I can't honestly see why, provided they knew the true picture, their place should have gone to Fax, which I had a funny feeling was what was going to happen, given this was the worst kept secret in years. Halifax should feel rightly agrieved. It was us they were upset with, now look. This absolutely stinks. RL loses credibility with me as a fan. God knows what the greater sporting world think. But this is exactly what I thought franchising would bring. People in boardrooms cannot be allowed to decide who has the right to play at the top table. It is too open to prejudice and corruption and the sooner it comes to an end the better. One up, one down, provided your ground meets definite, crystal clear, objective criteria.

Quoted for truth. Easier just to blame the RFL as the easy option than look at the real reasons. Any sports club, not just rugby league, in the most part gets into trouble because of bad management, spending money they don't have, or a mix of the two.

It's conveniently forgotten that Widnes went bust when P&R was in place. They gambled and lost to Cas in the Grand Final. Not the only ones of course.

I would agree with you - IF the RFL hadn't just subjected the Bulls to a robust and thorough process of financial scrutiny, and declared them a fit and proper club to receive a SL franchise.

The real issue here is that they've now done so with two clubs and either failed to identify the impending financial meltdown at all, or identified it but failed to act.

I suppose partially correct, if you mean the Crusaders, because of course the RFL did identify the problems and twisted their arms to drop out.

Where the RFL is to blame is the box where there has to be a certain number of members. That is why clubs like Bulls and us offer season ticket prices that are unrealistic. Although our gates are up 30%, I bet our takings aren't. The difference is that we are building a groundswell to take to a new ground. The Bulls strategy was madness. 10,000 tickets at £60 a pop equates to a 3,000 crowd paying full price, but they wanted to put on the park a team that equated to 10,000 paying full price.

Some simple maths. £180 is the going rate for a normal season ticket. Let's say the Bulls could shift 3,000 season tickets at that price. That is just about what 10,000 tickets at £60 brings in. But the Bulls can get 10,000 a week, and so the other 7,000 have paid combinations of full price and concessions. If we average that out at £15 per ticket, that is £105,000 per home game. If we multiply that by the home games per season, that is £1,365,000 they are throwing away. Now, someone remind me how much extra they need a season to survive.

Unfortunately the Bulls fans thought the Wakey fans where giving them duff info about not giving the £1/2 million to help save the club, but if they had gone into admin at the start the supporters trust would have 1/2 mill ready to invest.
Although i`ve never been one of there biggest supporters , its the fans I feel for.

Of course they know, but because they have usually been covertly complicit to some dodgy course of actions prior to said club going pop, they adopt the stance of doing nothing and hoping it won't happen.
It's obvious to the wider RL public, why do you think it isn't to the RFL?
Just because they and the Sky peddle the myth that all is well in the SL garden, it doesn't mean they know it to be otherwise.

They had ten days to come up with a buyer. If i was Caisley i would wait 5 days to see if anyone comes forward. If no one comes forward then i would look at selling as many players as possible to satisfy administrators then take over the club and start again. Think it was Guilfoyle who said on radio that the players wouldn't bring that much. I don't agree they have quite a number of players who are being well courted by several clubs. If Caisley works well with admin team i am sure they will be able to do deals to satisfy all parties. When we had players sold by admin team it was a different situation Glover didn't have control of the club and therefore couldn't have any say on what happened. Maybe once this is done and a big chunk of debt is paid off it might trigger some one to come forward with less outlay of money to be risked again.

Well said Charlie.
What gets me is the fact that they asked their fans (and the wider rugby league public) to donate cash to save tham and with a bit more honesty, instead of wishful thinking, this cash could have been used to breathe life into the "new" Bulls, but now it is lost and in the longer term this will damage their efforts to gain support .

A the 10 days count down, they will be more inclined to sell their top players, indeed it will become a necessesity, however, this means that maybe Leeds, Wigan, Warrington and Hull will be the destination for these players as these few clubs are the only ones with significant cash at their disposal..

By 10 days, if no buyer is found, all the players will be free agents anyway - no fees to pay.

This is why players get sold for less than their market worth in these situations - the administrator will want to realise whatevercash he can.

