Dave T

Considering you spend most of your time moaning about how Hudds fans are portrayed, it's weird you spend so much time fixated on Wire and their fans.

Indeed - this is an embarrassing quote: Rhodri Jones, RL Commercial Managing Director, adds: “I’m sure that there will be plenty of England supporters inside the Stade Ernest-Wallon to cheer on our Men and Women, and I’m thrilled that those supporters who can’t be there will be able to follow the action on Super League+. It’s a blank weekend in the 2024 fixture schedule, so Super League+ is the place to be for live Rugby League on Saturday 29 June.” How on earth are fans meant to go when this announcement doesn't mention anything about tickets - where can we get them, when are they on sale etc? Real basic stuff. Absolute rubbish.

It's always the struggling teams who will claim this isn't it? And tbh, it looks like it can only really be the case for Cas, and that smacks of excuses. The London one is a unique situation that won't ever happen again under this system.

Best I can find in terms of numbers for recent years showed semid finals at 7-900k average and final at 1.1m. These are on BBC 1 though, so will be interesting to see how this year's stack up as both quarters were on BBC 2 this year.

Fair, I don't know the capacity changes, but I would question about demand as per my earlier post, the stand at Cas is dire, I'd be surprised if there wasn't demand for these seats. Every other stadium has that demand.

It's only a waste if the new development happens quickly. And of course it could be said for other developments but the vast majority of clubs in SL, if not all now play in better grounds than when SL started. I'm not being critical of Cas' efforts, I agree with you about the difficulties, but that's the point. They can have improvements now guaranteed, or maybe some plans may come to fruition sometime in future, or not. I'm afraid they are at the point that guaranteed improvements are needed.

The problem here is that there is no certainty that their full development will ever happen. On that basis, improving what they have now makes sense. If their future development was 100% guaranteed then I'd agree with you.

I thought they seemed really low tbh. 340k and 380k average. We've certainly had much higher in the recent past.

That's a rather disingenuous read though. The outcome will be new modern seats in the stadium.

Other clubs don't have those high boards.

My point wasn't related to you or anyone specifically, it was that we shouldn't give undue prominence to viewpoints because they can be noisy. The noisiest crowd aren't always the largest. Imo Catalans have been received warmly, as have other expansion clubs, despite noisy criticism. It's easy to end up in echo chambers and believe a certain view, when it is more useful to study the data and see that viewing figs, crowds and travelling numbers can be high for them. On the Season ticket point, again, I don't think in reality a large portion of people are that bothered by this kind of thing. Many season ticket holders get good value anyway, and these concessions are for the lowest quality stand. But even then plenty of season ticket holders take advantage of it by bringing new fans along. Someay grumble, but the evidence appears to be there that the fans appreciate the good crowd, kids present and better atmosphere.

I've no issues with making overseas clubs pay (although this method is clumsy) but I was addressing your point that fans are not friendly to expansion efforts. I don't find teh main are like that at all tbh mate.

How was a lack of humility an issue for them?

Yes, I agree with that interpretation - and that can always be thrown at a club that has often been the best team over 12m but then fallen at the last hurdle - my personal view on that is that we have always been very competitive in our Grand Finals and each of them could have been Wire wins - hence my point that I'm not sure it's cultural. I think sometimes it is a claim that is thrown about lazily, often by fans when they are frustrated. They didn't complain about culture when we beat Saints at Wembley, but it became an issue when we lost in the playoffs to Cas a month later. I do think the culture point is lazily used in the way you describe, and I do think that was the interpretation that Powell had when he came in and treated long-serving players like a piece of s***, many who have gone on to to a good job at other clubs since.

We shouldn't let some loudmouths become the voice of the sport. The likes of Catalans have been embraced with huge travelling numbers and many large crowds when they travel here (admittedly with discounts in many cases) - in the main fans have been absolutely welcoming. They are many fans 2nd team. Similar with TWP, whilst there are many loud dissenters, we shouldn't see that as RL fans not being welcoming, many travelled there and many wanted them to do well.