I don't see anyway to get into SL and make an impact in the current ground it's small and in the middle of nowhere.
The new Wimbledon ground is a bit more central with good transport links.abs AFC Wimbledon are a club on the way up. The capacity starts off at 11,000 and will be extended to 20,000.
The most important thing is that it needs to be a long term decision.

I think in its current guise DH is running the club down. Until we get significant investment I doubt there will be any radical change.

I think it could be a good thing, both for Rugby League in London and for AFC Wimbledon.
However it needs vision and long term commitment. There does not seem to be much of that around at the club at the moment.

It's 2017.....not 2007. A decade ago maybe but as it stands, AFC Wimbledon would be better starting their own club up......what would bring to the party other than 500 (at best) fans?

Dog!
Why do you say that?

The 3 professional rugby league clubs in london are not making the best of it, why would starting another be sensible.

Because all we'd bring is 500 fans......that's why.

The London Broncos brand is tarnished with 2 decades of mistakes and mismanagement...better to restart anew with someone like Perez on board rather than an investor who wants total control over all aspects even though by their own admission they know nothing about running a club (read a pastel revolution)....

Couple of things, if another club were to start up in south london where would there fans come from?
And can't agree that the broncos brand is tarnished! Remember changing the name and re branding to the Quins? In a lot of people's eyes they were still the broncos

South London I'd hope......where did Perez find his 7k Toronto fans? Oh that's right......HE MARKETED THE CLUB UNTIL HE COULDN'T STAND......
How is it not? Handed a place at the top table the club did nothing and I mean between 1996-2014.....absolutely nothing to promote themselves to a wider audience or build a business model that was ever going to be sustainable. Not just Hughes, but all the other owners including Branson who for all his billions proved to be a clueless idiot who thought (like many other RL club owners) that sticking posts in the ground and announcing KO times was enough. Gridiron is a game as alien to your average Londoner as League is.......yet how come the NFL can fill stadiums in London with 2 teams full of American players that most English people have never heard of? Tennis is hardly on everyone's weekend things to do yet Wimbledon sees a scramble for tickets......The Boat Race sees people who couldn't find either Oxford or Cambridge on a map flock to the banks of the Thames each year, horse racing isn't eve a sport....it's just a reason to employ short people but the Grand National sees grannies buying the racing post...this weekend just gone will have seen close to 250,000 fans attend 4 Union friendlies across the British Isles generating tens of Millions in income.......it's not about the sport, IT'S HOW YOU SELL IT! The Broncos is a Brand that has nothing going for it...the chances are that if you asked 20 people on a London street what sport we played you'd get a majority say Gridiron...it's worse than tarnished, it's unknown!



This has been done to death...... We've LOST 4,000 regular fans in a dozen years and maybe 20 or 25 of those left because of Quins RL......if you think otherwise then there's little hope for you.
We've moved countless times, changed and reverted back to our name, moved some more and achieved little other than a fluke Cup appearance and LMS and Tony Clubb have gone north and are doing well......from 1996 to 2017 that is all we have to show for probably 100,000,000 quid in income and a bucketload of wasted opportunities and terrible appointments.

You are dreaming dog! You are not going to get the residents of Wimbledon or st reatham or Brixton to come flocking to watch the flat capers game.
How did Toronto do it? It's new! It's summat different! Those fictional 7000 (more like 4 or 5) are watching something new, it's an unknown over there it isn't here.
You mention gridiron being alien to south Londoners as much as league, utter tosh, it's because it's American and for some odd reason over here we think everything American we have to do.
What's the difference with rugby league generally and your other events? RU yawnion internationals terrestrial tv and how many pages dedicated to it in the papers? The grand national! Terrestrial tv and one off annual event, Wimbledon terrestrial tv newspaper coverage the boat race newspaper coverage, terrestrial tv, women's cricket, men's cricket see where am going with this
International rugby league yep terrestrial to but nothing elsewhere.
Club rugby! Nothing. So is it london broncos or the sport itself?

That's the spirit!

South London has pretty much the same RL pedigree as say a city like....oh I dunno.....what about Toronto? It's not the game....IT'S THE WAY YOU SELL IT!

