Exiled Wiganer
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Posts posted by Exiled Wiganer
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23 minutes ago, dboy said:
The crowds announced aren't necessarily the figures provided to IMG.
Maybe they counted legs rather than heads today?
Season ticket holders would be included whether or not they attended, which would account for the gap between what we saw and the official figure.
Certainly, we are seeing a reimagined Super League this year!
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1 minute ago, Worzel said:
Again, IMG didn't assess Salford's financials, the RFL did. You're trying to pin blame on them, for your own reasons. It wasn't them.
It's almost impossible to construct a financial assessment that is reliably forward-looking. Every club operates at a loss, and every club will say "yes, we have a source of funds to bridge that gap. Every club risks a change of circumstance at the top meaning that the promise cannot be delivered. All the sport could do last year was assess the present position, and it marked Salford close to zero on financials, to the extent that they almost came 13th and lost their spot.
The failure of governance came when Salford started to run out of cash. At that point the RFL could have imposed player sales as a condition, and taken the club to a break-even position. If they'd done that Salford would have had a bad season, but they'd have survived the season. Then an investor, if they came, could rebuild. Instead, the RFL closed their eyes and hoped the club would be lucky on time. That governance role is also nothing to do with IMG, or RL Commercial. It sits with the RFL.
I understood that IMG were part of the design/implementation of the process which resulted in a team with no money being awarded a licence. Something has clearly gone very very wrong in that process.
All the events after that flow from the initial calamitous decision, and demonstrate a lack of clarity of thought and denial of responsibility on all parts (including the clubs - with Wigan and HKR among them who washed their hands of the problem).
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2 minutes ago, Tommygilf said:
If that is your position I am astounded by its myopia.
Which fact did you want to pick up on, because they all look uncontroversial to me. I am genuinely interested - I may be inaccurate in my summary, but from where I am sitting this has been the story of the season so far.
I should say that I like the idea of devil take the hindmost, and the return to framing the future minimum standards. What I don’t see is any reason for IMG supporters to assert that 1) all is well, 2) it’s down to IMG and 3) anyone who thinks otherwise is as thick as the what have the romans done for us sketch (brilliant sketch though it is).
Clearly all is far from being well. You can broadly support the ideas behind an IMG long term/attention to detail/do some hard work for once approach - I do - and accept that things have gone very awry.
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1 minute ago, Tommygilf said:
Perhaps from the same folk who wrote the previous letter.
We're surely better than Union sweep it under the carpet merchants?
I am happy for this to play out, and for scrutiny to be given to our game. However, I would be cautious about the assumption that the members in a members organisation can’t step in and shake things up if they want. Their doing so may be misguided, and may do the game considerable harm, but as a rule of thumb if your owners are unhappy then you are probably not managing your business in the best possible way.
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46 minutes ago, Worzel said:
1. The Paul Lakin comment was a tongue-in-cheek joke, I guess that doesn't work in text form
2. I agree the RFL needs reform, the Salford saga was a failure of governance and the clubs are right to be angry and not be prepared to accept it.
3. I agree Derek doesn't have the ability to directly make change. That doesn't stop me fearing his influence, or mean I can't express my views on the downside of it.
4. My point on Davidsons article was that I think the comparison with Trump was apposite, in that I bet if you sat them both down to do a personality profile you'd get similar results, and his insight into why his views get so much media traction was also an interesting parallel.
2. Salford’s failure was a failure of the system of awarding licences to spot that err, there’s no money. That’s not to say that changes can’t be made to put in place a test that works. I would ask some financial people to ask some financial questions and leave the media rights experts to looking into increasing our media rights.
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3 hours ago, Tommygilf said:
Exactly! We have incentivised clubs to do more than spaff money up the wall on players!!!! And it has worked!
In what way?
Crowds aside from Wigan are nothing to write home about. We have a 12 team competition with 11 teams and one circus act. The only good thing of note off the pitch was Wigan and Warrington’s initiative. We have clubs’ business models consisting of “shrink our stadium”.
If that is working then god forbid it ever stops working.
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5 hours ago, dkw said:
The amount of people claiming IMG has added nothing to the sport is embarrassing, the sport has never been as visible on social media and "old" media, its been in the headlines for the right things for once (mostly), theres several clubs using the framework as it was intended to progress and raise standards etc.
