL in terms of investment, spectacle, level of athlete.

I think Leeds make around £10m revenue? Penn State make £75m+ and they’re barely in the top 15 colleges for revenue.

Yes I know - 106,000 at the game last night. Not sure your point? Obviously they’re bigger but that wasn’t the point I was making. I gave a whole list of similarities in the areas they leverage which are not dissimilar to our strengths and using these to promote RL seems a good direction to market our game.

Back of a beer mat musings do not make for a structured achievable plan. YOU are already a RL fan. The good folk who live in St Helens, Wigan, Warrington etc already know the teams exist and that games are on....they just don't care enough to go.
You're correct that the matchday experience isn't as good as it could be, but that's more to do with the clubs themselves cutting back, not the game as a whole.
Your "imagine a white out" comments betrays you as a fan. What is needed is non RL people to be engaged in selling the sport. The RLWC 2013 semi final was marketed by a non RL company and was a huge success. RL has to stop milkingnth same fans (some clubs issue 4 or more replica shirts a year) and reach out to new ones.....a "white out" ain't going to do that.
The game needs to reconnect with its roots....schools, amateurs, local companies.....I recall Wigan selling half a stand to a local firm a few years back for a game....Heinz? Didn't the big soup sponsorship thing happen soon after? That's how you grow the game......and forget the hundred or IPL.....the amount of money ploughed into the hundred by the ECB would bankrupt us....and the ipl is owned by billionaires.
College football is based around affordability and school rivalries......they have societies and groups who are responsible for whipping up support and selling packages.......if you want to engage locals as fans, start with the schools.....attending games is a habit and if you get them young you've got them for life.....it's a problem now faced by football in the UK with 18-25 years odld being less engaged with the game now than at any time in the modern era (80's onwards)
Eddie hearn is quite probably the answer. It's just that the RFL/SL can't agree on what th question is.

College football has always been my second favourite sport after RL.

Been a crimson tide fan for as long as I can remember

Isn't College Football huge somewhat because of the relative lack of other big sports teams in some town/cities in the USA ?

So you can pull in RL supporters via a gimmick, Keighley and Bradford did that pretty well, but unlike the USA there's plenty of other UK sports vying for your supporters attention within a 1 hour drive

I don't disagree that the game needs to re-engage to grow, just in how it does that.

Very good down to earth post.

People know what they want and what's on offer, last Friday 13,000 found their way to Headingley????.

Fair play to genuine posters who float such ideas

Truth is however the cost of mass advertising campaigns always far outweighs the value of the number of fans that are consequently attracted to the game.

Leeds marketing know how to best get a crowd, without spending an extra £10,000 on advertising only to sell £5,000 worth of extra tickets.

As much as we should be trying this, can you imagine rl fans, 'what they want me to wear a *insert colour* t shirt, they can chuff off, im not doing that'

That's a good point.

28 U.S. states don't have an NFL team, for example.

It’s completely wrong though.

The reason college football is so popular is simply because Americans love football.

Towns completely close down on a Friday when their local high school is playing.

Thats how popular it is.

The current scenario across all 3 top tiers of RL in the UK is as follows:

WEST YORKSHIRE - 11
GREATER MANCHESTER - 6
CUMBRIA - 3
EAST RIDING YORKSHIRE - 2
LONDON - 2
WALES - 2
FRANCE- 2
SOUTH YORKSHIRE -2
NORTH YORKSHIRE - 1
MERSEYSIDE - 1
CHESHIRE - 2
WEST MIDLANDS -1
NEWCASTLE - 1

by my calculations and based on 48 counties in England & wales, there are 36 without a professional/semi-professional Rugby League team. So half of the USA doesn't have an NFL team......75% of England and Wales don't gave a RL team.

Solution?

Schools.

Alas, a march has been stolen there by other sports, so it is community clubs where the game needs to focus its attention. If enough kids at a school are playing RL at club level, then the schools will take notice....and I am sure that if you start such a campaign of recruitment and awareness in a major metropolitan area like London, you'll reap long terms rewards, so no doubt the RFL will hold summer training camps in west Yorkshire...because with 45% of the pro sides coming from a county with the word YORKSHIRE in it, it's a mystery why the country thinks we're nothing more than a local hobby

Absolute garbage.

Across the north where RL is strong many schools play Union ignoring the kids preference for league, because the head may be a toff, and he may engage union minded sports teachers. The record is they do not take notice at all. I grew up on a big northern council estate where we all watched Rugby League. The estate comprehensive school we attended played exclusively Union. Same where we live now. Bradford Bulls signed one of the lads from the local school to play for their academy, so a clear pathway was in place. Despite this and the kids again being RL minded Union is forced on them.

I've heard so bull in my time and a fair amount of it from you and your other accounts, but there's so much to unpack there it might take a while:

1. [codeAcross the north where RL is strong[/code
Hmm....er, OK.
14,500 fans rocked up to watch Hull City football side at the weekend. This is at the lower tier of the 2nd tier of the football pyramid, with City recently bouncing up. Up the road (you mentioned union, not I), Newcastle hosted Harlequins watched by a measly 6,000 fans, whilst Sale managed 7,500 (apparently)......28k fans over 3 games in the north including a lower tier football game...that's more than day 2 of the Premiere RL Magic weekend this year.....2 tiy union clubs and a recently promoted soccer team draw bigger crowds than the likes of Wigan...yeah......


