Quote ="Tigerade"Sean Long promoting Fev's inclusion here :- www.pontefractandcastlefordexpre ... -1-5970646'" "there are several players who can easily step-up to Super League" doesnt sound like they are ready to me.

Quote ="Tigerade"Sean Long promoting Fev's inclusion here :- www.pontefractandcastlefordexpre ... -1-5970646'" "there are several players who can easily step-up to Super League" doesnt sound like they are ready to me.

"We"?

Are you suggesting that you have some sort of connection with the game of rugby league?

If they are appointed to SL after the GF when London have relinquished their place, there isn't time to recruit the number of quality SL players required to have a competitve squad.
Fev may well get promoted 2014 but they will be relagated along with one other club for 2015.

Who says they will win the grand final? They only won one of the last three!

Good luck to them. Hope Faisal comes through for them......

10 teams. that's the limit of the games ambitions and two of them don't currently exist but you think Sky will fork out the money for them. There is no war with a rival network over here to goad Murdoch into action. Dream on.

What makes you so sure your 10 franchises won't run into troubles and then there will be 9 or 8. How soon do you think the league will be too small to provide a decent fixture list and cause Sky to be disenchanted and walk away?

Australia has a bigger league with a third of the population and has proposals to be even bigger.

A ten team breakaway. good luck with that.

It really is frustrating

2 magic weekends, plus 2 clubs only play in 1 each but then play a match at Fev?

Sounds like taking a sledge hammer to break an egg, but at least you have accepted you were wrong

So you were wrong and are acting to form with your waffle, if not take the bet

I,ve no interest in what they call themselves. They are miles away from being fully professional clubs.

1. I am not advocating a SL was as such, just making a case that if SKY were to table this offer a year before the end of their current TV deal, with hints as to their reluctance to spend heavily in the game, then Wigan, Leeds, Hull FC and a couple of other heavy hitters may sign up...if they do, it becomes a feeding frenzy for the remaining places.
2. I did not say that Franchises would not encounter troubles....what I did say was independently checked business plans and 5 million up front to be drip fed back over the term of the Licence would soften the blow. I also alluded to these Franchises being run as businesses and not hobbies. The Likes of Ken Davy and David Hughes are destroying the game....if Hudds win the GF, they'll still struggle to attract crowds next year and London haven't spent a brass farthing advertising over the last 2 years.
3. Australian RL is essentially NSWRL with 2 expansion clubs bankrolled by SKY, another in debt to SKY after a bail out, a Gold Coast Graveyard team and a Kiwi side representing an entire nation. The model I have suggested is not dissimilar with maybe SKY bankrolling the 2 London teams from the start with a view to selling them off. This time last year the Sydney Wanderers soccer team didn't exist....this year they've just turned down a bid for 15,000,000 from the Penrith Panthers.
4. If there isn't a ten team league within 10 years then the game will already be semi-professional with the best talent going south to Australia. What is clear id the RFL are trying to pander to the financial needs of the top 6 or so clubs, whilst meeting the desires of smaller clubs who think they can cut it at the top level.

The top 8 SL clubs this year will all turn over more than 5 million notes.....Fev's 4,500 fan target (20 quid each..I am being generous) together with SKY money delivers 2,500,000 at best.........they will be up and down faster than a whores drawers and the owner will be out of pocket......the cycle of clubs going to the wall in the pursuit of the holy grail will continue and the game will eventually end up with 4 main protagonists at best and 6 or 7 smaller clubs to make up the numbers.

As someone has said earlier, Super 15 in New Zealand is a prime example of how top level franchises can work without destroying the existing club structures. Wellington Hurricanes Season ticket includes all Wellington Lions games too....those Hurricanes not currently on All Blacks duty run out for the Lions or their home provinces....it's a system that works well and has started to see the provinces make money again after a few years of stupidity.

The key is the management of the top tier.....the RFL are clearly not best placed to make hard decisions and that's why SKY or one of their subsidiaries needs to run this BUSINESS under the rules of the RLIF.

It's a pipe dream......but it is a simple plan to make the game more attractive to fans, sponsors, corporates and investors....got to be better than telling fibs about Foxy Bingo being more profitable than Engage....

Isn't the Magic Weekend already booked in?

With all teams not getting a game they couldn't logically use it as now with league points at stake but they could maybe use it as a cup round - two double headers over the Saturday and Sunday for the quarter finals maybe? It would be an even bigger attraction for a Championship club(s) to make the last eight and be part of the beano.

Accept who and where we are, then set about improving it
We have 5 clubs drawing crowds and generating income plus cats plus London. The rest are no better/bigger than the top teams below if they had been granted the same income these past 18 years
It will be brilliant when we have 10 and not 5, but it may never happen so we should go two tens but full time in 2015

Another year at least at CoM, two I think but can't be sure.

Just have 28 games 1mm and an on the road round

Still doesn't work with 13 teams , you would need a 12/24/36 game season

Would love to see Fev in, but also still feel Keighley could be re-born as an SL club (esp with the Bulls unfortunately on a downward slope).

Part of me will also always think a York is a big enough city to support an SL club, great place.

People saying the magic weekend stops 13 teams really don't grasp a playoff system. You can have as many rounds as you like. The top team are not champs. The playoffs allow for some teams to meet 3 times others 2 times. You could still play 4 - 6 games at magic. Another weekend other teams play. Then a third weekend other teams play. I'll write it down better. When I'm not on my phone.

But you still require all teams to play the same number of games prior to the play offs

Or are you saying that doesn't matter ?

Why would you? Teams don't have to play each other an equal amount of times. They just have to have an even number of matches. One team (the one that misses out on the Magic Weekend) would just have to have two on the road games instead.

Against who ?

I thought you were cleverer than this

You've forgotten that there's one less home and away fixture.
It'd be 24 games + 1 MW + 1 OTR.

If you have an odd number of teams that will dictate how many games you play as each ' round ' will include 1 ' bye ' , so 13 teams require a mutiple of 13 rounds meaning either 12/24 or 36 matches

end of , otherwise you have some teams playing more games than others

Against who ?

Having just looked at the NRL season 2005 ladder there is a way you can reduce the number of games you play by having more than 1 bye per round , that year they had 15 teams and they played 24 games , in rounds 11 and 14 they had 3 teams not playing , therefore shortening the season by 4 games

So yes you could in theory work in whatever number you wanted , but with 13 teams you would have to work from 36 games downwards having 8 extra ' byes ' to get down to 28 games