I guess that also depends where IMG decide to place London. The gradings are due soon. There has to be an argument the previous grading may drop. Category C in League 1 is looking feasible. That would get headlines, IMG's London strategy going as badly as possible.

Very quickly, unless someone can assure the players who wish to stay that a) there's an offer they will accept and b) there will be a club to honour it. If not, the players will soon be signing elsewhere, both RU and RL. Once that happens the club is doomed. Unless someone "investor" comes in with stupid money to drag free agents in from all over the shop. Which wouldn't exactly be a very sustainable start. That's the realistic deadline

If it was football the legal deadline would be the AGM of the club's league, as membership is confirmed there. I'd expect that to be next month some time.

Having been in at its birth, It has only been the last few years that I seriously thought i'd be in at its death.

Hope nobody has the idea of getting a coffin & walking it around all the grounds we've played a home game. We'd be walking for months!!

Lengthy Article in the Guardian adds some more detail in the complete absence of anything fr9m the club. Parata retired- in absence of anything formal from the club: thanks for all your efforts for the club. He really stood up when we were decidedly average and it’s a shame he picked up head knocks this year but he can say he made it to the top in the game. All the best to him for the future.
Basset is going back to Australia.
The interesting bits were around Bienek, who is one of 7 who have a contract for 2025, and Campo who handed in the lease on his flat and has gone on holiday hoping something will come up. Bottom line how I read it they knew things were problematic but there was no certainty that the club was basically folding and they were simply left to guess with people like Meadows getting things sorted and others hoping for the best and now swinging in the breeze.
Without Mr H no club but with him this kind of shenanigans. Not great.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/no-he ... gby-league Here’s the piece BigTime is referring to. More info - none of it good sadly…….

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/no-he ... gby-league Here’s the piece BigTime is referring to. More info - none of it good sadly…….

Thinking about this some more, unless something is quite advanced with a new owner, there just isn’t time to get through the gears. We have 7 players signed, potentially no training or back office staff, no ground, no funds. No sponsors, nobody running the website. At best we cobble together a 13 and agree to host some matches at Roslyn park and anywhere else that will have us. That is a recipe for tiny crowds, poor performances and a slow death. Yikes!

While not expecting it, I wouldn't entirely rule out a Hughes volte-face. Can't see how he can sell the club if the RFL exclude us & we are not a going concern.

I’m not expecting it either but there was the time he said he’d pull the plug when we left the Stoop - and ended up at Barnet.

https://www.loverugbyleague.com/post/im ... comparison IMG break their silence......

https://www.loverugbyleague.com/post/im ... comparison IMG break their silence......

I'm not confident Lobster will sort anything out in the time available. Hughes has basically taken his ball and gone home.

Huge difference between Melbourne & London, not least NRL has people who generally know what they're doing. As opposed to the RFL who have people who bearly know what day of the week it is. The NRL generally have a vision, the RFL are myopic. The NRL generally, perhaps with reservations, seem to be prepared to see the bigger picture. Superleague clubs are riddled with self interest. IMG will have a hard job fulfilling the ideas in this article, especially if there isn't a Broncos team. I certainly wouldn't bother to go & watch anyone else.

Ain't that the truth.

Most rugby league clubs and their fans don't give a monkey's about the the game overall. Success of their hometown team is all that matters. Reduce it to three clubs? Cool. We finished in the top three.

And before someone accuses me of hypocrisy....

I'm not from London and have never lived in London. I moved south in my early twenties, always loved rugby league, missed going to live games. So drifted into watching my new "local" team, 60+ miles away. (When my car got written off it was an all day trip!)

Hooked. Hometown team immediately despised (they're easy to despise).

Luckily (or not) for me, this was the Tank Gordon team.

Still, if we do disappear, '96 and '97 were amazing!

They were indeed Benny & will never be forgotten. Nor Tank's wonderful side either.

How can they centrally fund London when the Super League organisation does not have a pot to in. IMG does have millions but it looks like they are putting no money in.In fact it looks like they have taken the clubs for a ride. https://www.totalrl.com/talking-rugby-l ... questions/ I said years ago, the club should have approached the NRL, offered to take 2 up and coming players from each club in the NRL and put them into the London side.Then hit the ex pat market hard. During the days at the stoop the amount of expats sat in the crowd was huge but then we had a good side with well known Australian players. You had a successful team full of aussies and the crowds would have come but the northerners didnt like that and said it was unfair. You dont get chelsea fans moaning saying there are not enough Londoners in the Chelsea team. But dont forget a lot of the RFL money has gone on bankrolling Bradford over the last few years.

How can they centrally fund London when the Super League organisation does not have a pot to in. IMG does have millions but it looks like they are putting no money in.In fact it looks like they have taken the clubs for a ride. https://www.totalrl.com/talking-rugby-l ... questions/ I said years ago, the club should have approached the NRL, offered to take 2 up and coming players from each club in the NRL and put them into the London side.Then hit the ex pat market hard. During the days at the stoop the amount of expats sat in the crowd was huge but then we had a good side with well known Australian players. You had a successful team full of aussies and the crowds would have come but the northerners didnt like that and said it was unfair. You dont get chelsea fans moaning saying there are not enough Londoners in the Chelsea team. But dont forget a lot of the RFL money has gone on bankrolling Bradford over the last few years.

Toulouse working hard to keep Broncos legacy alive by signing Butler to add to their list of ex Broncos. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Campo there and a couple of others. We appear to be to Toulouse what Leigh are to Hull.

Londres Olympique ?

Yesterday, London Rugby League Limited filed its overdue accounts through 20-Nov-2023. The only real thing of note is that the creditors falling due after more than one year has fallen substantially from £27.5m to £21.6m. Since this must represent the loans made by directors (primarily Hughes) perhaps some of this was written off during the financial year. No explanation is given in the filed accounts.

