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I've held my tongue for a while on this forum. It's been uneasy watching on for a long while, pretty much since Truro FC came on the scene. It was clear as day that all focus and attention went in one direction as that was the shiny new club with a shiny new stadium the Council and Truro FC were paying for. Cornwall at Penryn had no assets, a weakened ability to drive its income, given the individuals and the contacts that come with it went to Truro FC. The dwindling attendances with the lack of any real (marketing) resource or way of driving a crowd with a shoestring team. The investment team cherry picked critical elements of Cornwall RLFC and then moved them to Truro FC as part of the acquisition and sale. On one hand entrepreneurial. On the other, chopped the knees off Cornwall RLFC which at the time was making good progress in the commercial world. There were a number of key failings. One of the biggest being the lack of any community or game being developed alongside the club. The club was paper-thin in terms of its depth in the community and as soon as Perez moved focus onto something else, the gaping chasm opened up with no resilience The Council were desperate for Truro FC to "come home" to the city and as such, an opportunity arose. At one stage I was optimistic that Cornwall RLFC could ground share and be a dual enterprise. It would've put the RU Pirates well and truly on the back foot down here. All of that was cast aside for what ever reason the investment team had. For everyone who is casting the "it would never work" notion. I categorically rebuff those statements. It could have worked. Cornwall started with a good solid foundation, with energy, an off the field team doing some good things, and with a decent following. They could've made the club more sustainable for the long-run with investment into the community game/building a broader base. But equally, when you switch focus to Truro FC, sell the business and keep hold of your sales staff, contacts and a limited corporate order book for sport sponsorship in the Duchy. The buyer of the RL club is always on a hiding to nothing. In my opinion that is the biggest issue that killed Cornwall.

The presence of Cornwall doesn’t stop anyone “financially consolidating” anywhere else. The game needs to stop looking for outsiders to blame.

Given he setup a professional rugby league club on another continent, with little/no background in the game, secured entry into the English leagues, winning successive promotions in front of record breaking crowds, it’s difficult to consider him anything but a visionary

It’s certainly the fault of whoever has overseen the slashing of central funding and the removal of any pretence of a sustainable, national development strategy. The sport will only wake up when it loses a heartland club though. They’re the only ones that count.

They only had to fork out once a season to go to Cornwall yet Cornwall had to pay up every other week to travel north, totally unsustainable for any club with such limited funds / income. still a sad day for the sport though.

I know, just imagine the pathetic sound effects Degsy could have bought with the few grand chucked Cornwalls way, or Saints could have paid some over the hill NRL player, or could have advanced Salford a few more quid to throw away.

Well done you. Take a badge.

It's all PR - you can pretty much get whatever tickets you would like for any game, but it has created a buzz and fans actually flapping about not receiving their code etc. It's created a sense of urgency, whereas it's probably fair to say that for an RL event you can normally just wait until the final month before bothering. Hopefully this strategy will allow them to know where they now need to focus their marketing budget, and how much (although I'd expect no real surprises!).

In the loyalty period - managed to get 2 x Headingley North Stand In the pre-register period today I got 2 x Everton in the south west corner and 3 in the Club Wembley ring. A good amount spent and it should be worth every penny. I don't believe that the grumps on social media and BBC HYS pages complaining about prices fairly represent RL fans. It's evident that many RL and sports fans in general will pay good money for top class RL in this country. My first international game was vs Australia in the '92 world cup final at Wembley, It means a lot to be able to go to this series with my dad if he can make it to October/November.

And combine that with an almost impossible task of getting out of their division it is a marvel that the leaders of such clubs don't get totally disheartened and call it a day. The light at the end of the tunnel is becoming a pinprick.

Blimey! I'd just posted on the League 1 thread about whether North Wales Crusaders could expect a win this Sunday. A real shame; I'd been to all our games in Cornwall and met some lovely people down there, and I appreciate the hard work that had gone into trying to promote and run the club in Cornwall.

Over 60k tickets sold apparently

Greece Rugby League continues to grow:

Also I see the top tier has opened up at Wembley!

Lifelong soccer fan these days, apparently. This was on the cards once the ownership transfer happened. Credit to folk for trying but not a surprise. Still, another one for the “look, we’ve tried expansion” crowd.

I'm not sure anyones ridiculed you?? I don't agree with a lot of posts on here but surely a bit of debate is what it's all about? If we all thought the same it would be boring. Your opinion is as relevant as anyone else's but there are going to be people that disagree. Personally I welcome posts from older supporters as they often bring things up I wasn't aware of and it's great to hear the history of the club from someone who's been there and seen it. On the Australian signings I do have a very different view to you though and don't really understand why you're going in on Clint? I actually think the recruitment has been pretty good under him and all the overseas lads he's brought in have been excellent both on and off the field and really made a difference. If you think differently that's absolutely fine. From what ive seen and read about this new lad, he looks a cracking prospect and we've done well to get him. If that means we have to pay for flights, accommodation etc then so be it. I don't think Clints going to put the clubs finances at risk to bring him here. I agree it's frustrating when players do the dirty on the club but it's the nature of the beast and happens to all clubs. I also don't think it's the overseas lads that have been the problem for us in recent years, I think they've been superb.

