Now that is funny







And? If that should come about who'll be bothered apart from a few Bulls' fans? It certainly won't have any effect on SL, nor much on the Championship come to that. Maybe Bradford would then cut their cloth accordingly, as they should've done a while ago?

Keep sticking French clubs in SL? Nope.

So let's shove in Toulouse and - I dunno, Pia? - and consequently wave goodbye to - I dunno, Wakefield? Salford? Widnes? Who would you suggest chucking out of the top level, and then who would you select to chuck out of the Championship and League 1 with the knock-on effect?

We want to improve international RL, we're not going to do that by removing top-level UK teams and decreasing our pool of elite players. One of the reasons we all cite for Australian dominance is their huge player pool, yet some people want to 'improve' things by removing clubs? Odd. And don't trot out the argument that it would concentrate our best players, increase intensity, etc - it wouldn't. A smaller pool means just that - fewer players. RL cannot afford to go down that road. Bonkers.

Then the fans. So you chuck a few teams out of SL, you can wave goodbye to a significant percentage of their fans, many of whom are lost to the sport forever. That's not just a few thousand existing fans, it's their families, kids, the following generations. RL is simply not strong enough to be turning fans away at any level whatsoever. Bonkers.

In addition you then have 3 teams bringing no more than perhaps a dozen fans to away games, and considerable additional cost for UK fans to travel to France 3 times. Of course this has been discussed before and a lot of fans think this isn't important - because our clubs can afford any scale of decrease in revenues from ticket, hospitality and refreshments sales of course, and a poorer atmosphere at games with no visiting fans is healthy for the game. Bonkers.

Wellsy13 says "gradual, sustained growth" - yes, absolutely, but not as he describes. Growth needs to be from the bottom up - grassroots, kids, schools, etc. Not a pot of money, a squad of Antipodeans and into SL you go - no, grow strong roots organically and work your way up. If you must aim for SL then start in League 1 and earn your spot, build solid foundations and a fan base along the way. I'd sooner the French developed their own league but if we're going to let them into SL, let's do it right. We've had too many failures and need to learn from them.

We all want French RL to grow but for me they need to do it on their own turf. A strong TV deal is vital, investment is key, yes the RFL and SL can help but not at the expense of existing clubs. I don't have the solution but more French teams in SL at the expense of British teams isn't the answer.

We can sit and twiddle our thumbs waiting for TV stations to pump millions into a league they're clearly not interested in, or we can build clubs and competitions they may want to buy into. No brainer to me.

More players does not mean better talent. If we want to compete why the Aussies, we need as strong a competition as possible to build better players. There needs to be a balance.

I think 12 English clubs is the most we could ever handle. I'd argue 10 would be ideal. I'd prefer to see the league increase if we were to include more clubs, but money dictates.

Is there scope for French soccer clubs to be encouraged to partner with RL sides?

Even if it's not in terms of direct cash support, I would imagine the expertise and promotional clout afforded by the likes of Monaco, Mille etc could be of good use to some of the French RL clubs struggling to generate media and spectator interest.

It seems to me that this thread contains a lot of examples of people talking about how they want the world to be, rather than how the world is.

We are struggling to attract sufficient funding in this country to maintain a single full-time division of RL, yet we are vastly better resourced than the French, with a much higher domestic profile (even if that profile is woeful). The idea that there can be a full-time pro French league is laughable. It's not going to happen, short of some French billionaire suddenly deciding that what he really wants to blow his wealth on is Rugby a XIII.

So anyone who says that the future is a French league, or that Catalans can somehow be the kernel of a full-time French competition, is just indulging fantasies.

So the question is simply this : do you want there to be any professional full-time rugby league in France ? If you do, then the only league where that is even remotely possible is the super league, and the only way of realistically making that happen is to simply place the French clubs in SL, because the semi-pro leagues are not so much a gateway to SL for overseas clubs as a portcullis, moat and murder holes preventing their entry.

