No thanks I've got more important things to do , my spuds and parsnips need watering

perhaps your right smokey,as the RFL are a toothless organisation whos only purpose is to put a face to the policies given to them by the chairmen ot the SL clubs.
as for lewis,isnt he something to do with the olympics now? so yeah he will probably get his medal.

so how do they benefit from having one or two teams dominating for three years?

and he was headhunted by the FA. But you know what, those organisations know nothing about sport.

Well they are getting some things right. They do need to improve their fanbase, but that was always dependent on the new stadium. If it does we can probably expect great growth and a route into an important market. If not they will likely be dropped and we will need to find something different if we are to crack that market


It doesnt mean they are good or useful or that they arent damaging.


which isnt what was asked.

What benefit is there to a club through relegation? a positive however minor is much better than doing harm


has that happened? arent Leigh doing ok? whats their comparative position last year and this?

I do miss relegation, I must admit. And I do think that it should be brought back one day. P&R is just British Sporting Culture, and it always will be as long as the country's biggest sport runs it. People look at football and see it as a way sport should be run. Whether that's right or wrong isn't the point.

Yes there are pros to the licensing system we have and the franchise systems they run in Aus and USA. And at the moment, I do think it's a good time to have it as the game needs a bit of stability at the moment I feel with the league moving to 14 teams. But I think we should aim to bring back P&R one day, and look for a better structure for it to work in. Promoting the Championship club a minimum of 3 weeks after confirmation of who is relegated and who will be playing SL next year pretty much makes a very difficult task almost impossible.

Just out of interest, with the course SL is heading, how do you think we could fit p+r back in?

Would catalans be exempt? would the drop into the championship, would they want 2 trips to france? would they go the elite?Crusaders? if \Toulouse move up would they be?

And just to reiterate on my point about when teams should be promoted...

If the SL regular season ends in the first week of September, the Championship final should finish at the end of August. Championship clubs need MORE time to put a team together (as they need far more players to recruit) not LESS time, which is pretty much killing any chance they have already.

Whether that means starting the season 4 or 5 weeks earlier (so starting in November/December when the weather is bad) or having the NRC after the season would be the main stumbling block.

It is a fair question and one that I have thought about before. Obviously with the more European element, there are some hard decisions to make as to whether teams from outside of England should be relegated or not.

Perhaps teams outside of the RFL (i.e. Catalans and Toulouse are FFR13 clubs, and I suppose you could count Crusaders as a WRL club) could be exempt from relegation, or "relegated" to their Governing Body's competition, and should their NGB not see fit a replacement for them in their league below (i.e. the French Elite or the Welsh Premier League) then no relegation takes place. This would mean that French clubs would have to play in France and Welsh clubs play in Wales though rather than play in the Championship, something I'm not totally convinced (for the French anyways) should be happening. I think we'd be far best served having an end of year European competition than have just one French team play all the English teams (allowing for the regular season to finish earlier and give the promoted side more of a chance).

Whether the RFL chose to relegate the "lowest placed English club" in the event of them not finishing bottom in order to guarantee a side from the Championship is promoted is their call. It's supposed to be a European League, but it's basically run as an English league with guest clubs from Wales and France. Perhaps they should have it so that there are a certain number of clubs from each NGB in the SL (subject to change every so many years when TV contracts are decided, etc.) and it is that nation's NGB who decides who it is that has that place (so 2012 could be 11 RFL teams, 2 FFR13 teams and 1 WRL team)?

These are just some of the ideas that have floated in and out. They may not be the best, but there is a logic there. Unfortunately, many of the decisions made at elite level defy logic these days and are just made up as they go along. People just want to know their fate or what they can achieve, and under that system at least they know what they can and can't do and a sensible reason as to why.

But they go straight back down with loads of debt. They will survive thanks to the parachute payment.
However, rugby league can't afford such payments.
The franchise system is RIGHT, RIGHT, RIGHT.

So true. Over 100K people out on the streets to celebrate Blackpool's promotion. It's so much part of our sporting culture. Makes it harder to sell RL to general sports fans.