AFAIK those clubs must be spending the full cap. I wonder if tyhe RFL will let them breach the cap to sign these players

I don't know that they did twist their arms to drop out - the opposite could easily be true.

Either way, the impact of their act or omission was that our club was left with an unreasonably short window in which to prepare for SL; in real terms, we had less time than Widnes to prepare for the 2012 season and we're now seeing the results of that - fail to plan, plan to fail and all that shiz.

If the RFL are capable of learning any lessons from the past 12 months or so, perhaps the most important one is that they should act more quickly when a club is known to be failing? If they'd been more robust with Bradford when the opportunities arose (first, when they didn't make any payments on their 400k loan and latterly, when they bought the lease to keep them afloat and subsequently lied about why they'd done it; and that's not even mentioning the long contracts handed out to players when they knew they were heading for a financial iceberg) then perhaps those members of the RL community, including the supporters, wouldn't now be 500k worse off with nothing to show for it? The attendant loss of goodwill is difficult to quantify, but a quick scan of RL Fans is enough to tell you that fans of other clubs are finding it difficult to be sympathetic to a club that appears to have been the author of its own misfortune.

The attitude at Red Hall seems to be one of preserving at all costs the illusion that SL is an umitigated success; in my view, they need to be more organisationally mature and understand that the failure of a member club doesn't necessarily mean that their system has failed - they'd get more respect for outing and dealing with failures consistently and with fairness. That might also have the fringe benefit of encouraging clubs to be more open and honest with them and applying more financial rigour to their operations - if they knew that financial improprieties would result in severe penalties, maybe they'd act more sensibly to avoid them?

The rfl have announced that any Tom, dick or harry who runs the club can fufil the fixtures until the end of the season, seems quite a bizzare thing to do....

I don't think they've thought it through.

Super League bosses will allow Bradford Bulls to finish the season as a new company even if the club goes into liquidation in the coming weeks.
This would avoid a scenario in which results from this year have to be expunged due to the club folding.
The club's licence would then be reviewed at the end of the season.
A Rugby Football League spokesman said: "We are working with the administrators to help Bradford Bulls out of administration."
The four-time Super League champions are ninth in the table with nine games left to play in the regular season.


Found this on the BBC site, what does it mean, will they have points deducted for going into administration or not?

If not it seems a bit unfair that Crusaders and WTW did when they went into admin? I'm confused.

Points will still be deducted as normal. There doing this to save loads of work and plus avoid arguments with other teams that have either played or not played yet and it would make a mess of this years competition. This way the actual playing side of things is not affected.

Would the potential buyer have to go through the RFL's 'fit and proper person' test as Andrew Glover did?

Surely this would rule out any of the previous Bradford directors from buying back the club, after the mess they have made.

I would prefer it if the RFL came out and explained how a club who they graded as a B 6 months ago, can be in this position!

At this stage they would probably rubber stamp Dick Turpin, if he promised to see the season through.
The longer term is of course a different matter.

[urlhttp://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/9785838.Bradford_Bulls_disappointed_as_expression_of_interest_withdrawn/[/url
Interesting Wakefield aspect to the Bradford problems..

I cannot believe how deluded the Bulls fans are and how adverse they are to any kind of critisism


It's like the blind leading the bling on their forum



I think my next post on there will be "I Told You So"

We did tell them so. That's the problem. They were too pig headed to listen to people who'd been in the same situation 12 months ago!

and now, according to sportinglife.com, the RFL are going to help them even more - haven't they helped them enough?
This help will be at the loss of the other SL clubs.
They weren't there supporting us.
THIS ALL STINKS - HEY SHOULD BE LEFT TO SORT IT WITH THE SAME SUPPORT AS WE GOT.
One big rugby league family with a few prodigal sons!

They should receive the same help we got while in admin. Simple.

They have already had far more help than we had, but it hasn't worked.
Rest assured though, they will certainly receive plenty more before the job is sorted.
Although it shouldn't make a difference and size shouldn't matter, we do have to accept that
The Bulls have been one of the major forces in the SL era and thier loss would be felt far more than ours.