If you don't care about French RL, and are happy for it to continue to wither and die, then the best thing to do is to say that you really care about it, but there's no place for French teams in Super League. Super League is the only northern hemisphere possibility for full-time pro rugby league. Anything else is hot air, wishful thinking, or - if I was being cynical - short-sighted self-interest on the part of small-town northern clubs who'd rather the game died everywhere outside the M62 than reduced their chances of scrabbling an occasional season in the top-flight living vicariously and parasitically off the bigger clubs they have no chance of ever challenging.

If you want French full-time pro RL to survive, then it has to involve French clubs in SL. That is the ONLY real option.

Give this guy a medal for talking sense.

People want us to have a bigger and better international game yet many wouldn't want French and Welsh teams in SL. If the likes of those countries are going to get bigger and better then they need a serious and strong presence in the club game.

Absolutely. Losing one of the best supported clubs, home and away, miraculously has no effect.

On your "logic" ([size=85my apologies to Logic, I know it's a stretch but[/size...) nobody would be bothered apart from a few Wigan, Saints, Wire, Hull, KR etc fans if all those teams were replaced by French teams to "widen" SL. Yes, I can see that.

A SL comprising (say) Wigan plus eleven French sides would really sell the game, raise playing standards, and make it rich!




You know I have missed the regular drip of moronic Bradford-haters who think dredging up that now banal metaphor makes them sound intelligent, so thanks for the laugh, but it's not a pop-at-Bradford thread, it's a French Teams In SL thread so stick to topic, there's a good boy.

Exactly right. The demotion of Bradford (and allowing London to die on its feet) were two examples of incredible short-sightedness by RL management, other clubs, and many fans.

We do not have enough clubs capable of putting together 10,000 averages to fill even a 12-club super league. Bradford were one of those clubs. Yet we booted them out, and as you say, if they don't come straight back, then they'll probably never come back. Yet the bad news is that the same championship clubs which argued so vociferously for the rejection of licensing and the return of "promotion" seem to have been too dumb to notice that the tortuous system we have now put in place will effectively guarantee that there will be no promotion. The gulf between even the bottom SL clubs like Wakefield, Salford and Widnes, and the best the semi-pro championship can offer, is vast.

Yet we heard the same voices saying the same things when Bradford and London were killed off : "we really care about RL in those places". "They need to build from the bottom up". "They can earn their way back".

No. None of this will happen. Fantasy.

People seem to like over-stating how big a club Bulls are. If they'd had the same last 20 years as Hull FC for example their crowds would be averaging somewhere around 5-6k, not the 10-11k that Hull get. It's a big city but the Bulls are only a big club when they're winning grand finals and c cup finals....even then they never seemed to bring many fans down to London when compared to the likes of Wigan and Leeds.

Bulls were given a lot of support from the RFL, they can't afford to throw money at clubs like the NRL do at Gold Coast, there's no big pot of money put to one side to prop up failing clubs.

Right now they're in division two, have sold more season tickets than some SL teams (whilst charging more than they ever did when they were in SL - you know cutting their cloth and all that), have recorded one home attendance of nearly 5K against a Whitehaven team that brought 12 away supporters and have helped Leigh and Fev post massive attendances at their grounds. On all 3 occasions beating at least 2 Superleague games for attendance.

TBH if anything people seem to over state how important other clubs still in Superleague are to the league.

Not to mention clubs like Leigh, Featherstone, Halifax etc. that would be pretty peed off to not be allowed to see how the results of their hard work and continued support stacks up against the not so big boys in Superleague.

BTW over the last few years when Catalans have been one of the top teams the French national team has gone backwards. On Saturday you could count the number of French Nationals in the first 13 on one hand. So it's not working in develping international competition if you go by results and not romantic ideals.

As for this incorrect notion that the RFL propped up the Bulls financially it's total garbage. As was proved in the high court this week. Strange how RFL aren't available to comment now though.

I disagree on two counts :

1) Bulls were (and still could be) a very big club. They have a populous catchment area, a high-profile local recognition factor, and a proven track record of bringing in regular 5-figure crowds. Of course their crowds declined when they hit the skids. Saints and Wigan would equally see significant cuts in crowds if they were languishing uncompetitively at the foot of the table. The difference is that when the Bulls WERE competitive, they did bring in the numbers. There are several clubs in SL now who can't get a 5 figure crowd even though they ARE competitive.

