iffleyox

This comes up regular as clockwork. Though if I was a massive horse racing fan, I might be a bit more miffed about the treatment of Britain’s most attended sport after football…

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Would they have space to fall over?

Decent on and off pitch management and lots of money? The former paid for by the latter and generating more of the latter… it’s completely replicable. All a club needs is the personnel and the cash. see also Wakefield.

*All* at the start of your second sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting though. Especially when implicit but left untyped is ‘and deep pockets which they have a hitherto untapped desire to empty in the direction of a rugby league club’

Except Bristol Sport - Bristol City, Bristol RU and Bristol Highfliers basketball. admittedly that’s only been going as a group since 2012 so there’s maybe one generation there that thinks it’s normal now, but the idea was to explicitly copy Barcelona.

Some people play down to their surroundings I guess. Weird phenomenon, but it happens.

Do you know, exactly this was running through my head?

You…

A small town a long way from the M62? Hardly the centre of the universe compared with Leeds…

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Wesfarmers/Bunnings famously recently did. Cost them $1bnAUS it’s not like we don’t have hilarious recent examples of largeAustralian operations thinking they can come to the UK and do *exactly* that… we in the UK might stop having that expectation when a bit more water has gone under the bridge since the last time it was tried.

Favourite -Cas - now where like it when it’s packed and rocking. least favourite - Whitebank, hands down

Yes, didn’t miss them off for any reason - it was twenty historically successful big town/ big city clubs off the top of my head. I missed Huddersfield too but not for any reason either. All of them would be level 1 or in the 20 clubs level 2, with probably less of a gap between the divisions and big clubs/gates at level 2. anyway, this is a real off-season thread so I’m going to get on with something else!

Plymouth talk a very good game but if you actually look at their history they’ve never been a ‘big’ club. Similarly Cornwall did very well coming together from penny packet clubs for the county championship but if we’re hypothesising actual ‘top clubs’ I can’t see it. bottom line is IMO we’d have had a strong ‘rugby’ code where the top flight was an amalgam of the larger places that have always played top RU or RL. It would be north/midlands biased a la football, but there would be clubs south of Birmingham and more top club presence in the SW than football has ever managed.