RL had 4 amateur sides in Toronto before the Wolfpack......how many has south London got? RL in Toronto has seen 9k gates for internationals....RL isn't as "unknown" as you'd think! As for Londoners......as I say, SELL IT!

Do we heck! Americanisms are all well and good but the one thing you can rely o the British to be is Bloody British!.....Gridiron is sold as an EVENT. I remember back in the late 80's the 49ers came to Wembley and the cheerleaders visited my pub in Duke Street.......i'd have paid the entrance fee to Wembley just to see those lovely ladies again......SELL IT!


Yes...you're painting yourself into a corner...because......wait for it...

.....nice brush strokes there NB

....oh how the media hate us eh

...the Broncos had a fan on the etitorial management team at METRO and still never leveraged the opportunity......

It's London Broncos!
I've brought people to games...some liked it, one is now a ST holder......others didn't and never returned, but what connects them all is they were never EVER asked by the club. No data was collected, no surveys were conducted, no marketing was carried out.

Trailfinders lends itself perfectly to the Wolfpack scenario....Beer Tents, Kids activities...stuff that makes it an event worth going to but what do the club do.......stick posts in the ground and announce KO times.
Our once ally at Quins RU who owns as a marketing company got 67,000 fans to the Big Bash at Wembley....he also put in place plans that have seen the Melbourne Storm increase their gates deep inside enemy territory.......It's not the Game, IT'S HOW YOU SELL IT and the Broncos are guilty of never even trying.....

"oh how the media hate us" never actually said that, I said that all those events you mentioned were covered by terrestrial tv, no coverage therefore little interest which bleeds over into the papers, purely stating the fact, didn't suggest it's because they hate us!
British being British, am an old bloke in my youth we had school discos not prom night! Halloween was largely ignored, now we have a strange American tradition of trick or treat, apparently we now have Black Friday!!! Spot a trend?
If rugby league was so well known in Toronto why were the first two games against English cities of london and Oxford? Apparently because keighley and hunslet would have raised the question of who? So massive in depth knowledge of the game displayed there!
Saarf london am sure Brixton, Staines/Richmond, Elmbridge, st Mary's, beckenham, storm, marlins, Guildford, all the schools that play in the south would be really pleased to hear you are aware of them.
As for selling it, actually I agree but its at a national level the game fails in marketing not at club level.

There's been pretty good newspaper coverage in the UK of this current world cup and England games are live on BBC whilst the rest is available on premiere. It is not the job of the media to promote any sport....it is the job of that sports administrators



Halloween is an Irish tradition and Black Friday is SELLING IT!!!! Gridiron get's pitiful viewing figures on SKY, yet they ram Wembley/Twickenham for events.....by SELLING IT.
...another clever instance of SELLING IT!


SELLING IT.......don't knock them, applaud them! It's not like we haven't had a helping hand from the RFL now and then......there was that 100k of marketing budget bunged to our landlord which was never spent on marketing but secured us as tenants.


And there was you asking where the fans would come from?

The Club have never tried selling themselves.......every time the RFL or their agencies tried to help they have been rebuffed. The RFL manage to get good crowds in London....even Wigans trip to the Den did better than we could....it's not the game it is the Club.

Newspaper coverage of the WC has been abysmal.
England games on BBC exactly that's it! Premier sport is a niche minority sport platform. And did I say anything about who should be promoting the sport, I merely point out the reason why it's a minority sport in the uk.
Halloween has grown from the USA nowhere else.
Don't agree about American football, it's the desire to grab anything American.
Black Friday point proven, lets be the 51 st state.
London and Oxford chosen because no one knew anything about rugby league so they had to choose names they might know, e.g. No one knows anything about the sport.
Ask anyone to name a rugby league team, if they can it will be wigan, what does that trip to the den prove?
As for the south london players, setting up a team closer to them is going to drag em in is it? Those that watch the game already do! Those that don't are not all of a sudden going to start watching the Wimbledon Wombles

Somehow you've got us back on Thread



Regardless of the perception of RL as a minority sport, the way to raise awareness is through hard work, money spent on media and other channels and more hard work. Given that we only have access to the money but the bloke with that money would rather spend it on renting a wedding venue and god only knows what else....but not marketing or promotion then I repeat that the London Broncos as a club is a tarnished brand that has lost over 4,000 fans and would have trouble attracting any more than 1,500 if they were ever to get back to Superleague.

