It's not just about Bradford though. They are merely a symptom of a much deeper malaise.

The game is disappearing up it's own @a as it contemplates another decade of austerity and a salary cap remaining frozen at 1999 levels. This managed decline of the sport which, these days, resembles a load of clubs having to pay regular visits to their Sky foodbank, is utterly screwed unless something drastic happens over the next few years to turn things around.

Best case scenario? Back to part-time for most of the clubs and players with just a small handful of clubs whose players are able to remain on full time contracts.

I'd get rid of the salary cap and allow any multi-millionaire sugar daddy to get onboard and spend as much money of their own on the sport and the club they may fancy taking over as they damn well like. At least that'd generate some headlines in the media along with the possibility of some big signings.

The current managed decline or policy of death by a thousand cuts is a tragedy still unfolding.

I doubt Bradford will be liquidated tomorrow. I also doubt they won't be in a similar situation in two years time, such is the cycle.

There in is the problem. How many multi-millionaire sugar daddies are there out there who've any interest in the sport? Part of the RFL's remit should be to promote the game far and wide, yet they seem incapable of doing that. Out of all the "expansion" clubs there's only been one that's actually worked and that was Catalan. Every other time the game has attempted to spread beyond the M62 it's fallen on its backside. But I think that's mainly down to the how as the RFL still cling to this idea that if you put a SL club in an area (even one without an RL history) that it'll be a huge success and are always shocked when it isn't.

The sport needs an overhaul. Full on root and branch style, otherwise I can't see it remaining a pro-sport beyond the next 10 years

Multi millionaire sugar daddies have no interest in our sport because the salary cap is static, restrictive and holds clubs back. Now, as mad as Koukash is, he was at least willing to really throw his cash at the Salford venture but has found himself handcuffed and tripped up at every turn. I'm surprised he is still in the game TBH. RL will never attract big time business men again in it's current form. It is small time. What William says, although cold and hard it is the pretty much the truth and something needs to be done and quickly.

That would pretty much have been my response.

If I was a multi-millionaire sugar daddy who fancied boosting my ego with an expensive hobby involving ownership and investment in a sporting club, I wouldn't touch Super League.

Where is the attraction and fun in being restricted in terms of how much you can spend on your hobby? I'm amazed Koukash is still involved at Salford. I'd have walked by now and told the RFL and the sport to go do one. No other sport would be stupid enough to turn down my millions.

Of course, it ought to go without saying that the cabal of former double glazing salesmen, carpet warehouse sellers, car room dealers, market traders and brickies who occupy the leading CEO and ownership positions at SL clubs don't want to spend any of their money, and they certainly don't want any rich outsider urinating into their p!ssy little paddling pool and showing them up for being the small time rug merchants they are.

Have to agree with the above couple of comments, every time Koukash has publicly spoken out against the antiquated not fit for purpose RFL he is ridiculed from all sides.

After 30 years of no money we come into some, Koukash spends a lot of it Salford get deducted points now he says nothing and spends nothing. FFS we have a wealthy owner and most predict us to still finish in the cellar. Only at Salford...

In fairness there was nothing stopping him spending as much money as he wanted to on things like your academy. He wasn't interested in that though and just wanted to bring as many overpaid mercenaries as possible. He could have built Salford up in a similar fashion to Ken Davey or Simon Moran, but his ego got in the way. The RFL might not be fit for purpose but neither is Koukash as an RL owner.

Well that's because he went about like a bull in a china shop, no reason why he couldn't have been smarter and calmer about they way he went about things.

Koukash is a publicist, and knows precisely how to get people to listen to him. He's a remarkable character and that is something that the sport has sorely lacked.

I'd much rather listen to somebody like Koukash, who is at the very least speaking positively about the sport and putting forward ideas to improve it, than a moaning windbag like Neil Hudgell.

The Premier league and European football have spending restrictions as huge teams have discovered.

Whilst I'd agree with some of the comments regarding "millionaire sugar daddies" - surely there has to be much more to this than just waiting for a knight with a shining chequebook?

I look at the sport and simply cannot see where the growth is.

