DAVID JOHNSON is a company director with a longstanding love of Rugby League who wants to see the game prosper. In this article he laments the current lack of direction that he sees in those who are tasked with running the game.
IT’S that time of year.
A time for new year resolutions, new starts, new beginnings.
What better time to review the health of the game!
It’s time for an honest assessment…and from my perspective it does not look too pretty. There’s an old adage in business – you are either progressing or you’re regressing but you are never standing still. And I don’t think you need to be a Harvard graduate to conclude which direction Rugby League is moving in.
In an article in Rugby League World magazine, League Express editor Martyn Sadler recently noted Juan Soto’s $765 million, 15-year baseball contract with the New York Mets, comparing it ruefully to playing contracts available in British Rugby League. In so doing he referenced the sport’s television contracts not even keeping up with inflation, but in fact halving in the last seven years, while other income levels across the board are at best stagnating.
With costs going relentlessly upwards and COVID loans to be paid back, it would not be surprising if club owners and benefactors were beginning to flinch.
Some estimates put Super League’s collective losses at £30 million per year. If so, these clubs aren’t businesses in the accepted definition of the word. In reality they have become personal indulgences.
A few years ago, the latest attempt to sort Rugby League governance was delivered to a great fanfare, the so-called re-alignment of the RFL and Super League from the ruinous breakaway that appears to have coincided with the decline. This latest iteration has the RFL running the regulatory part of the sport, while a separate company entitled Rugby League Commercial is charged with growing the sport’s income, with the star turn being that yet another company, IMG, has been awarded a twelve-year contract to drive the sport forward strategically.
Yes, that’s right, twelve years!
IMG’s “Re-imagining Rugby League” is certainly a big title to live up to.
So what would be a fair appraisal of their efforts so far almost three years after their introduction to Rugby League.
From where I stand, as an interested observer, it’s hard to see what that re-imagination consists of.
Their flagship policy of grading is, by any measure, both controversial and unpopular, perhaps as much as licensing was when it was trialled and discontinued over a decade ago.
When will Rugby League learn?
The potential disaster of grading was fortuitously sidestepped last season when London Broncos just failed to do the impossible and finished just behind Hull FC on points difference, while Wakefield cantered through the Championship and won the Grand Final. The two clubs swapped places, just as they would have done under a conventional promotion and relegation system.
But let’s see what happens this year.
The Super League competition still contains the ridiculous loop fixtures that nobody likes or respects, given their very transparent real purpose.
The domestic calendar continues to jump around. The Magic Weekend, which IMG wanted to discontinue, has thankfully survived and returned to its more traditional slot and venue in Newcastle.
But the much-vaunted “new event” that IMG promised is nowhere, while the World Club Challenge, one of the great British successes recently, is not even being contested in 2025.
Internationally the game is reduced to shortened home series against Tonga and Samoa, rather than the usual Rugby League fare of Australia and New Zealand.
Really, is this the best the game’s administrators can do?
And let’s not even mention the mid-year international against France, which was tagged on as double header with a Toulouse home fixture. And the next World Cup is retracting to being a 10-nation tournament, down from the 16 in 2022, with Ireland and Scotland actually downgraded in international status.
On the field, there appear to be more players suspended for innocuous contact, making the sporting spectacle a shadow of the gladiatorial combat that attracted us all in the first place.
Rugby League devotees like London benefactor David Hughes and League Express columnist Garry Schofield are disenfranchised enough to turn their backs on the sport.
Finally, it is now reported that a fire sale of playing talent is underway at perennial over-achievers Salford, following near insolvencies at Halifax and Whitehaven.
Is this the “re-imagining” the RFL envisaged when someone signed a twelve-year contract with IMG at a reported £450,000 per annum.
On the basis that surely no one at the RFL can be happy with the current status quo, what is anyone doing about it?
And here is the rub. Who is actually responsible for driving the sport forward in 2025?
We appear to have a three-headed monster, with everyone looking at each other when it comes to tackling the big issues the sport faces. So where does the buck stop?
Every organisation worth its salt has a clear vision about where it is trying to get to, how it is going to get there, when it will get there and, crucially, who is accountable for getting it there.
But does anyone know what that vision is for Rugby League?
Maybe it’s lost in the small print, but the ambitious “Re-imagining Rugby League” looked like the perfect project to re-set the sport with clearly identifiable objectives for growth.
The need is surely to seek a stronger, deeper elite competition producing an on-field product that makes compelling content for broadcasters.
If we look around the rest of the world at other professional sports, we see that they are pursuing new markets aggressively because they have their own internal economics under control, so that they can afford to fund ambitious expansion plans.
As was also pointed out by Martyn Sadler, if you give all the money away to the clubs in a softly regulated player market, it’s no surprise that they will spend it all on playing talent.
Where, in this bold re-imagining, is the clear vision for an expanded Super League over the next decade to deliver more spectacular sporting content to more people?
Rugby League appears to have regressed enormously in London, Wales and Cumbria, to name just a few.
And what about the international programme? Yet again on the eve of the season we are no wiser about the programme for international Rugby League this season. Can you imagine that in any other sport?
And on the field, how does the RFL make sense of the significant challenges facing collision sports, like rugby of both codes? How does it cope sensibly with the attrition rate of athletes while keeping the sport economically viable?
How can the RFL make its offer to the market the most compelling it can be, both in stadia and through the TV with better fan engagement, excitement, drama, controversy and talking points to package up the athletic excellence that it can usually rely upon?
So I would like to make a final plea.
Will whoever is actually in charge please identify themselves?
Will they make themselves known to us and explain their vision, explain how we get to achieve it and by when.
Anything short of that begins to resemble the band playing on the Titanic.