The RFL Bulls would snap your hand off, no way are they in the top 10 clubs (apart from attendance), they are likely to finish just above Widnes and Salford this season.
You are Nigel Wood and I claim £5

That was based on last seasons standings...

I know Trinity are often the favourites to take drop into the division below (again) with hypothetical discussions regarding reducing the league size, but to omit them completely is a new one.

Ha sorry! I knew something wasn't quite right!

Lets just hopo that some warning is given to any proposed change and that the teams can play for their place in the top flight ?
Or will we have a cull after the end of the season "because the TV deal was too good to miss".
De ja vu anybody ?
Its like Uncle Maurice is back in charge !

Someone just jumped up and down on my grave when i read that

They could, but they wouldnt want to. Sky are all about elite sport. Even the coverage they give to the lower leagues in football is pretty poor, they show 75 matches across the 3 leagues compared to 70 Super League matches a year.

SL should grow not shrink, with the move to conferences combating the rise in games.

Surely you mean TV is all about elite sport, so why have the Championships on?

No I mean Sky is about elite sport, TV outside of Sky/ESPN arent interested in pretty much anything regular. Bar the champions league and FA cup there is no club sport really shown on terrestrial TV regularly throughout the year. There are the international competitions but outside that. Not a lot. Outside Sky and ESPN TV isnt about club sport.

The championships are a second tier competition on a second tier channel. A channel which picks up more niche sports/competitions and caters for those fans who are prepared to pay a little bit extra, whereas Sky look to pick up as many people as possible to as bigger package as possible. Its how they make their money. They arent going to make more money by bringing down the upper echelons of SL to bring up the lower echelons of the Championship, just so they have 2 leagues instead of one.

I think Super League should grow not shrink. I would love to see a 16 team league, maybe 18 in the future.

The RFL should get some advice from the NRL, their expansion system seems much better than ours, read up on a lot of it the other day, interesting stuff. The RFL need to do away with their approach to unrealistic expansion (Build it and they will come, even if they have no money) and concentrate on growing Super League.

Not disagree, as I put the 10 team league idea is just another making the best of what we have rather than trying harder to get what we want

Hopefully, one day we'll have enough quality to expand the division rather than make it smaller

14 clubs to me has the right sort of feel for number of games, although I'd definitely get rid of the extra fixture.

Am I alone in thinking that standards seem to be slowly improving? IMO we have Sts, Leeds, Wigan and Warrington who are very good teams, plus a number of other teams not that far off the pace and certainly capable of causing an upset. Even as recently as 2009 neither Wigan or Wire would have been considered real contenders.

The problem is the inconsistency of the mid tier teams, the really poor quality of the bottom couple of sides (suggesting we simply don't have enough quality players full stop), and the fact that SL sides seem to throw in the towel defensively far too easily leading to blowout scores. It's certainly bizarre when you have a coach like Tony Smith complaining about too many easy wins. Those areas are where the work is required IMO.

The cap should match the SL grant, what is the difference at the moment?

Clubs should have 9 home SL games plus Mill magic. Create two conferences to help with away travel and generate more rivalary games. 7 teams in each conference. You play your conference home and away (12 games) and 7 games against the other conference + MM derby game givng a 20 game SL regular season.

Heres my plan, there should be 13 teams with 26 rounds (magic weekend included with teams alternating each season so the same team isn't losing a home fixture every year). Keep the international V's exiles 2 games during the season. The challenge cup final will be the first game at the end of the regular season. Then the playoffs start, the playoffs are straight forward with no second bite if you lose your out. 1st play 8th (game 1), 2nd play 7th (game 2), 3rd play 6th (game 3), 4th play 5th (game 4). Winner of game 1 plays winner of game 3, winner of game 2 plays winner of game 4. Going off this seasons fixtures the final would be played on the 22nd of september. After the SL playoffs a world club challenge with the top 4 teams (the 4 teams left at semi final stage of play offs) from SL and NRL. It would start on the 13th october so both sets of teams have a few weeks prep. There would be one round on each weekend with the final being played on the 27th october, Gf winner of SL plays 4th in NRL playoffs (game 1), SL runner up plays 3rd place in NRL playoffs (game2), SL 3rd place plays NRL runner up (game 3) and SL 4th place plays NRL GF winner (game4). winner of game 1 plays winner of game 3, winner of game 2 plays winner of game 4. there is a chance of a all SL or NRL final but i think it will be a good knockout comp. the reason i said a playoff system is because a league will take too long.