We have a salary cap that was set in 1999. If it had merely grown with inflation, that salary cap would be close to £3m today, rather than £1.85m. And yet we find ourself in the position where we have clubs that still oppose any sort of increase on the grounds of affordability. I think all of the sport's stakeholders really need to look at why they haven't been able to grow their clubs merely in line with inflation whilst our main competitors have achieved far more.

Where is the growth in crowd numbers? Where is the growth in ticket revenue? Where is the growth in commercial revenue? Where is the growth in non-matchday revenue? Where is the improvement in young player development? As it stands we've got a marginally better TV deal, but little else, whilst the sport's competitors have continued to grow.

The RFL is a convenient lightning rod for many of the games ills but the clubs really have to step up to the standards required. With a sustainable and effective marketing strategy in place, it shouldn't take a glut of cheap tickets to get anything approaching a respectable crowd at Super League fixtures, it really shouldn't be the case that clubs are selling raffle tickets for their main commercial sponsorship oppportunity and it really shouldn't come to the point where clubs can't grow their non-matchday revenue.

If the growth really is there and I've got the above all wrong, then I'd love to know where this additional funding is going, because (in most cases) it sure as hell isn't going into talent retention, youth development or facilities.

Pretty much spot on, the RFL have pretty much have no idea or inept to stop the decline. Marketing the existing model and attracting high profile sponsors is pretty pathetic, we are very low profile in global sport.

There's some twaddle written on here. Multi-millionaires aren't put off from investing because of the salary cap but because the game isn't anywhere near as big or popular as you (and I) believe it is/should be. If it were we wouldn't only have Sky bidding for the TV rights to league games, we'd have big corporations queuing up to sponsor etc etc.... Oh, and there'd be that many of them they could effectively force the RFL to up or abandon the cap.

Your argument is the exact same ass-backward outlook the RFL and too many clubs have.

It isnt up to those outside the game to come in to the game and make it attractive. It is up to us to make it attractive to those outside the game.

We dont have a low salary cap because we can't attract sponsors, we can't attract sponsors because of the effects of the salary cap.

We dont have poor visibility because a crappy deal with sky, we have a poor deal with Sky because we have crappy visibility.

The game is a product we sell to fans, to sponsors, to tv companies. It isnt up to fans, sponsors or TV companies to improve the product so they can pay more money for it. Its up to the game to create a product they can sell to fans, sponsors and TV companies.

Smokey is right. And we have gone backwards these last few years. We've lost Bradford and London, two clubs with big city names, one of which was one of our handful of clubs with proven potential for 5 figure gates, and the other our only English club away from the M62, and in the capital. They were huge losses in terms of the perceived importance of the competition to sponsors, journalists and spectators. Bradford in particular are a club we should have moved heaven and earth to retain in the top flight, but instead the RFL and other SL clubs are just watching this asset to the game wither and die.

I can't speak about the amateur game in the north, but London's relegation has coincided with a near collapse of the southern amateur game. That club's role as the apex of the local development pyramid was unique amongst English clubs, the rest of whom have other pro clubs nearby. We sacrificed a national big city professional profile to allow the return of a system designed solely to benefit small town semi-pro clubs. And before anyone starts pointing at Toulouse and Toronto, those clubs are irrelevant - in terms of profile anything outside SL is invisible to all but the existing RL anorak brigade.

In addition, while I've always supported the salary cap, it's clearly now hurting the game to be set at this level. The image of our best players disappearing to Australia en masse, or even relative journeymen doubling their salaries in RU, is as terrible for the sport as the shocking quality of most imports compared to previous years. It makes us seem like a third-rate feeder competition. We have to let our clubs spend more. That will result in five or six clubs far outspending the others, but at least those five will bring back some quality, and offer us some protection against the player raids of NRL and RU. And, to be blunt, the clubs who can't already spend up to the existing cap aren't genuinely competing anyway even today with the theoretical level playing field. It'll be no change for them.

I had little time for Maurice Lindsey, but he was right back in 1996. The world was changing, RL could either move forward and survive, or stand still and die. Our last twenty years has seen periods of both brave steps, and catastrophic mistakes, but the last three years have been a period of absolute retrenchment. The game has retreated into its shell, hoping that if it Circles the wagons around its so-called heartlands, the world outside will somehow continue to look after it. Instead we're just rotting away in irrelevant obscurity.