I'm with Salty on this one.

Still don't care about Blackpool F.C.though.

There are two parts to my initial post...one can be debated over.

The other is simple...the fans of Blackpool will never forget that day and nothing will ever take that away.

I doubt RL fans will reminisce years down the line 'you remember that time it popped up on Sky Sports News that we were heading to SL for 3 years'

And you will never hear....'can you remember that last day when we had to go to Warrington (for example) and win...and WE did and stopped up.

You will never hear these and if that's just 'how it has to be in 2010' then i'm sorry but RL is missing one vital component which makes sport great for me.

if a club cant survice being relegated then it isnt financially stable, under what criteria should it be in Super League? The fear of losing money by being relegated is not an argument for no relegation. If correctly managed then the club can continue, and will have a shot of a return within a year, if not then they probably would have gone bust in Super league anyway - clubs have survived relegation, others have done badly and that is down to their own management and not relegation

The Franchise system is wrong, I see no benefits to the game as a whole that only it can provide - the people for it's introduction give it credit for anything good that happens and blame the legacy of P + R for things that go wrong
the way franchises were handed out was wrong too and given one of the franchises failed within a year then that shows how well they were thought out

Completely agree with the above two posts.

so RL should have P&R just because soccer does.

yeah thats a convincing argument

hey soccer doesnt allow ball handling either (at least on the field), lets copy that too for RL.

thats never going to happen though is it. Its pie in the sky to ever expect the french elite to be of the level super league is. And even if it is, there is no other league that is ever going to have the strength SL does. Whilst it is conceivable Italy or Spain or Germany could in 20 years have one or two clubs of SL quality if given the right help and the benefits of SL, but they arent going to create their own league with 14 teams of SL quality in the next 100 years.

People need to accept that the european super league is a european league, not the top tier of the English league system. The Championship is the top tier of the english system.


you are complaining at the RFL for 'making it up as they go along' yet proposing we have 12 of 14 clubs playing for relegation and 2 not. Going forward with in the next 5-8 years that could conceivably be 4 of 16 clubs not playing for relegation. At that point you could be left with a team 3 places from the playoffs in a 16 team league being relegated.

It is simply unworkable to have P+R in a pan-european league. And it is only going to get less workable

You will also never hear, "do you remember when we went to the GF and needed to win to get promoted. and didnt. Then went bust the next day"

i completely agree with you.with the exception of failure off the field it would need to be a closed shop.

Instead you do hear

" Whats the point winning the league if you dont go up " , or " Thats daft "

Having said that I have accepted that P and R will never come back and also that My club will never play SL again

What I wont accept is the pathetic response that the RFL have come up with to make the Championship a worthwhile comp and the so called help they have offered to the clubs in it

Adding a French club to make the Championship ' sexy '

Offering clubs money to employ people they dont need

If you are going to take away the one thing that made it exciting and attractive to a sugar daddy , what is the point then offering money to clubs to then find one

Clueless

headhunted...ill bet you wet yourself laughing when you wrote that.
they know a yes man when they see one.

How is Lewis a yes man, he is the head of the organisation? Who is he saying 'yes' to?

SL chairmen i would have thought that was obvious.

really?

I never heard it at Old Trafford when we have won for the last three years. We stayed exactly where we are. I didnt hear it when we won the WCC and didnt go on to play in the Galatic club club challenge. I never hear it from the RLC national or any of the divisions below.



What about finding a new sponsor? Giving the clubs money? getting it nationally televised? Nah your right, these are just little things, they havent yet addressed the supreme issue, giving them more money for nothing. Until the lower divisions are given more money they didnt earn, nothing will be good enough

yes, you are right,
Sport England, the FA, the LTA, and the RFL are all in cahoots to give Richard Lewis more titles and more power simply as a trick on the parochial backwaters of northern england.

He is now the chair of Sport England (an organisation that has just given us about £30m to spend on grass roots participation{by that i mean real grass roots, not semi-pro clubs pretending they are the grass roots}) purely because he is a yes man to SL chairmen.