It is possible to ascribe to IMG anything you like, given that they have some nebulous brief. There were initiatives taken to drive the game forward in the 100 years plus before they came on board. We will never know what might have been, but I suspect that the clubs could have sussed the desirability of increasing our social media presence themselves. The crowds this year, if you take Wigan out of the mix, are nothing to get excited about. Go back and look at Super League crowds over the years, and we have had far stronger crowd figures. Trinity’s “success” amounts to shrinking their ground until its maximum crowd fills it (a route being adopted by the Giants, seemingly). HKR’s growth was given vital impetus and was anchored by a one off legal event.
There have been 3 big stories this year: first, Salford - within weeks of being assessed by IMG - discovering players needing paying in actual money. Second, the boost given to the profile of the competiton by the Vegas match: which was entirely Wigan and Warrington’s project, and nothing to do with IMG.
Third is this putsch which might or might not lead somewhere, but which seems at some level to reflect a dissatisfaction from the people paying IMG’s bills with the results. You can get as cross with them as you like, and defend IMG all day every day, but if your client who sees what you do and who pays your bills is so unimpressed they act in this way then that’s a clear failure of the service provider to instil confidence. Which leaves us with a choice between believing that IMG - whose job it is to drive up value and standards - is doing a fantastic job, and the people who would directly benefit are unhappy because [fill in the gap because I honestly can’t think of a reason] or they have failed to carry with them the people paying their bills who see first hand, rather than through an online fans forum, what they have done. My money is on the latter.
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That’s the way to do it, as Mr Punch used to say…
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35 minutes ago, hunsletgreenandgold said:
So you'd advocate for a club like Salford for example, who's on field performance warranted them remaining a SL club, be demoted due to not being a viable SL club? I'm not disagreeing with you, just clarifying that is what you mean by that.
I would. Their case could not be simpler. They were living vastly beyond their means, with no backers in place, such that they ran out of money pretty much instantly after being awarded a licence. This devaluing and distorting the 2025 competition.
The idea of identifying the areas clubs must improve for the game to more valuable is sound on many levels. The execution/design has been worse than amateurish though, damaging the value of the product the game is trying to sell.
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6 minutes ago, Chrispmartha said:
They finished 4th in SL last year.
Yet they finished bottom on the gradings in SL and look likely yo drop out.
Which criteria would you prefer?
Perhaps some which involve adds and takes, and can see that there isn’t enough coming in to pay the players on the books.
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46 minutes ago, The Masked Poster said:
Huddersfield haven't had 60 years in the doldrums though, they've had a recent period of modest success and showed a respectable increase in crowds for a while.
And Wakefield are hardly riding the crest of a wave, they won promotion from a division in which they were the only full time squad, which is good but hardly stellar. But on top of that they are being proactive in attracting fans to the stadium.
They have also mastered the art of shrinking your capacity until your crowds fit quite nicely.
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21 minutes ago, Tommygilf said:
Shocking how you can be worse than them really, but we have 24 of those!
We don’t. Shocking that we came up with a system which didn’t think having the money to field an actual team mattered.
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4 hours ago, daz39 said:
They also haven't had 60 years in the doldrums losing 2 generations of support and a habit not passed down through families, they have had success which has kept already interested fans and families at those clubs, Wakefield are riding on the crest of a wave following a successful season in a lower division and a good start to this year, apart from Wigan none of them have to compete with a high level football team either, Wigan are the biggest RL brand in the world so that will always hold them in good stead.
As a Huddersfield fan for nearly 40 years now i tend to agree with the 1st bit, we are a dull, boring club who do very little to change that notion.
I have my own thoughts and ideas there but i won't air them on a public forum, i am lucky enough to have instant access to our clubs important people and a relationship that means i can ask questions and offer opinions etc, they may not go down well but at least i make them known to the people that matter.
If the Giants reduced their stadium to Trinity’s size people would feel much better about them. It would also make the current fans’ game day experience much better. If you take along a newbie to a 3/4 full ground they are far more likely to focus on the game and enjoy themselves than if they go to a 3/4 empty one.