2) The issue with the Bulls was not some Greek tragedy where nothing could be done and the decline was inevitable. What brought down the Bulls - as ever in our woefully-administered sport - was rank bad management at the club over several administrations, under the negligent eye of an RFL which watched as one of its prime assets was destroyed through incompetence and more than a hint of something worse. I'm sure some of the more clued-up Bulls fans would be able to give chapter and verse on some of the goings-on.

This didn't have to happen - it wasn't just an absence of cash. It happened because people at the club made it happen. But it also happened because people at the RFL (and of course in the other clubs) allowed it to happen. Some other clubs were even quite happy to see it happen because it removed a local rival for a place at the top table. The Bulls weren't just an asset to the Bulls fans - they were an asset to our sport, and the game's top flight is much the poorer for the absence of another genuinely-competitive "Big" club drawing 5-figure crowds.

Someone earlier in this thread said that the RFL doesn't ever appear to have a plan which runs further than the end of the next season. I tend to agree with that. It's simply a cop-out to say "there's no pot of money". There IS a pot of money - a sizable pot from SKY. They don't have a separate contract with each of the clubs - it goes to the game, and we could have been much more interventionist about how to distribute it. It is long overdue for our game to accept that we are far too small and weak to manage a winner-takes-all-devil-take-the-hindmost system. We need to identify our assets, protect them, and build from that strong base. Instead, we just stumble from one big idea to the next, hoping that each will be the magic wand which will suddenly turn Featherstone into another Wigan, or cause a SKY executive to have a stroke and double our cash settlement when there's no competition for our coverage, or magically drop a fully-functioning French professional league out of Nigel Wood's backside.

The only times I felt semi-confident that RL might have a chance of developing into anything more than a withering regional curiosity was when Neil Tunnicliffe produced "Framing the Future", which was actually an incredibly far-sighted document when read in hindsight, and in the early days of Richard Lewis's tenure when he was expending energy knocking heads together at clubs (and at BARLA) to try and get people to see that the game's interests were not the same as a hundred individual clubs' separate interests. Since Lewis lost interest, and Wood started running the show, I just feel that the game is not growing but shrinking, and the future looks less and less positive. They're much happier in the boardrooms of a limited number of championship clubs, mind you.

I wonder if the Aussie's are as introvert as some on here when it comes to the NZ Warriors?

Catalans are one of the top 4-6 clubs in the comp coming from absolutely nothing 10 years ago...many of these historic championship clubs have been trying and failing for decades. There is defiantly a hunger for SL in the south of France. Not big enough as yet for a full pro league but expand a few clubs into the SL and maybe over a couple of decades one may organically grow.

Do nothing and a French league is nothing but a fantasy.

If Toulouse are anywhere near as strong a club as Catalans the SL would be a much stronger league, with a top European city on its résumé.

Barring a miracle Bradford will not be promoted and so will be set back years.

So whoever championed promotion & relegation well done on killing one of our most well supported club. Just to serve some small club chairmen and a section of our support who don't want to have to drive longer than 45 mins to get to an away game

Basically, I agree. .

1. There was a much higher chance of a new club entering and remaining in SL under the licensing system than there is under this contrived new system. It's just ridiculous to believe that even the best of the championship's semi-pros would beat the worst of the SL's full-time pros in an on-field competition.

2. We've also lost the ability to plan to improve or bring fresh blood into the league, and this thread gives a really good example of that : Toulouse (or indeed anyone) may come to us with a multi-million-pound backer, a top stadium and an average crowd offering in the top half of SL, plus the various spin-offs of a second French club in terms of attractiveness to sponsors, advertisers, media etc. And we can do nothing except say "Here you go lads, spend three years losing hundreds of thousands of pounds playing Hemel Hempstead and Batley on muddy fields in front of a few dozen hardy souls, with no interest, glamour or selling points for your domestic audience. Then, when you've firmly established yourself in the minds of potential supporters as a mediocre mostly-amateur club playing in second-rate competitions, we might give you one shot at beating a full-time pro team which is impossibly better than you could be given the restrictions we'll place on you, and when you lose, we'll shrug and say at least it's fair."

