BY MARTYN SADLER, EDITOR OF LEAGUE EXPRESS
HERE’S a tip to IMG.
If you want to create a gradings system that actually benefits Rugby League financially, then how about building in some incentives that nudge clubs into doing the right thing.
Try to be a little more imaginative than you’ve been so far.
With the Challenge Cup Final coming up in less than two weeks’ time, we can all look forward to seeing a Wembley Stadium that isn’t sold out, despite three very attractive matches being scheduled for June 8.
Apparently the ticket sales from Warrington in particular are going very well, compared to some recent seasons, while Wakefield will take more fans than any other club ever has for the 1895 Cup Final. But that still is unlikely to be enough to prevent large swathes of seating being empty on the day.
One of our upcoming sessions on the League Express Podcast series is a discussion with Mike Ford, the managing director of the Oldham club who has an amazing history as both a player and a coach.
Mike played in the Challenge Cup Final for Wigan 39 years ago, when he was part of the team that defeated Hull FC 28-24.
On that day there were more than 97,000 people in the old Wembley Stadium.
So where have crowds like that disappeared to?
Well of course, many of the people who were at Wembley that day will no longer be with us.
But the crucial people were those who went to the game who didn’t happen to be supporters of Wigan or Hull.
There were thousands of other people at Wembley who were wearing the scarves of their favourite clubs.
Sadly, so many supporters like that no longer go to the Challenge Cup Final.
If they did, the attendance would be far more impressive and we might even approach getting a full house.
So how do we persuade all those missing fans to get back into the habit of going to Wembley for the Challenge Cup Final.
It’s obviously a truism to say that if we don’t try, we’ll never succeed.
And it’s also obvious that the solution lies with the clubs themselves, but they need some sort of an incentive to mobilise a proportion of their fans to go to Wembley, even when their team isn’t playing.
So how can we nudge them all into getting their fans on board for the big day?
How about modifying the grading system to allocate points for the number of Challenge Cup Final tickets each club sells.
Let’s allocate up to 2,000 tickets for each Super League club, perhaps 500 for each Championship club and perhaps 200 for each League One club.
The RFL would sell those tickets at a significant discount to the clubs, so that they would make a profit by selling them.
But not only that, let’s allocate one whole gradings point for any Super League club that sells its complete allocation of 2,000 tickets.
And for clubs that can’t sell 2,000 tickets, let’s allocate point accordingly, so that a club selling 200 tickets gets 0.1 points and the points awarded goes up by a decimal point for every 200 tickets sold.
The clubs could be encouraged to run supporters’ travel to Wembley at a reasonable cost.
Such a scheme, if run properly, could potentially add 25,000 to the attendance and, more importantly, give the impression of a thriving and popular sport when the game is broadcast on television, rather than the impression we currently create of being unable to fill our stadium for one of the biggest days of Rugby League’s sporting calendar.
Unfortunately, on the same day as the Challenge Cup Final, rugby union will be staging its Premiership Final at Twickenham and I’m quite sure we can bank on that stadium being full to the rafters, partly because the rugby union authorities run schemes of the sort that I’ve outlined here.
Marketing our game has never been our strong point and it looks as though it never will be.
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