Indeed. People have been moaning for years that SL lacks a national profile. This can only help "brand awareness".

But that's only going to happen if the SL lorries venture further than a few industrial estates up north

How do they get to them indests? hidden roads DOH

Irn Bru, i wonder which haulier has there distribution contract eh

So rugby league is the second most watched sport on sky sports behind football. We have a whole weekend where Super league dominates the channell for two days. A huge play-off series and grand final which gets massive viewing figures, Stobart will have their name next to all of these events along with everything on the internert, every time the competition gets mentioned... and all we have in return is 100 trucks. I can't believe we havn't got a penny. I could have negotiated a better deal than that, it is a disgrace. Yes the trucks look great but compare this to other deals in sport. Coventry City FC got 1million from their shirt sponsor! You telling me Cov City have a higher profile than super league? What are the RFL playing at? I assumed the trucks were part of the deal. It seems not that way.

No wonder we are so far behind Union when they are negotiating deals with Aviva worth 20million over 4 years.

The people at Stobart have pulled off the best deal in the history of sports business.

Yeah, well, you can do that when you get umpteen pages of exposure in the national press every week (including the off season). However, rugby league doesn't. Which is why rugby league needs 100 trucks and rugby union can pull off a four year deal with Aviva worth £20 million.

PS: Not only is RL the second most watched sport on Sky behind Premiership soccer, it's the fourth biggest televised sport period. You wouldn't know it though by the amount of press attention we get.

That is a small part of it. I honestly think I could have negotiated a good deal. Super league is actually a brilliant league to sponsor, the RFL need to tell people about it. Sell it. They clearly have not done a good job of that. I don't think 20million is realistic, the RFU have pulled a rabbitt out of the hat but we can certainly be getting a few million for a great product with such great TV coverage.

Please do tell us, how would you negotiate a better deal? Tell us your pitch? How you'd go about approaching companies, etc.

Twice you've said this, so it's not just a throw-away comment.

Being a University student I don't have time to put together a pitch to post on a message board just to prove a point. What I will tell you is this is the stuff I study. I had a chat just today with one of the most important people in the country in sports business. He was the first on BBC news when Real Madrid signed Ronaldo because they wanted his opinion. Speaking to him about this deal, he found it shocking.

Either way, do you honestly think 100 trucks was the best the RFL could do for the kind of coverage Stobart will now receive? Is that a fair deal? Stobart have pulled off a stunning deal for their company. Super League has got some free advertising which looks ok on the face of it but shocking compared to other sponsorship deals in all areas of sport. Like I said, Coventry City FC got a million pound deal just from their shirt sponsor. If Coventry City can do that I'm sure super league deserves quite a bit more. Super league gets a lot more coverage than Coventry City FC.

How on earth can the RFL suggest this is a good deal compared to other 'current' deals within proffesional sport? They can't.

I suspect the RFL set their targets too low which gave them little room for negotiating, actually, thats a lie, that is what the experts at Coventry University think. I am inclined to agree.

While my original post seems to suggest I am some kind of 'know it all'... I am not at all. But I will agree with people who research sponsorship and work in this area. I am merely studying it. I have ambition to work in Marketing within RL and sort it out

I couldn't have negotiated a better deal, but I'm a teacher, so you'd be surprised if I could.

However, if a marketing department couldn't pull off a better deal, then I'd be very surprised.

This is pants. No cash at all for a major televised sport ? None. Never mind all this baloney about how much it would cost to advertise on billboards. A sponsorship is about the sponsor buying exposure from us, not about us taking exposure from them. Fine, if you want billboards, buy them. At least with real sponsorship cash, you can make that choice depending on where you think your best investment return is. Here, the clubs will have no choice. And no money.

If you'd told me that every Stobart wagon, or even every other wagon, or even 25% of the wagons, would have a SL-themed livery, then you might have been able to persuade me that it was a good deal. But 100. Out of 2,200. We get 4.5% of the wagons. On any given day, loads of those will spend all day parked up at a distribution centre, or on an industrial estate. So basically, we've given this company enormously valuable TV exposure, and some newspaper exposure, for the fantastic deal of the chance that a few hundred motorists might spot a SL-themed truck on any given day for a couple of seconds.

Fanbloodytastic.