3. Because the only criteria for staying in SL is now to be able to beat a bunch of semi-pros at the end of the year, then I think we can safely kiss goodbye to much of the work which went into stadium improvement, youth development, and many of the other key off-field activities which licensing forced clubs to - albeit reluctantly in many cases - pay attention to. Wakefield and Castleford will still be announcing the "plans" for their new stadia when I'm long in my grave, and Saints, Wigan and Leeds will still be providing a hugely disproportionate number of the professional players from their youth set-ups because half the clubs will divert cash from theirs into ensuring that they have sufficient also-ran well-travelled pros to ensure there's really no chance of a shock when they beat the championship guys at the end of the year.

Yet there are still people connected to championship sides out there who think this is "bringing back promotion and relegation". No it isn't. We've dumped a system which genuinely allowed clubs to aspire to and achieve membership of the SL, in favour of a system which effectively establishes a closed shop of the current clubs, the price of which is a few hoped-for larger gates against the least attractive super league sides at the back end of the season. See how well those gates hold up when the inevitable one-sided hammerings of the semi-pros by the pros begin.

If you think new league structure was brought in because a few of the Championship clubs and their chairmen were upset, you are sadly mistaken. The championship clubs had been largely ignored by Super League and the RFL for a number of years, any moaning and groaning from the chairmen fell on deaf ears. The change was brought in by the RFL with the majority support of the SL clubs, probably because the franchise format and the way it was implemented was failing to do what it had set out, mainly providing a safe environment in which the SL clubs could grow without worrying about relegation. The blame lies with poorly implemented franchise system and the poorly run SL clubs that couldn't thrive despite the closed shop. They brought it on themselves!

Agree with that in general though I do think the yearning for P&R to return was at least part of the reason for the change. Otherwise they'd have just changed the licensing format.

I definitely agree that the licence system was poorly implemented. The whole reason for licensing was to provide an environment in which clubs could invest longer term rather than just avoiding relegation and to raise standards at all clubs.
I'd argue it was relatively successful in the 1st point but failed in the 2nd.

It needed to be a longer term licence (5 years or ideally, in my opinion, 10) and have far, far more in-depth analysis and assessments of clubs in their entirety, along with concrete, measurable targets in several key areas for all clubs. The clubs that don't meet their targets, including on-field performance, would be at-risk of losing their licence and would go into a decision process that involved applications for a licence from Championship clubs for the next licence period.

Missing the point, I think. While we may disagree about whether the championship clubs were happy with this change, (it was also very controversial amongst the SL clubs and certainly didn't have unanimous unqualified support. Some of the top clubs are pretty frustrated at the failure of some other SL clubs to do anything other than effectively sponge off the top table without ever contributing any challenge), what's happened here is that we've moved from a system where it was possible to add clubs, and where there was at least some pressure on existing clubs to sort their act out, to a situation where there is no pressure on the current SL clubs at all now, and no way of adding clubs - no matter how well financed, or how attractive for other reasons.

I'm not blaming the championship. This is just another example of short-term reactive thinking from the RFL. No plan at all to develop the game. Just shift the deckchairs around and hope the same clubs playing in the same fixtures in the same stadiums with the same catchment area, will somehow produce a different result this time.

the Bulls still aren't a big club, getting slightly better attendances than the worst SL clubs doesn't make you a big club. It makes you a medium sized club. Only getting 10k crowds when you're dominating the comps doesn't make you a big club. Playing in a big city doesn't make you a big club (London/Salford anyone?). They're a good, valuable club but I don't see why they should be considered more valuable to SL than any other middle ranking pro club.

They're not. But we don't have many clubs capable of being a middle-ranking SL club.

Too harsh on the Bulls by far. Essentially, the realistic position for us in terms of clubs is that the big clubs are those who in the last twenty years have drawn 10k regularly, produced competitive teams, generated decent numbers of young players for the pro game, and attracted significant sponsorship. That's a short list :

Wigan
Saints
Leeds
Warrington
Hull FC
Bradford

Then you have a group of clubs who produce solid gates (7500+), can occasionally hit a purple patch and take games off the big clubs (or even put together a good season like Huddersfield), but usually fall short in several areas and are thus never quite serious contenders, although they have clearly shown potential that they might, one day, with sufficient effort, make it to "big club" territory.