Rugby League events in London are well attended. Even the 2 WCC warm up matches we were "gifted' attracted bigger gates than we got during the season because they were marketed by the RFL as events, but it's like a marketing person once ran over DH's cat....he would rather employ 2 more MacKays and a Powell than spend a cent on promoting the club.....he genuinely believed that changing our name back to the Broncos was going to bring the crowds back.......that is the most shocking thing.

.......even the imaginary flowers on a round-a-bout would have achieved more



As for Wimbledon? Why? Every time a new stadium is announced someone suggests we move there, but what would be the point when we wouldn't tell anyone we were there and just expect them to flock to see the greatest game once we announce the KO time. And how many of the 800 or so that we averaged this year would travel south?

Not saying we don't need to move to a viable stadium. We all know that's the case, unless there is massive investment in developing Valiss way, and we all know the problems with that.
However I still can't agree with your view that broncos brand is tainted, and I believe that most fans actually applauded the return to the name.
As for "events" you keep mentioning them, yep "events" do attract folk, but that's very different to following a club week in week out! So yep the numbers are going to be massively different. Example 1 the one off event of the boat race! How many folk that go watch that go to any other boat race regatta?
Example 2 london marathon is an event, the folk that go out and line the streets for that race prob have no clue what events there local harriers put on.
Example 3 one off event American football in Wembley it's an event, ask any of those in Wembley where the Berkshire renegades play?

1. Event marketing is what the Wolfpack did for EVERY HOME GAME THIS YEAR.....it is what is needed......consistent and long term promotion...asking for feedback, inviting, re-inviting, getting out to radio stations, getting photographs of events to papers.....how do you think the likes of say Saracens or Harlequins have taken their gates of a few hundred in the mid 1990's to an average of 23.000+ last year with a couple of event games (14,555 without the event games).......when we joined them at the stoop they had been getting 3k gates......it's not by magic. We fired a PR girl that we hired to market the club (Gus again) and Quins RU immediately employed her as their PR person......

Remember....before they officially became professional, Union clubs attracted 3 digit gates at best and played nowt more than friendlies and the cup....and Union was all over the BBC back then too with the 5 nations and cup games shown Live.......yet we blame BBC bias towards the 6 nations as the reason we languish behind????

2. Most fans applauded? Really? How come attendances went down and Rupe 1 and his hordes didn't require all 4 sides being opened? It was changing seats on the Titanic and an exercise in self preservation from a CEO who was out of his depth. It was announced in November.........3 months before the first fixture and nothing was done to attract lapsed fans back...just a few flyers at Wembley and a program advert. No effort to buy the original website back (which I could have picked up cheap), stupid choice of colours and again a sense that all the hard work had been done and the fans would flock to games.

The last thing London Broncos need is yet another move. The nomadic lifestyle the club has embarked upon since the club's birth in 1980 has been one of the biggest problems the club has had in terms of support and growth of the club. Another move would be the death knell of the club, if the move to Ealing hasn't already been that.

The Supporters Trust should be, in my opinion, developing a rainy day fund, if they haven't already. I'm not saying the club is in any imminent danger or the club needs a rainy day fund in the mid-term but it cannot hurt to have some funds put away should the club need it or should the fans ever need to take over the club, help towards the cost of a stadium or any other issue of that ilk.

Moe, am with you, at the minute we are a championship side, lots of folk seem to think we have some entitlement to be in SL, we don't.
Everyone knows Ealing is not good enough for top flight RL. Will trailfinders develop it? They def have ambition to, if they can or not we have all debated. Even if they do develop will it be good enough for SL?
Barnet was a failure, should we have stayed at the Stoop? Problem is we were no longer welcome, academy played at aldershot, team trained god know where.
Where is the future of the club, assuming we still have money coming in? Realistically yep we need to move again, it vallis road gets improved then stay there. Whatever option trailfinders has shown that to be a club, you need to be a united club, have everything in one place.
Moving now on a knee jerk or being forced would be wrong.