[urlhttp://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/feb/04/marwan-koukash-salford-rfl-sky[/url

Knock yourselves out...

Well, you cant accuse him of being shy and apart from the bit about Salford contesting the GF, he's said what many others think.
Good on him !

It will end in tears.

A few defeats and the pressure will be on Noble and the team.

Just to clarify a point in that article; Koukash didn't dismiss promotion and relegation, he dismissed the version of it that has come up. He singled out the Leigh club for praise and said they should be given a chance to get to Superleague, but feels that the new system weighs too much against the championship teams in the middle 8.

First class clown.

Lost any remaining credibility (did he have any anyway?) when he suggested Noballs for England coach.

The general tone of that I agree with, it's only what most of us say on here but with the added bonus of being in the loop.

The RL moonie community rarely accepts outsiders into the fold... particularly those who emit opinions of a critical nature.

I don't think he's right in being so dismissive of an extra 300,000 a year. It's a lot of money, and in all seriousness, if we had of moved in 3 years time to bt sport for the increase were getting with sky, most (including koukash) would be singing it's praises. How much did we seriously expect it to increase? We like the "what ifs" a lot at the moment, but when you focus on what has happened to what we got it looks a lot better. The fantasy situation these nay Sayers have in their heads, is just that. You jump with the first girl in bed, but you don't not do it because you might have a chance with a supermodel in 3 years time. A closer analogy would be you don't dump your girlfriend because a hot girl moves into town, but doesn't know if she's staying.

He is another who thinks he can run the rfl, and at least some of what he says is politically motivated from that. It does further ridicule the position of lenaghan though, by announcing he voted against it and lenaghan voted for it.

Yes you do.

Every time i read the good Doctors view i think of boom and bust, with him taking his ball with him and the game left to pick up the pieces

The reason why 200 million sky deal is phenomenal and we were right to bite there hand off is because i don't know of any other broadcaster that has ever shown any interest in showing so many live games of rugby league and are willing to pay over 1 million for it.

Point 1. The Sky deal and the League Deal

The length of deal although securing 5 years of rugby it locks out any potential new player expecially BT, how do we know they wouldn't have offered more?
The short notice so that the club's can't arrange any form of cogent argument.
How do Warrington get an international blue chip company as sponsor and yet the league they play in, no one has heard of them? Why can't we get cclubs more involved in this, surely it's in their interest?

Point 2. Steve McNamara

Can anyone argue with that at all, seriously?

He's bang on the money there

Couldn't agree more, I predict no teams will get promoted in the first couple of years and the pressure will be on for further reforms. At least it will offer maximum protection to any SL team that goes into admin from ever been relegated.

If he puts his time and attention into being a clown I have no doubt he would be first class.

He did mention Brian Noble - well he has coached GB,hasn't he? He also mentioned Shaun Wane - as he did on his Twitter account.Anderson and some bloke named McDermott.......''because thay have won things...''


Carry on...

Are you serious? I'm not surprised you dont know of any other broadcasters that have ever shown an interest in Super League, because as far as I am aware they havent been given the opportunity to. How many of us knew the RFL were renegotiating tv deals with Sky for such a length of time? There should have been a concise tendering process undertaken, with enough time for all relevant parties (including club chairmain) to evaluate submissions and vote on which was most suitable to move the game forward.

Instead the chairman get a call the day before, asking for them to attend a meeting and vote on something they know very little about.

It may well be a phenomenal deal and had the RFL undertaken a proper tendering process, the results may well have been the same but the point is we will never know.

He has indeed, what did he win that Mcnamara hasn't ?

I've just listened to some of his press conference. It's a pity there aren't at least half a dozen Marwan Koukash's operating within the sport. One is definitely not enough.

You can't tender something that's not up for tender. You can renegotiate and extend. So, to be sure going to tender is the right thing to do, you have to be sure of 2 things:

1. The major competitor, who is driving the price up in the current renogotiation is still going to be present and active in 3 years.

2. The competitors is definitely going to be willing to outbid the present offer on the table.


Can you say with certainty either would be true? I couldn't. Considering they paid 152m for union, and a lot has been made about viewing figures vs advertising category's there are question marks bt would of gone higher than they did for union, which the sky deal beats (ish). And that's assuming that the harsh realitys of competing in the sports broadcast market doesn't kick in. Bt sport looks very attractive currently, but what happens to viewing figures when they start charging subscriptions? (Which they will do)

What's to stop the rfl running down the clock to tender, but bt sport to slow down purchasing, and then sky to hold us over a barrel and only sign the deal late for less money like they did in the early 00's?

Just as an aside, do or are any other Super League clubs having an official 2014 media launch? It's a first for a Salford and the whole event is being heralded by the media moguls on social networking. Apart from the aforementioned press conference, the team also took part in a public training session underneath the big screens on the Media City piazza.

No doubt the press will have a field day with this and we'll see many column inches filled with talk of Marwan Koukash, Salford Red Devils, Super League and the RFL tomorrow.

I'm fairly certain he was British coach for our last two wins over Australia. Something we can only dream of at present.

I understand it was a renegotiation and in order to tender (without knowing the details of the contract with Sky) I imagine the RFL would have needed to wait until they were in the final 18-12 months of their contract. As I said, the deal may be a phenominal one but we wont know because we appear to have taken the first offer Sky have tabled and ran with it. On the flip side from your comments, if BT Sports grow from strength to strength and offered competition to Sky during a tendering process who is to say the deal couldnt have been substancially more?

Hull had their media launch on-board a P&O Ferry for years when they sponsored us, but don't think we've done anything this year, apart from a kit launch back in October/November in Hull City Centre. Good to see Salford making use of the BBC being on their door step though.

What's a club media launch?

What trophies were they in the final of?

It's all based on IF's . So he's definately caught the RL bug.

Seriously people were complaining that the RFL had not announced a league sponsor for a couple of weeks, now they are complaining that a TV deal has been done too early.

The other option is wait 3 years only to find BT value RL at about £100million.
SKY outbid them and offer £120 million.

How much over the £200+million does koukash or anyone else think RL could get??? Seriously.

That's £40million a year
with current viewers averaging 150,000 for RL. and assuming every single one of those viewers gets SKY SPORT purely for RL (which they don't).

SKY could be running SL as a loss leader. Now given BT sports has far fewer viewers, how much more of a loss leader would they need to put RL at to just bid the same as SKY.

This takes nothing like the running costs into account for putting on the broadcasts. SKY are there to make money not run a charity. I think BT will be re thinking Rugby Unions deal too and I doubt it will be up given the number of viewers they have on board.

This is the problem though isn't it, we don't know how much negotiation has gone on, it may of been the first offer that came out of the blue, it may of been months worth of negotiation by the rfl. I doubt even the clubs know how many rounds of negotiation the rfl went through to get this offer. It could be 1 it could be 100. I remember a story being published in November time where the rfl talked about how they were going to restate negotiations with sky now and get a fairer deal. We all took it with a pinch of salt at the time. It may well of been well underway then, and this is months worth of back and forth.

As for bt sport going from strength to strength, it may well do, and become a serious competitor. But how long is enough to know they will be a long term consistent partner? 5 years? 10 years? I'd understand the argument far more at the end of this contract in 8 years time, but right now, they're as risky as a new company and it will take more than 3 years to see how serious they are!