Logical, structured growth and not planting trees in the desert, WOW, this type of sensible talk will get you banned from RL Fans.
Fully agree with you

2 things, 13 teams is 24 rounds


And once AGAIN, can you explain how an odd number of teams play an odd number of games?

haha oops i included playing yourself aswell, yeah i guess that messes up the whole magic weekend, if it was kept at 14 teams there would be one week less for the top 4 teams to prep for the world club challenge so the SL grand final will be on the same weekend as the NRL grand final.

I'll let you off , at least you haven't argued the case for several pages as some have in the past

The playing each other both home and away should be scraped, you could have 18 sides playing 24 domestic games.

Yes , but an odd number of teams requires an even number of games , that is the point being made

Reduce the quota to 2 and introduce a compulsory squad rotation system, thereby forcing all clubs to invest in the development of young, domestic players and crucially, to actually give them some meaningful game time. It would require more strategic thinking by coaches in terms of working out which players to play against which opposition, but I don't see that as a particular problem; it could even be argued that the number of blow-out scorelines would be reduced?

To go forward, we would first have to go back; in the short-medium term, it might result in a perceived drop in quality of some matches but in the longer term, should create more virtuous behaviour from clubs and improve the overall health of the whole sport, from grassroots to elite level.

At the moment, it's not helpful for a few representatives of the more fortunate clubs to be spouting about reducing the number of teams in the league; if we were having this conversation a few years ago, we'd be talking about cutting adrift Warrington and Huddersfield for example, both of whom could be argued to have added value to the sport at elite level - the former, without question.

In my view, the RFL should be working to a ten year plan that makes clear to all stakeholders what their intentions are and crucially, what the desired outcome will be - talk of cutting adrift several clubs without any steer from the governing body has a destabilising effect on the sport that we can ill afford; as someone else has mentioned, they'll be rubbing their hands together down at Twickers.

An interesting ' term ' for clubs outside the ' Elite '

Haha we are all a bunch of dreamers when we want to be. I'm not sure we are ready for a conference system, nor are we ready for the idea of watching a merged team. We have a different culture in the UK whereas in the USA and Australia the people don't seem to care as much. I like the idea of a conference but there are too many problems. At the moment crowds are generally on the up, viewing figures are on the up and we are seeing a lot of young English lads breaking through. We don't need radical change at this time, I think Widnes' inclusion to Super League is great for the sport, hopefully Leigh and Halifax can put the hard work in over the next couple of years and get themselves ready for Super League. Dumping Toulouse or another Welsh team in SL is not the way forward.

One of the real problems is the Championship clubs though

That'd be a biggish cut to the cap, iirc. The SL grant is something like £1.1/£1.2m, [uI think[/u.

9/10 home games just isn't enough. Clubs would be waving goodbye to something like £200-500k. You'd need a League Cup type comp to make up the fixtures.

I think conferences is a good idea, but only if we could get 2 of 8 (22 fixtures). Even then you're losing 2 home games. Conference champs would feel like a proper prize, rather than the hub-cap which is just the poor relation of the SL trophy.

I've not got a plan for raising more cash, but player burn-out could be limited by capping the number of SL rounds any player can be involved in to 20. Stop 'em playing busted, and mitigates the impact of injuries.
Only danger I can see, is weaker teams resting half a team against the strongest in games they don't feel they have much of a chance in.
Players might want fewer games, and that would allow it without fans missing out and revenue being lost.