Solid crowds at club level as well, to be fair, not to mention the 50k they had for an ordinary mid-season league game between Quins and Leicester

Not true I'm afraid. RU was averaging over 600,000 last season compared to RL's 325,000. Some Heineken Cup matches surpassed football audiences. No SL game comes close. Only the Challenge Cup is well viewed on TV.

My source used to be an insider at SkySports but now works for the BBC.

I am sure that this is because the audience is relatively poor in the South. How often I hear "that is a game from the North", meaning we don't really care here.

And the press and TV coverage is close to non existent.

That is why the europeanisation is necessary to raise the interest in the South of England. With 2 French teams this would start becoming serious. Three is I think the minimum number for the competition to be unambiguously European. The ideal would be to have a Paris team within 10 years. Imagine the derby with the Quins. I bet that it would beat the attendance number for the Union.



With Perpignan, Toulouse and Paris plus a Welsh and hopefully an Irish team, I am ready to put my money on the table that the SL will not only catch up with a competition like the Premiership, but overtake it in terms of crowd support and media coverage.

Totally agree!

You are way off the mark here mate, try BARBS official figures for comparison.
6-12th April on Sports 1, RU got 172, 121 and 41k, RL got 270, 230 and 213k
13th -19th April on Sports1, RU got 152k against 198, 154k for RL.

The 6-12th were the big one for RU, Heineken cup.

seems the sky figures show rl is viewed more my child.

all figures in 100,000

.7 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Fri 19:55) 270
8 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Thu 19:56) 230
9 SUPER SUNDAY - THE LAST WORD (Sun 18:30) 220
10 LIVE EUROPEAN RUGBY (Sat 17:53) 213



.5 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Fri 19:30) 189
6 LIVE PREMIERSHIP RUGBY UNION (Sun 13:00) 165
7 LIVE PREMIERSHIP RUGBY UNION (Sun 15:27) 144


.Sky Sports 2
w/e 29 Mar 2009
000's
1 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Fri 19:33) 216
2 LIVE FRIDAY FIGHT NIGHT (Fri 22:00) 159
3 LIVE PRO20 INTERNATIONAL CRICKET (Sun 16:55) 138
4 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Sat 17:55) 107
5 LIVE PRO20 INTERNATIONAL CRICKET (Fri 15:55) 82
6 LIVE EUROPEAN TOUR GOLF (Sat 13:00) 77
7 LIVE PREMIERSHIP RUGBY UNION (Sun 12:00) 75
8 LIVE PREMIERSHIP RUGBY UNION (Sun 14:2icon_cool.gif 73
9 LIVE GREYHOUND RACING (Tue 19:30) 62
10 INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL LIVE (Sun 21:55) 55



trust in me my child I am the truth

Thanks for the numbers.





In general, where is it possible to get these audience numbers?

As someone who watches both codes I've got to agree totally.
RU has slowly been getting its on field act together, whilst RL has continued to change for changes sake (or a minority TV channels sake - depends how cynical you are

).

Its like tryig to compare the Football Championship with The Conference cause thats the difference in money being paid out between top flight RU and Championsip RL, at club level below the RU top flight the play is dire the players are mostly 'ham and eggers' so compare like with like o don't bother.
Anyway its a personal thing most RL supportres wouldn cross the road to watch RL and visa versa. Me I wouldnt waste time on RU at club level nd only just at nternational, bu the super 14's is a god comp.

That's fair enough. Embarassingly, I apparently had my facts wrong after hearing from my mate - what he actually said is the Heineken Cup Final attracted around 600,000 he thought.



Nevertheless, those viewing figures are much lower for RL than I was expecting and I suspect the CC attracts far greater audiences.

Interestingly you don't quote Premiership football?

I coach league and union, though I don't like watching union... there are occasionally good games, but the good-to-bad ratio in union is around 1 in 6 at best, while the ratio in league is 9-1 (for my money, anyway).

Union does have one massive advantage though, at both beginners and vets level. It is very scrappy by nature... ball to ground in the tackle so set up around competing for the ball on the floor and in working at the pace of the slowest players; offside mark so close to the play (back foot of the ruck) as denies space; kicking massively rewarded.... which means that the actual skill and fitness levels needed to play the game can be very low indeed...

...but as long as you have two matched teams of equally low ability, it doesn't matter. You get an enjoyable game to play, and the tension that accompanies any sport of a close result.

The women's team I coach would, at times, really struggle to play league at all. Their handling isn't great, their tackling isn't great, their willingness to break the line is questionable.... not for everyone, there are some great players... but for some. At league, it would be a contstant procession of knock-ons and teams going backwards on their own sets of six. But at union, they compete in meaningful and exciting games.

