LATER this year we will know the IMG grading scores that will determine which 12 teams will feature in Super League next season.
The gradings will be announced on 23rd October and we can be confident that London Broncos will be playing in the Championship and that Wakefield Trinity will probably replace them in the top flight in 2025.
But will there be any other changes?
The clubs in danger are those that didn’t qualify for an ‘A’ grade when the provisional gradings were announced last October. And the team in most danger would appear to be Castleford Tigers, who were the 13th ranked team with 12.16 points, although the club made representations after the gradings figures were published to suggest that their score should have been higher than that figure.
Immediately above the Tigers were Leigh with 12.45 points, Wakefield with 12.52, Toulouse with 12.97, Huddersfield Giants with 13.49 and Salford with 13.80.
Immediately below Castleford, with 12.02 points, were Bradford Bulls.
After the Bulls there was a significant gap to the 15th team, which was Featherstone Rovers with 10.65 points.
So which of the top 14 teams will lose out?
My guess is that Toulouse and Bradford won’t make the top twelve and that the other teams will all improve their scores to get nearer to 15 points.
In fact that only thing that really counts when the gradings are announced is the gap between teams 12 and 13. If that gap is a very tiny one, let’s say 0.1 points, then I would be amazed if club number 13 doesn’t resort to legal action to try to preserve its position in Super League. The point is that the financial consequences of being 13th instead of 12th is around £1.3 million pounds per year. So the club in 13th position would be foolish not to challenge the gradings.
And if it does, that will make the planning of the 2025 season very difficult, with the RFL having to wait until any legal challenge is played out. And who knows how long that might take?
That, of course, begs the question of whether there should be 14 clubs in Super League next season.
I think there should be, but the RFL insists that there is little chance of that happening, even if there is a legal challenge by a disaffected club.
Instead Super League will remain at twelve clubs and we will continue with the ridiculous loop fixtures.
One of the things that interests me, however, is the way the gradings scores are compiled and in particular the five points that could be awarded for ‘fandom’.
Those five points are split into a potential 2.5 points for clubs that draw an average attendance of more than 7,500.
Then there is one point that can be awarded for viewing figures where they average more than 150,000 viewers per game.
Finally there is the potential score of 1.5 points for a club’s digital profile.
That figure breaks down into a maximum of 0.2 points that can be earned for a club having more than 500,000 followers on its social media outlets (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or X as it is now called), TikTok and YouTube added together to get to the threshold).
Then there is the potential to add another 0.8 points that are derived from the number of engagements (likes, shares, comments, retweets, video views, metrics for reels and stories) across social media platforms. The maximum points will be awarded for more than five million engagements per year, while there will be fewer points awarded to clubs on a sliding scale down to 300,000 engagements per year. Below that figure, no points will be awarded.
Then a club can earn another 0.5 points if it generates 60,000 visits per year to its website, which seems to me to be a remarkably modest ambition.
But it’s worth asking what impact a strong social medial digital profile brings to a club.
For example, one of the clubs that has most embraced its digital profile seems to be Warrington Wolves, whose activity on social media is exemplary.
But how much value does its social media profile add?
The conundrum facing Warrington is that the club’s support has declined significantly this year when compared to 2023, when the club’s average attendance was 10,894. For most games this season the Wolves have been struggling to draw 10,000 fans, despite having appointed the charismatic Sam Burgess as their head coach combined with their creative social media output.
So is the cost of having a strong digital profile really worth the money?
It would be counter-intuitive to make that claim.
But it does cause me to wonder whether 1.5 points should be awarded for it in the IMG gradings system, particularly when those points could have such an important bearing on the future of all the clubs in the competition.
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 499 (August 2024)
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