While I'm at it, the BBC story says that Nigel Wood claimed that the best thing about this deal was that it allowed other commercial partners to be brought on board. Great. Where are they ? I believe Betfair were interested and offered a large amount of cash. Will we see their name on a sleeve ? Somehow I doubt it.

This is a terrible, terrible deal. You can't blame the RFL, I guess, because the clubs voted for it. But apart from Widnes, who have no choice, the other 8 clubs who voted for it must have either taken leave of their senses, or be so loaded that they just don't think the game needs the cash.

I literally cannot believe how bad this deal is. Stobart are laughing all the way to their bank. As ever with RL, it's never the professionalism on the pitch which lets down the game; it's the amateurism off it. I don't like to make statements like this, because they're often misapplied; but the rest of the sporting world will be laughing at us about this.

Couldn't have put that better myself.

It makes it worse when you look at other deals within proffesional sport to compare with. It is a shocking deal. It makes it worse that clubs actually voted in favour of this. Then again I have seen better marketing strategies in small web design business with 5 employees than can be seen across super league. This sport is far worse than average across the board when it comes to marketing.

Seriously though 100 trucks! What would they have said to 200? I might have offered to pay for all the trucks to be done if we could have all 2,200. I daw three on my way back from Coventry this evening. Even that would be pretty poor though as a sponsorship deal. Stobart are meant to be using us to promote themselves, they have done this for FREE!!!!!! Instead we are promoting ourselves on a very small scale rather than a potential million pound deal with a different brand.

Whoever negotiated this at Stobart deserves a knighthood. Either that or he should be jailed for taking advantage of innocent 3year olds at Red hall.

Exactly.

We cannot rely on the traditional sources of positive publicity, i.e. the national press, so we have to be a little more creative in raising our profile.

Roll out the lorries.



Being associated with such a high profile company will reap benefits in attracting a wider variety of cash sponsors who had previously not considered SL as a suitable vehicle (pun intended) to enhance their valuable public image.

With respect to previous sponsors:

Tetley's, Stones, Silk Cut, No.6, traditional/stereotypical sponsors in keeping with the public perception of a northern working-class sport (betting companies would be more of the same;

Engage, an effort by the RFL to change the type of sponsor, but they needed us more than we needed them, had you heard of them before they sponsored the league? We raised their profile. Maybe it was hoped that this would attract more established companies in these fields, but it didn't because we don't have the profile or image.

This is a chance to break the cycle.

Why? They only had the 2 deals to vote for and IMO the Stobart deal was far better for the RFL to build on.

The Betfair deal would have meant accepting a deal 75% of the previous deal and that's it for 3 years full stop. The Stobart deal gives us national exposure the game has ever had (what did Engage do to promote the game?) and also the potential to bring in further partners over the next 3 years things like MOM sponsor, Official beer, official betting company even (though difficult with SKY), official soft drink, official travel partner etc etc the options are unlimited and it's now up to the RFL to make the most of it. Stobart has enhanced the brand name now they need to sell it.

Instead of the professional maketing agencies that are used, I don't know why the RFL don't come on here and ask a few people who clearly know a hell of a lot more about marketing and tv deals.

Crazy that not one penny has been brought in. I dont buy the crap about its worth x amount due to 100 lorries. Those lorries look like an advert for Sky sports.

When you think that the average league 1 club at football sponsorship is £200,000 to £300,000 for very little coverage. Its crazy. I said this when the double header at wembley was announced that the RFL should have sent free tickets to all marketing managers of leading companies. To show them what a kind of a product RL is.

I suspect you're being sarcastic; there's a kind of double irony in your post however, since what you've said is actually true. Sad, but still true.

It's really not true. The proposals people come up with on here are mainly pie in the sky proposals just saying that we should have accepted offers that were never there!

BBC Radio Merseyside has an interview with Stobart Chief Exec Andrew Tinkler and discuss some of the promotion ideas Stobart have for Super League. Appaertly, it is 120 trucks that are to be kitted out and they will be on the road 24 hours per day, throughout the land.

Here:
[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00n02g7[/url
Tinkler interview starts at about 53 Mins in

Oooh, those extra 20 trucks make all the difference. It's not 4.5% of their fleet, it's 5.4% ! That's won me over.

So if these trucks are never going to stop, does that mean that they're going to be driving round 120 empty billboards for a laugh, or is it possible that 24-hours a day might be a bit of an exaggeration.