The same goes for vets rugby... I know RL seniors is looking to address this... but Union players often play into their fifties and sixties, in age-banded competitions but under full union rules. When was the last time you saw an amateur RL player over 45? There's usually one or two aged nutters at each club, but certainly not a team's worth.

Premiership soccer gets abot 6x our audience, if only we could get 1/6th of their deal

people who enjoy watching Union must accept watching crap slow sports as OK. You get the odd Union game OK to watch but most of the time the skills and vision on show are less than in an under 10s League youth game!

Union has got away with lieing about most things it does for over 100 hundred years. It also has the old boys connection which push/force it on to people no matter what-Look at the BBC and media in general despite crowds often being less than League. Union is only strong at the International level and where it makes its money from. Even then theres about 8 Nations who are of similar standard then the standards drop steeply!

Many Union people know very little about the game and how to play it, its history etc yet its a bandwagon which brings in sadly millions to a sport boring as dish water which has a history of lieing, bribery and getting in to bed with dictators and bad regimes. Caucescu (Romania) Apartheid South Africa and Vichy France for example. Even today in Europe Union looks to stop people playing League in places like Greece, Serbia, Czech Republic etc.

Once had a conversation with a woman who had gone down to Wales to visit the Union club her dad had come from years ago to find her dads name and photo blacked out of team photo.

.Sky Sports 1
w/e 19 Apr 2009
000's
1 LIVE FORD FOOTBALL SPECIAL-MATCH (Sun 13:00) 733
2 GILLETTE SOCCER SATURDAY (Sat 15:00) 350
3 LIVE FOOTBALL LEAGUE (Mon 12:00) 341
4 LIVE FOOTBALL LEAGUE (Mon 19:30) 298
5 GILLETTE SOCCER SPECIAL (Mon 14:30) 209
6 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Sat 17:55) 198
7 LIVE PREMIER LEAGUE DARTS (Thu 19:00) 181
8 SOCCER AM (Sat 09:00) 179
9 LIVE SUPER LEAGUE (Fri 19:30) 154
10 LIVE PREMIERSHIP RUGBY UNION (Sun 15:35) 152



All figures are from the barb website

AS THE ABOVE FIGURES SHOW WE ARE WAY AHAED OF UNION ON FIGURES,but only get a smaller contract

With football we are not that far off them but light year behind the contract deals

Do the rfl know what figures they get ?

Regarding union v league each to there own two different sports

Each to there own.
You sound like someone off the VT with that kind of tirade against Union



I'll just highlight one piece for you and say one name, R.Lewis - July 2008 BBC1 Look North West

.

Union has lied about paying people for well over a century and thus not paying Tax etc. It has lied and bribed town officials in France to stop people playing Rugby League. People still try and do this in Europe today. Union was in bed with Apartheid in South Africa, Caucescu in Romania and the Vichy Government.
Rugby Union rubbed out of its records people who trained with Rugby League Clubs. It is a sport still heavily reliant on its class structure. I hate Union due to the way it has consistantly tried to stop people playing my sport. If you go on Planet Rugby and some other Union sites you will see the way many Unionites look down on League and refer us to Mungoes and Apemen. Sorry but I have no respect for Rugby Union and hope it suffers in this credit Crunch time.

could not agree more...what union did to french rugby league after the war was nothing short of criminal.

have the english union ever apologised f0r over 100 years of discrimination.

until that happens i will never forgive, and yes i am jealous and bitter about unions infrastructure and crowd popularity at international level.
that is because the class structure is alive and well in the uk.

if you sent 15 pigs onto twickers wearing an england shirt, called it an international they would still get a full house

All this discrimination and perpetuation of the class structure will be sorted when we have a change of government!

So the RFL have learned from RU how to lie.

In between the Millennium Magic I switched to the RU. The game was Munster v Leinster. There was an incredible world-record 82,208 attendance for a club match. This shows that RL should not underestimate the draw of the game no matter how much us RL fans find in boring to watch.

However in the few minutes I watched the nastier side of the game was on show with a close up of eye gouging, something thankfully not in our game.

My eyes were opened, and not in a good way, when I moved down to London to work in the '80s. I got involved with Ealing ARLFC, now no more, and a lot of our players also played union. They lived in fear of someone from their club finding out they'd played League, because that would get them banned sine die. They could have been professional footballers, professional cricketers, professional golfers, or whatever, but amateur Rugby League players, never. Things have changed now, but that experience of irrational discrimination has coloured my own POV for good, I think. Still, if you are going to have a prejudice, it's a pretty harmlesss one.

Apparently John Hopoate is coming to the UK looking for a contract. Nobody's paying him yet, he's going to work his own passage.

He will be putting the 'feelers' out then?

He has his fingers in a number of pies, that's all I'm saying