Huddersfield
Hull KR
Catalans

Then you've got the also-rans. The clubs who exist to give Sky commentators something to get excited about in occasional underdog upsets, but otherwise just make up the numbers, and nobody seriously expects them to either start drawing large crowds, or to seriously challenge the big clubs.

Widnes
Salford
Cas
Wakefield

Uncomfortable reading for them. Some of their fans will deny this. But the bottom line is that even when Cas managed to put together a good run which lasted nearly a whole season, they not only rolled over and died at the end, but they also couldn't keep that team together for more than a year, and their average crowd in their best ever professional era season was less than 200 greater than Bradford, in their worst ever super league season.

Yet those four also-rans, who in twenty years of full-time professionalism have shown no sign at all of truly troubling the big clubs, are still infinitely stronger on and off the field than anything in the championship (except maybe Bradford). London Broncos circa 1996 may well have been a genuine and exciting contender to become a big club, but the current incarnation is an embarrassing slow-motion car-crash. The rest are not so much semi-pro clubs as amateur clubs who pay their players beer money. There isn't one of them who, if they entered SL, would stand the remotest chance of challenging the big clubs in the next half-century, and the game probably won't last that long if we carry on as we are. Below that, you're looking at essentially amateur rugby played at a decent national level.

That's it. That's rugby league in the entire northern hemisphere at this point. 6 big clubs, one of whom we're currently in the process of killing off. 3 clubs who might make it at some point to be big clubs. And a whole bunch of clubs who will never be able to challenge the current big 5 on or off the field. This is why Sky think our entire sport is worth a couple of premiership games, and why we'll be moaning until the cows come home about the lack of media coverage. Because even those who know about our game think there's only 6 places in the whole country where it's practised with serious and significant intent : three Lancashire towns and three Yorkshire cities, one of which may be about to disappear. Maybe Catalans will pull it together this year and shake it up a bit - I think they've got a real chance of doing so if they keep Carney and Tonga fit. That'd raise a few sleepy eyebrows in the media and amongst sponsors. But otherwise, this year will be business as usual. The 8-8-8 thing is just some bizarre and pointless ritual which won't change a damn thing.

Sorry. I know I'm ranting. But I find it so incredibly frustrating that in a sport so desperately short of serious clubs with serious support and serious potential, we're quite happy to watch one of our half-dozen assets die, while at the same time, the knee-jerk response to a potential addition to that middle or top group of clubs, is met with a wall of negativity, and the firm thudding of the drawbridge being pulled up as we tell them all the reasons why we can't possibly do anything which might in some way harm the chances of an existing also-ran club to sponge more cash from the diminishing number of decent clubs we have left.

Whilst I have a lot of respect for Roy Haggarty. On this point I feel he too is guilty of what he accuses others of doing.

Which is wishing for things to be different to what they actually are.

Lets take the Bradford Myth to start with. Relegation did not kill Bradford. Bradford owners killed Bradford Bulls. As anyone can see the Bradford Bulls Club as was ended many seasons ago with the end of the owning company. This was in the promised land days of no promotion and no relegation. In fact the lack of P&R seemed to do very little to stop clubs dicing with financial ruin.

Then some how London got thrown into the mix, stating it was short sighted to get rid of London. Once again missing the point that London was not bought into long long long before P&R came back on the scene. London had been in the top flight for decades and blaming heartland clubs for the demise of London is in my opinion completely mis-placed.

Now lets go with the assumption of a new French club to expand the league. This is wishful thinking too. If we take out a heartland club and get rid of P&R and drop in a French club. There is absolutely zero evidence to say that the heartland club will continue pull in the crowds as they would in SL or in the Championship with the hope of promotion.

There is also nothing to suggest that the new French club would not be another PSG, Wrexham, South Wales, Gateshead. No evidence they will attract more fans, or will do anything other than be a roll of the dice whilst in the mean time cutting off those who are already loyal customers.

It's similar to banks who offer deals to new customers only. Except in this case there will not be an inertia from the old customers to stay but an active push to force them away.