Keighley's statement just now on this subject is so predictable from them. Mentioning Northampton as a demised RL club where there never was one is quite typical nonsense (the Demons being amateur only).

Mascord was right about Toulouse having to pay for travel, and then later right about Catalans having to pay for travel. He has good sources in the French clubs. The issue with Catalans is not whether individual clubs take advantage of any commercial opportunities they bring. They don't need to bring any. They add value to the league because they are a consistently competitive club, well-resourced with a strong youth system. We don't have enough of those. Nobody at another club ever asks "what commercial opportunities do I specifically get as a result of Huddersfield being in the league". When we have 12, or even 10, strong English clubs we can have a chat about Catalans versus one of them. But we don't. Why set them some higher bar they have to get over? I'd frame it a different way: If any club is so fragile that it can't afford to meet the requirements of travelling to France once or twice per season, then you should step out of Super League and into the Championship which is clearly a better level for it.

£844 lighter. Headingley x 8, Everton x 8 and London x 4 Bring it on.

One off Nige’s to do list.

That's that then. An entire rugby league club from start to finish in 56 pages...

When you assume you make an ass out of u and me ... Winning always helps, indeed that is why it has the greatest single value in the grading scale. Nobody would ever deny that. But in counter to your suggestion that this is all about winning, I'd also point to how HKR, Leigh and Wigan have all over the past 3 to 4 years had rebrands and consciously invested in improving their matchday experience beyond the on field. For example, Leigh now have live entertainment at every game, HKR with the Craven Streat end, and Wigan have Robin Park doing lots for them. The whole point of this system is that its not just one thing or the other that a club needs to be good at, its everything. Shockingly the clubs doing well across the board are the ones seeing results, those that aren't are not...

No. you are right. Lets wait for SKY to slice the pie even thinner and reduce the game further into its heartlands where the demographic ages and reduces in numbers even further.....Sigh. Short-termism will be the death of the sport in the northern hemisphere.

It doesn’t matter and we should stop pretending it’s the most important issue facing the game.

Isn't that just for the away fans?

We need to be very careful going down the route of slating certain clubs. It would be very easy to make a case for a UK only league with all central funding being routed to UKRL that wouldn't see a reduction in value. It's by no means a route I'd go down, but let's not make out Catalans bring huge financial value to SL. But an SL place is worth probably €7m a year to the Dragons.

Catalans have been in the league for over twenty years. If clubs can't afford to travel there, then they should opt out of the Super League competition. I strongly doubt they would, or that if they did they'd be a club we'd miss very much. We can always define the terms of entry of new clubs. The MLS has greatly increased it's franchise buy-in as that league has developed. That's normal. But to move the goalposts for a current club, when that club has done all we could ever have asked of it since it joined, and more so, is frankly nauseating. It's gangster behaviour, from clubs who really shouldn't be given the strength of gangsters and instead need to be called out and made to make their own hard choices rather than be mollycoddled.

Credit to the organisers for all the pre-sale stuff and creating a buzz around this. Such a small thing on the face of it but it has really helped to push people towards buying and generating sales.

I think this is where Headingley does make some sense. There's a good chance that by the time tickets go on general sale, and even by this afternoon, one of the three venues has gone. That's great both from a message of "this is an event people are fighting to see" but also from a message of "if you want to see it, this is where you need to go". A sold out Headingley helps sell Wembley.

New owners are coming into the sport, and investing in more than just the first team when they do, because the new ranking system gives them multi-season security of tenure (and a framework that describes what good looks like, beyond "spend an extra £1m on players to beat your neighbours") To be honest I'd argue that anybody who thinks that rugby league has just somehow magically attracted more inward investment than at any other time in its history, and indeed at a time when the outside world is going to hell in a handcart economically so there's less money around, is being wilfully obtuse. Of course it doesn't work without the investment, that's always been true. You need both. But the purpose behind security of tenure is to make investment more attractive, by providing the time to succeed.

He’s not there any more, and he left because they got no support from the game. Not even allowed to enter the 1985 cup.

Given Salford's position, you may not have to wait long.

I would agree with you, but I am hopeful Midlands Hurricanes might be showing some early signs of bucking that trend! Let's hope so!

Another sad day for RL and another nail in the coffin of the sport.. Feel for the fans and players affected by all of this...