I think our window of opportunity is fast closing. We are currently in danger of becoming equivalent to speedway, or ice hockey. We've slammed the door on the world, while moaning that the world isn't paying enough attention to us. We need far-sighted leaders at both our big clubs and the RFL to change the direction of travel, because the game is starting to gather the smell of death around itself.

Some have been preaching to the choir for ages.
Sadly the choir is dwindling and soon there will be only the old bass singers left.

The problem with (English, at least) Rugby League always has been and will remain for the foreseeable future the people that run the sport off the field, be that at the RFL or the individual clubs. Incompetent and narrow-minded in almost all cases. It doesn't help that supporters of the game are very clearly divided between "traditionalists" and "expansionists", and the RFL seems to want to try and please both groups - which it cannot do if the sport is to be successful.

RL doesn't benefit from the natural economics of scale that accrue from being the national (and indeed international) sport, either doesn't want to or doesn't know how to reposition the sport towards focusing on it's international offering (like cricket and RU have done) and seems to lack the commitment to push the game into new formats or venues that might offer more casual but mass appeal (like cricket and darts).

Ironically, Rugby League is a sport that seems to take an almost perverse pride in "innovating" - yet all too often this "innovation" is ill-thought through and not given the time and resources required in order to make it a success.

The game in Australia has its problems, but after spending two weeks there over the summer simply to follow RL I have to say the way that the game is administrated, and the quality of the offering there is lightyears ahead of the way even our best clubs are setup. Potentially Leeds and Wigan might be on a par with a St George, but there's a long gap to match the offering of a Brisbane or Rabbitohs outfit. There's now a very conscious continuity to the NRL's core offering with an expectation of on and off-field excellence, whilst at the same time taking the game to new markets in a controlled and considered fashion - with adequate resources to support any new endeavour.

I have yet to see any multi millionaire claim their love for rugby league and call out the RFL to raise the salary cap. Koukash may have done this but he's a classless buffoon whose abandoned Salfords academy. Raising the salary cap won't stop Rugby League being a small time sport where the important positions are filled by small minded people. It also won't help improve the amateur game - that's where the real battle lies. The problem is people are thinking top to bottom rather than bottom to top.

It's one thing to get people to listen to you, anybody could do that if they're prepared to come out with certain comments but getting people to listen and not have a large proportion of them think you're a **** is a much trickier thing and one that Koukash failed in.

Katie Hopkins knows what to say to get herself heard, doesn't always mean that's a good thing though.

This argument that the salary cap needs raising is just daft when we have clubs not running academies, not running proper commercial departments, not running proper marketing departments, not investing in youth production and marquee signing places unused.

If all this were being done I'd be the first to say raise it. Until clubs actually start running themselves properly all that would happen is player wage inflation.

Spot on. People just think let's raise the cap and watch as all these Millionaires come knocking down the door wanting to get involved .

Whats wrong with wage inflation, i think we all accept the sportsmen in the sport we follow are under paid.
At the same time if we want more kids playing the game then the financial incentives need to be better

I'd love to pay the players multiple times what they are currently paid.

But not at the expense of everything else. Which is exactly what happened in the 70's, 80's and 90's and got us in this mess in the first place. Even the richest and best run RL clubs in SL are only doing the bare minimum in terms of investment in club infrastructure (commercial, marketing, facilities, executive management etc) and youth production. And the poorest are doing none of that.

Kids don't have any idea how much the players are paid and not one either takes up the game or leaves it because of how much the players are paid. They play it (or don't) for various reasons - fun, peers, parents, local sport. The media profile of our players and sport can have an effect on the number of kids playing the sport but how much players are paid in terms of the salary cap has zero impact.

Indeed, kids play football because they want to emulate Messi or Ronaldo, they don't do it thinking they'll earn millions doing it. That probably comes later in life.

Yep. The issue of wages comes at academy level where there is a choice for lads between a poor RL wage and going into whatever job they may have available outside RL.
However this still isn't a major issue for the vast majority of lads who, sadly, don't have great job prospects anyway.
But even then that issue really comes into investment in youth rather than a raising of the salary cap.