If there is good evidence to parachute a club in, fine parachute them in give them a 3- 5 year dispensation. But in the end they need to be competitive, which means competing which includes the heights of winning and the lows of losing.

No one goes to watch sport just to have a predetermined result. A lack of P&R is a predetermined result on a systematic basis. There is no point looking at the NRL and NFL and saying they can do it. It's comparing different sporting cultures again wishing for something to be what it is not (which is exactly the same as wishing for a pro french league).

I don't think we will ever convince each other of the merits of each others point of view, but I know for sure, if Saints were relegated with no hope of promotion then the club would be as good as dead, they would not go to Wigan to watch RL. They would just leave the game.

The question is are we running a sport, where on the field performance matters or just a cartel where what ever you do on or off the field will make little to no difference?

Great post Roy, enraptures my views entirely. I just don't get why people can't get it!

Killing Bradford for the sake of P&R, and to totally abandon expansion is ridiculous.

The problem would, in my view, be identical whether 3, 5 or 10 year licences were issued: half a dozen clubs opting for safety in numbers by all failing to meet numerous criteria.

I think we're possibly talking at cross purposes here. I actually did say that it was rank bad management which killed Bradford (and London), not P&R. My point is simply that we do not have sufficient assets as a sport to take a laissez-faire attitude to who rises and who falls. Because those who fall - through incompetence - may well be our crown jewels, while those who rise, temporarily, may well be bottom feeders coming up for a brief gulp of air. The sport is increasingly looking too small to sustain full-time professionalism. We are entirely dependent upon Sky funding, and we are offering them now just 5 big clubs (all of whom are equivalent in support, but not budget, to top of League 1/bottom of championship in soccer). That's not a huge offer.

I accept your point about the risks of new clubs. However, in a sense, I think the fate of those expansion clubs underlines my point about how we can no longer afford this c'est la vie attitude to the game as a whole. None of those clubs involved the RFL saying : "we want a club there, and we'll invest the time and money and expertise to make damn sure it works". Instead, we simply found some likely lad (and some of them - in Wales - came into the "did you actually meet these guys before you signed the cheque?" category) willing to start up an operation, and then told them that although they had lots of problems and issues and challenges which exceeded anything faced by existing clubs, they weren't getting any more cash, any more assistance, any more central commitment. Here's your share of the sky money (or not, memorably), now do your best. If it goes toes up, then such is life. Contrast that with the approach the NRL has taken (and is about to take again), and you start to see why Catalans are a blooming miracle, while Crusaders, Gateshead and London were predictable.

The situation is, however, that we are now officially stagnant. Our entire strategy for growth is that the same clubs in the same places might somehow be able to attract a few more hundred species each from the same towns to watch them. That's it. That's what we're offering Sky. It's also what we're offering future potential participants. Other than that - nothing. There are only four fully professional team sports in this country : soccer, rugby union, rugby league and cricket. Three of those have establishment backing to one extent or another - large participation, plenty of assets in terms of grounds, a slavishly attentive media, good connections with business, and the sort of sponsorship deals which make you think the finance director must have been bladdered when he signed the deal. We have none of that. We've traded on the fact that we offer pretty consistently good entertainment value on the field, but also a decent amount of hype, experimentation, and not a small amount of smoke and mirrors about how widespread our support is (London played such an important role in helping us disguise the reality of where we are, and I suspect we will suffer for their absence off the field). We promised international teams in the same league, expansion into new frontiers, spreading the gospel and a bright future for the greatest game. Much of that may have been guff, but sport is entertainment, and we were selling a positive, confident, expansionist message. But now we're shutting up shop. This is your lot : three Lancashire towns, two Yorkshire cities now, and a bunch of also-rans. Toulouse ? Don't call us, we'll call you.

You're right that any expansion might be a risk. But the alternative now stares us in the face. The same teams, playing the same matches, getting the same results. Until someone at Sky decides that there just isn't enough interest in selling to that audience, and pulls the plug. We don't have the advantages our competitor sports have. We have to fight for our right to even exist, and we always have had to. That's meant taking knocks and bumps and getting back up - that's our game on and off the field. This season, I feel like for the first time since super league started, we've given up that fight. We've circled the wagons, sat down, and are just hoping something turns up. I don't think it will.