I'm not an accountant, but given how little money came in, that would seem the most plausible reason.

I'm sure Gardiner, you will recall that Fulham/Crusader/Broncos were most northern fans 2nd favourite team until probably 96 when we finished 4th & 97 finishing 2nd. Once we started beating them, is when they got the hump & said we had too many Aussies (or was it just too many good players?)

Interesting I see at the start of this season Dragons had 14 non French players in their 35 man squad but rarely do they get the criticism London did.

over 20 years and a number of user names after gutters was banned here and on the other site for being "too confrontational" about the future of the sport and London in particular, it makes me seethe that IMG are getting paid to say what i was saying 2 decade ago.
Hughes, the owners of RLFans and Total were all wrong and little old Gutters was right......who'd have thought it?

IMG will deliver SFA, whilst the likes of Derek at Leigh are the only hope the game has. When Ken pops his clogs, Huddersfield will be next to go, with any number of other clubs next in line.

10,000 fans is the minimum needed.....15,000 once SKY offer less next time and it really is now a northern niche sport.

As for Hughes? I feel nothing but disdain for the man. He constantly messed it up and never admitted his errors. Arrogant man.

So which team next season will end up with the most Ex-Broncos?

Don't disagree with this other than to say most successful people tend to be arrogant including dare I say it yourself. Unfortunately, Hughes & success where rugby league are concerned were never in the same bed.

Mr H was and is the only game in town for Broncos for several seasons. Where we are now was inevitable, only the timing was in doubt. Many teams are built on similarly shallow foundations and many are at risk. Many may have to cut the wages and standard of their squads which will lead to smaller tv deals- an anti-virtuous circle.
DH’s money allowed fans to have a bit of fun and for that he should be thanked but now sadly it’s done.

I wonder if the Covid situation is where our fate was sealed. The termination of the 2020 season spaffed our parachute payment down the toilet. The 2021 season was a mess - 7th with a full time squad was pony. Did he feel after he treated staff right over lockdown (as I understand) that they were all a bit quick to do one. The complete loss of momentum and pitiful crowds when they were allowed back was depressing.

There can be no excuses for the move to Plough Lane with a PT/L1 squad. it was the perfect example of a last incompetent throw of the dice and of someone who wasn’t getting good objective advice or not taking it. As I said at the time if he’d wrote down what he planned to do and had shown it to a grown up they’d have explained why it was total pony. It’s like he guessed what would be enough for IMG and assumed they’d just accept it rather than stick to the criteria they had developed (sh xx as some of them were). Let’s be honest Last year was going nowhere until we bought a couple of players late doors, Fev collapsed and we were in SL on the back of a string of away games that almost none of us saw. Then the brutal announcement came that IMG weren’t playing games and we’ve blundered through another sub par season albeit one where the side developed from poor to competitive but again the damage for crowd growth was holed below the water line in our 1st few games now. One positive is we no longer need to worry about crowd growth.

In fairness to him and his family he’s probably given up enough of his money the situation isn’t going to change London and rugby league aren’t really viable.

The next couple of weeks will be a daily litany of players leaving and then we’ll hear from love rugby league or Matthew Shaw that the club has folded. Sad.

On those occasions when i have been successful, I was always wary of the thinnest of lines between arrogance and self confidence and admit to having crosses it a number of times. What kept me (and still keeps me) grounded was the times i wasn't successful or made gross errors when I then had ro bw himble and accept defeat and or advice/help.
Hughes biggest problem was he wouldnt take advice from anyone, even The RFL. He would insteas double down on his errors and towards the end became more beligerent. 2 unexpected MPG wins which were 100% luck more than planning gave him a warm fuzzy feeling of success, but now his mismanagement of the important things has been laid bare doe all to see by IMG, he does that most arrogant of all things.....he walks away.
Instead of changing back to the broncos name and leaving the Stoop, if he had instead remained QuinsRL at TW2 and even just employed the sicial media from 2024, we would have scored much better than we did in the gradings. NOBODY ELSE IA TO BLAME.

I am actually very sad today, DH's money was papering over the huge cracks, and it was well known that without the huge financial support that DH was providing, RL in the capital was toast. Well gentlemen, we are here and we are now toast.

When Ian Lenaghan arrived in 2005, for the first time I was hopeful that there was a strategy being put in place to back up the millions that was being pi55ed down the toilet each year. I could see that there was enthusiasm from the marketing, selling the product to London. We took out advertising space in the Evening Standard, we were at train stations during the evening rush hour, everybody was shoulder to the wheel. Yes there were issues, but it was the period where I thought RL in London was turning the corner. Most of all, we were a happy bunch.

IL was forced to drop us after he acquired Wig*n, back to the DH show we went. The bad habits started to come out again. Same amount of money, but no strategy on how to invest it into the future, instead short termism and unrealistic goals in the most part. The viscous cycle started.

I saw the start to the end when Gus Ma*kay was brought in. If you think about it, the most London Bronco supporter I knew (Paddock Punter), Nigel went to every game home and away (1st team, Reserves, Academy). In my view he was the most loyal and ardent fan any club of any sport could have. Gus some how managed to massively offend him, took a stand that he wanted new fans without taking the Paddocks of the club into consideration. It was blind arrogance.

From there, When I came back from Australia for a year in 2011, the club I knew when I left was a shell. The enthusiasm left, the real hard core of supporters were alienated and had left they didn't care, and as such soul of the club was ripped out. But don't worry, DH was paying the bills and hiring total e to 'run' his hobby horse.

That was the problem, when IL left in 2008, we then started to witness this very slow, nasty and very expensive car crash, and there was not a lot we could do about it. Unfortunately we are all collateral damage, that's why I am sad today.

See you at the Scholars!