This remains a fantastic deal for Stobart, and an absolutely gobsmackingly bad deal for the RFL. I'm happy to be proved wrong when all those additional sponsorships referred to above start coming in, although (a) I don't see why BETFAIR would have had to prevent those if Stobart won't, and (b) if they were going to happen, I'd have thought maybe they'd have happened by now.

I think Nigel Wood needs to be more specific and how the Stobart Deal could benefit Rugby League upwards to the tune of £2.5 million.

With my job I travel quite a lot of miles up and down the motorways and the busy time or "visible time" for Stobart Lorries is early morning or late evening, which is outside of the public commuter time window. Also the signage is showing SKY superleague on Friday Nights only, so a non RL person would be blinkered into thinking they don,t play this sport over an extensive weekend.

The package might migrate people to watch rugby league on SKY but I doubt it will put "bums on seats". For me the deal has pure "novelty value" and won't generate income, exposure. Only serious media marketing will do that, Aussie rules did this a few years back with a concentrated marketing campaign, there attendances are now sky high whilst the NRL have stagnated.

24 hour trucking is not an exagaration, its a reality in this day and age.

Take one of mine for example today , where it was and times

0300 Hull, 0600 Newcaslte, 0900 Hexham,1000 Washington, 1300 Bradford, 1700 Hull, 2300 Lutterworth and will finish back in Hull around 0400.

650 miles covered and use of the M62, A1 and M1.



Example 2 is one thats been away all week (just to show were its been)

Monday Hull to Berwick
Tuesday Berwick to Seaham to Burton Latimer to Peterboro
Weds Peterbro to Stevenage to Sandy to Doncaster to Hull
Thurs Peterboro to Trowbridge to Bristol to Swansea to Cardiff
Fri Cardiff to Erith to Bedford to Peterboro
Sat Peterboro to Hull

Those extra trucks won't make a massive difference, Roy. But, as is said in the interview, there is more involved in the deal than just new livery on the side of Stobart trucks.

I'm not saying that this is a fantastic deal for Rugby League. It isn't. But neither is Betfair's 750,000pa which, if you take the RFL statement on the deal as truth, does infer that the Betfair deal would have given them sole rights over the RL brand and SL logo.

So, if they can make up the difference lost in cash from the Betfair deal, with a plethora of smaller sponsorship deals, then the Stobart deal is the better of the two evils.

By the sound of it, after listening to that interview, it seems that the RFL are trying to develop a long-term relationship with a major brand sponsor that would lead to a better, more financially rewarding deal, in the future.

So we could end up with both money and massive national exposure from the deal we have now, and possibly a lot more in any future deal. It will still be chickenfeed compared to RU though. But gaining a lot more national exposure could help increase the sports desirability to big brand sponsors.

It's sad that RL is so far behind RU in being able to attract big brand sponsors with massive financial benefits, but that is the way it is. There was no-one offering anything like the £40 Million Aviva deal. We had two choices; the Betfair deal or the Stobart deal. In the long run, the Stobart deal is likely to be the better of the two. Forget all the fanciful nonsense on here about how much better it could be done by them. There are far too many self-appointed experts on this board commenting on something, the details of which, is known only within the boardrooms of Stobart, Betfair and the RFL.

We'll have a better idea of how good or bad this deal is when we see all these sponsors, that the RFL have promised, ploughing the extra sponsorship money in for the next three years.

Or not, as the case may be.

Whats in this for Stobart?

I could understand a betting company wanting the sponsorship as people will bet on RL matches and they could do live betting during games at half time etc so they could increase numbers betting hence making money, but a trucking company hmm

More exposure. They get a mention every time the Superleague is referred to. So they will be mentioned on the BBC and Sky pretty much every week.

There's quite a few people on here who appear to know that this is a bad deal for the sport when I don't believe we've actually tried it before. Now I don't know if it's going to be a success or not but I'm quite happy for us to try something different and something novel.

For it to work each club needs to increase their turnover by approximately £54k for us to break even with the BetFair option. That works out at just over £4k per home match which is (based on £20 admission charge) an extra 207 fans per game which is very achievable if you ask me.

If these lorries driving up and down the country are able to increase each team's attendance by more than 207 fans a game it will have served a basic purpose. Will it help attract more? Quite possibly because it's not just about attracting new fans it's about increasing the frequency of those fans coming who perhaps only go to the odd game or big game. Let's not forget that.