Professional rugby league outside the heartland will only work with full-time teams that are competitive. Otherwise, as we've seen countless times, isolated outposts can't develop quality in sufficient numbers to stop the losses racking up, interest inevitably wanes, and the writing is on the wall. We don't need semi pro clubs all over the place, a widespread community game and one sustainable SL club in London will do more for UK RL than half a dozen strugglers in L1.

Why don't these small-minded fools go off and form their Ultimate Rugby comp with Leigh, Bradford, Keighley and Batley (and St Helens too apparently, as McManus slowly loses his marbles), with Nigel Wood as CEO and Raph Rimmer doing all the admin, and in doing so let the rest of us get on with trying to build a viable future for rugby league in the northern hemisphere?

The central funding Cornwall received probably wouldn’t even cover a weeks worth of interest on Salfords loan payments.

Longhorns are a very ambitious and well run club. I really hope the RFL back them and support them. We had the pleasure of hosting them in the Challenge Cup and it was a uplifting to deal with people so enthusiastic about our game.

Thirty plus years ago and irrelevant to today

It's the only way Forward pal 1 championship league and get rid of the Micky Mouse cup games.

It wont even make the agenda of the new regime. Its nigh on impossible for a team in league 1 to get promoted given the play off format. The plan has long been to isolate league 1 and eventually shift it lock stock and barrel to the ‘community game’ getting us back to two divisions. Its a game of musical chairs and Oldham managed to escape before the music stopped.

Cornwall weren't the ones complaining though were they?

While most in this forum including myself would love to see expansion it’s quite clear that the games leaders (RFL and heartlands clubs) are against it, so I’m now wondering why anyone bothers. The amount of time and money wasted at Cornwall must be mind boggling.

To challenge that somewhat, we do need a sensible discussion on how we embed overseas teams in the UK structure. Because so far we've had various different models. We've had 1. Full central funding. 2. Full central funding minus travel costs. 3. No central funding and travel costs covered by overseas team. We can't just keep winging it. Not can we automatically just absorb £0.5m new costs per year for every new French club. In reality, all that will happen is we will start saying no to these clubs instead of having an adult conversation. I'm a fan of planning and consistency, and I don't personally have an issue with costs being paid like this, but I do have an issue with fairness and moving the goalposts. For me, this is another example of not thinking through consequences of decisions or any kind of planning.

What a complete waste of time that has been, brought nothing to the game at all and caused clubs to pay out extra money for accomodation and travel to their place, what happens now ?

One of the big issues that is related to this is that RL has really not adapted well to younger generations becoming more geographically, socially and economically mobile. RL lives in a part of the country where young people might once have bought a house next to the factory / industry in their home town where they would spend their working lives, but that doesn't happen now. Today, RL lives in a part of the country where young people tend to leave for education or career prospects. I was one of the first of Tony Blair's "50% of kids should go to university" generation and that is what more and more young people did - they moved away, at least from their home town, and often from RL land entirely. Some might come back, but many don't. Until IMG, it was difficult to follow and "buy" RL in any meaningful way if you didn't live close to the heartlands. More than 50% of our fixtures most weeks weren't televised, those that were sat behind a bundled paywall, digital content was sparse and that left you with whatever BBC Radio coverage you could get. Now, what should have happened (because this generational trend was obvious to anyone who was paying attention) was greater investment in things like student rugby, because that is a brilliant way to keep people from RL land engaged with the sport when they move away, and it brings people not from RL land into the sport. Not only that, but if you work on the basis that most of the country's future business decision makers or political leaders are university graduates, it increases the sport's changes of breaking down historical issues of "old school ties" and the challenges we have being taken seriously at those levels. But the sport didn't do enough of it, or didn't do it well enough. And I think that's why your point about Leeds is fair. The student population of Leeds is around 80,000 - that's close to the population of Castleford and Leigh combined. It's a major untapped market. Leeds has a very competitive leisure market and I think it does OK to get the market share that it does, but there are bigger issues around why RL doesn't have as much appeal in the 16-25 sort of demographic that I think it arguably should.

A 20k sell out at Headingley before they go on general sale is far better for the sport than a 25/30k attendance at ER in my opinion

15k in pretty much 97 minutes would be astonishing. Remember that Southern fans were mostly locked out of the pre-pre-sale.

Wakefield have only averaged over 6,000 just four times in the last twenty years, and never averaged over 7,000 in that period. During the whole Super League era “normal” is more like 4,500 for them. So by any stretch of the imagination, the progress this year is very significant. Any team who can increase their average attendance by over 75% versus their long-term norms deserves to be praised. If we can’t celebrate that, what can we celebrate? You can’t get to the next level without going through this one. Wakefield are attracting a large audience now for their next generation of growth, the kids coming now will be here for decades ahead of they maintain this hard work.