Dave T

It's not necessarily disrespectful, I think it's a fair question around the value/going rate of Women's RL at this stage. Just had a quick look on Wire's Facebook and their home game was a fiver, Leeds charged a tenner (kids free). The fifteen at Hudds seems out of kilter, particularly when you are also selling a men's game at £22 that day too. As a comparison point, Women's football SL you can get a ticket for Man City's last game for £12.

I'm just not sure you are gonna click your fingers and make the Cup more attractive, it's going to need something bold to work. I know it may seem lazy to revert to cheap tickets, but I do think that needs to be part of the offering here. Even at Premier League clubs when it comes to cup games the price is usually half what it is for league games, maybe even less. Personally I'd be charging £10 for adults and free for accompanied kids. I think we need to forget gate receipts being a huge driver here, as let's be honest we can see crowds as low as 2-5k at the likes of Wire now for the cup, so hardly a main driver anyway. But every time we stage these games, particularly on TV, we damage the brand. Sell these games as a great intro to RL - a chance for anyone to sample it without cost being a barrier. We are in a vicious cycle at the moment where low crowds damage the cup brand and this in turn affects the final attendance. This surely affects commercial performance of the cup.

It does rather miss out quite a bit of the narrative. International RL is a tough sell, and when the biggest and richest RL nation in the world consistently undermines it, you get to the point where you have to question the motives. Four perfect recent examples. 1. Successful Four Nations concept scrapped, not replaced by a 6 or 8 team tournaments which was mean to be the plan. 2. The sh** show that was the Denver Test. As above, RL is a tough sell anyway without internal sabotage. 3. The postponement of the RLWC in 2021 and the associated costs that created. I have some sympathy with them on this one, but when other international sports were working out how to make it work, we just walked away. 4. The recent criticism of the England's staging of the Tonga series, saying we need to do better (a valid point), but it was distracting from the car crash of the Pacific Final that they'd just held in NZ in front of a smaller crowd than that in Leeds. I was one of the biggest critics of the RLWC last time, but we have regularly pulled in crowds that the biggest RL nation in the world can only dream of.

Convincing people they are worthless so they become grateful for whatever they can get is one form of negging.

That's what negging does. We now become happy for any scraps.

Logistically it's fine. Commercially it's absolutely barmy. To charge £37 if you want to watch both games just feels like a poor decision.

All of that is just an unnecessary fudge though. They have designed a brand new system, it should be made fit for purpose and future-proof. Grade A is genuinely unnecessary unless they are going to be fluid with the number of teams in SL, which they won't be. The whole 'suck it and see what happens' approach doesn't demonstrate control. When you have a blank canvas, creating something flawed is a worry.

Capping at 12 clubs and guaranteeing A grades a place in SL is contradictory.

I'm just surprised you're surprised mate

No, your grading lasts one year. If the next October you've dropped to rank 13, you're out.

Slide 8 and 9 of this deck. Reimagining Rugby League Presentation – MEDIA_27Sep2022.pdf (rugby-league.com) Slide 8 highlights that "Category A - Top Tier Participant on a Permanent Basis" - whatever that means. Slide 9 highlights that 2024-2026 will have 12 teams, and then we move into 202? we would expand (on the basis of us having more than 12 Grade A teams. It doesn't address what happens if we have more than 12 A teams in advance of that. I am conscious that things may have moved on since this was published (September 2022) - but it is still there on the RFL website under the strategy docs.

This is fair - I don't think the thresholds are too onerous, but we aren't at 14 yet, or anywhere near - clubs may be hovering around that 12-13.5 mark, but as you say, it is difficult to make that last step. My main frustration here is that this was always going to be controversial, and tbh, very boring - I think they had to land the strategy and associated comms well - and they just haven't. The Grade A point is just confusing. It means nothing. Grade A gets you nowt. Yet at the start of this Grade A guaranteed you permanent SL status and gave you that security, but there is no security if your score is changed annually. The loose comms around how may teams they will have in SL is poor too. It is just vague statements, basically kicking the can down the road. I don;t think they appreciated how fixated people would get on these 0.25 scores etc.

Indeed. Suspended fines can only work if it is a significant fine hanging over them. It's a weird decision.

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The point that is absolutely explicit is that A grade clubs are guaranteed an SL place. So if we manage to get 13+ A grades at the end of this year, I have no idea what they will be doing. Tbh it's another example of poor implementation, or poor communication at best.