2.
Without documented and verified proof, this is opinion. It's one I've heard countless time but yet to see any proof. What I do know is teachers are involved in a job that involves "engaging" kids. If said kids were 100% league and not union, then the teachers would follow what their "VOCATION" steered them to do. Like the days of 'KES' & "Vichy France ate my hamster"....you troll to the masses like drake and the fascists at the frequently unread RL press corp.

By the way......your northern teachers should have told you a comma doesn't precede AND.....turn off your American spell checker NOW!


3.

More anecdotal gibberish



You dragged union into this, I didn't, but whilst we're here......They will play a shed load of internationals this autumn to do little more than generate revenue and future revenues......show me the TV deal for The France England RL game and I'll maybe listen to your whining.......Ireland are apparently playing in Las Vegas......I doubt a local there Knows what Rugby is, but they'll play in a full stadium with a few million watching on TV.......miniscule in terms of college football, but between them ad the all black a week later, 100,000 fans will have paid to watch a game of union in America.....


Back on thread. Maybe a few purist RL schools in the north eed to have ther games broadcast on youtube/ourleague? Kids games of union are shown here in little old NZ and there's still only one game in town...

I would ask for proof but I know you dont deal in proof for your wild claims.

Yet the players can't be paid which is nothing short of a disgrace.

I don't know what sort of proof you are looking for but I can give you a direct example of this happening. When we moved to Leeds I went to a large comprehensive in East Leeds, with solidly working class children. Everyone who liked Rugby was a league fan but the deputy head was involved in Roundhegians RUFC and insisted that the school only play Union, both in games lessons and against other schools. I directly asked him why in a school of Rugby League fans we weren't allowed to play League and he said "because Rugby League doesn't teach children the right skills". It still sounds a big unhinged to me after all these years, but he clearly had strong ideological objections to Rugby League and managed to use his position to stop it being played. It happens.

https://www.leedsrhinosfoundation.org/b ... -in-leeds/ 21 High schools in Leeds took part. So can someone name the "many" high schools that only play Union?

https://www.leedsrhinosfoundation.org/b ... -in-leeds/ 21 High schools in Leeds took part. So can someone name the "many" high schools that only play Union?

I can only name the one I went to as I haven't a clue if its a widespread issue but John Smeaton in Leeds wouldn't allow league when I was there. Admittedly that was a while ago now but it was just an illustration of how one zealot can insist on Union being played in the RL heartlands. Might be an isolated case, I dunno.

Maybe more relevant to the 'College Football' discussion, is whether thousands of locals went along to support the future of the game at said event ?

Or how many RL match attending supporters are generated by 21 x 17 = 357 school children playing RL ?

I'm not calling you or anyone else a liar, but it is more often than not that such claims are anecdotal.

The issue is how many rugby league fans are prepared to support (as in attend) lower level and schools RL.
Most RL fans are fans of their club....so the kids above will play the game and probably support one of the local west Yorkshire sides. Whether the fans of those west Yorkshire sides or even the parents of the kids went to watch them is a direct responsibility of the schools, RFL and clubs.....sticking posts in the ground and expecting folk to rock up isn't a strategy that works.

Lol what? Some troll claimed that schools in the north play union with no proof to back it up as normal. I proved him wrong. For the 100th time

From here. [urlhttps://www.yourschoolgames.com/taking-part/our-sports/rugby-league/[/url

These 40,000 kids who in some way have been in contact with and played a form of rugby league are the target audience.


At London we'd bemoan the fact that the Kids who would play the mins tournaments before KO at the stoop would invariably bugger off before the main game, either dragging or being dragged away by their parents......but the issue was ours. We had been delivered 100 + kids + Parents etc and we did absolutely nothing to encourage them to stay.
If the kids were playing a minis tournament, I'd have fed them as the main match was kicking off and had prize presentations (with a prize for very team) at half time, on the pitch. We had small gates but still, 4,000 people applauding you on a pitch in a stadium is a pretty big thing for a kid....but nope, we let them slope off

When the NZ warriors play a game down here in the Capital, they are out at local clubs for the days before hand and visiting schools.....I know that when they played wests here a few years back every school they visited got 100 tickets to the game.....Vodafone were handing out flags and scarfs and every seat had a vodafone folding cushion/beer holder thing.......22,500 rocked up and the boost to the game down here was great. In the following weeks, the head of Wellington RFL ran RL courses at 25 Primary schools across the region....volunteers managed hundreds of kids and we havd loads of warriors freebies for them to take home.....it's not easy, it's not cheap, but with a lot of hard work it can be done.

Instead, your average RL marketing department will stick posts in the ground, announce it's a "wear white day" to their existing fans and wonder why they still only get their normal gate figures. Any new fan they do attract receives no follow up and are expected to have fallen in love with the game immediately....it's insanity.

The game isn't flush with cash, but it has a core of supporters who would gladly volunteer for their clubs.....and some do. I still chuckle when i remember the switchboard messages at Saints recorded by Johnny Vegas........and it's not all bad marketing....The Tomkins one with wigins was a fantastic advert, but more often than not, RL is not very good at promoting itself......it reall does need someone from outside the game