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I am not sure whether this has been discussed, but my eye was caught by an article on BBC, which concerned the resignations of a couple of (female) RFL directors. If I understand it correctly, it suggests that losing all independent and female directors from the board may be perceived very badly by Sport England. I assume they are major supporters of our game.
I have been largely agnostic around recent events. I tend to the view that it is highly regrettable to go about taking stock in this way, but, if the RFL and IMG can’t keep the RFL members onside they’ve only themselves to blame. In the light of the recently licensed and assessed Salford financial calamity and the success of the clubs’ own Vegas initiative, I can see some logic in the clubs’ annoyance. However, if that puts many millions of pounds of public support in jeopardy then that would be an exercise in gross self harm. And one which halfway professional people would have anticipated and addressed from the outset. They may indeed be doing so, but if not…
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3 hours ago, sweaty craiq said:
Ill say it again - letting folk in for Free sees you being the next Salford, putting £25 on the ST price to include this doesnt but what if you are drawn away on a Friday night ?
I think they should at least make this an option. We would pay extra, appreciating that we might be “at risk” if Wigan get no home games or quids in if we got 2. Many of us bought covid season tickets appreciating we wouldn’t be seeing any matches - they’re tickets for matches but also a way to show our love for the club.
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Matty Peet is usually polite and restrained when he speaks publicly. Pretty much the only occasion I can recall his anger boiling over was when commenting on Warrington having signed Nicholson. Not that they did anything wrong, more that he knew what we had lost. Different league from Smithies, who is basically an Ian Potter 40 years on.
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1 hour ago, Worzel said:
The first step to the funding of a 14 team league is an improved TV contract in the next buying cycle.
If we jetison the IMG project after 18 months of a 12 year programme, we will blow that possibility up in smoke. Sky will not see us as serious, grown-up partners with the ability to execute a strategy we'd previously committed to. We'll look precisely like we've always looked before: A tinpot organisation that runs on short-term thinking, and so can't be trusted to deliver on the promises we make.
You honestly believe that the only way forward for the game is through IMG, don’t you? And everything flows from that. I have seen organisations thrive without IMG, and have lived through periods of growth and stability in our game without them.
I would say this. If they decide to terminate the contract, they ought to consider why they are doing it, how much it is going to cost, and what effect being seen to ditch it will have on their bargaining power, and be convinced that the alternative is better. Otherwise they are just having a money bonfire and their failure will cost all of them further down the line. In short, they would need very good reasons indeed to ditch them.
i can’t see it myself: I would not have had IMG run the evaluation process (though I can see that they would have to play a part in working out what form it took). But if they add any value at all, it is for what they would go on to do, where they clearly have expertise.
I think the hurdles to get over to ditch them are huge. By all means pull them up for their contractual failings - indeed their contract should contain provisions that allow them to do so - but terminating the contract for failing to do something they were ill equipped to do looks many many steps too far from where I am sitting.
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3 hours ago, Bull Mania said:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/33843197/rugby-super-league-salford-wembley-money-crisis/
I remember reading this type of ###### from Gledhill when we were going through the same torture Salford fans are. As a fan you're desperate for any good news to cling on to when you're on the cliff edge. Difference being Gledhill is a gob **** on twitter who somehow triggers most of the RL Media. Carter's a rugby league correspindent for a national newspaper. He should be leaving his love of Salford at the door.
Im no finance expert butIt is not normal that the new owners of Salford can only transfer £49k a day because of the overseas bank rules. This isn't transferring a mate money on your phones banking app. Maybe I'm naive and business deals between Australia and UK over £100k have never happened. Stop portraying it as legitimate excuse.
Oh and the fact Salford were in such a bad state was a surprise!!?
Maybe they were reassured by their having been awarded a place in SL after an exhaustive evaluation process and are astonished at the reality?
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2 hours ago, Worzel said:
You and some club owners are the modern day reboot of the “what have the Romans ever done for us?” sketch. Has everyone been blind and deaf in the last 18 months?
I’m an advocate for the IMG partnership in the sense that I’m an advocate for progressive thought and actions. If the counter-revolutionaries had a better concept, I’d be 100% behind it. But instead what have we seen behind the scenes from such people?
- Making Toulouse, and now Catalans pay for their travel, with no rational justification other than “we have the power to do so, and they’ve built a better business than us so can afford it”
- Many clubs not investing in the audience and community growth strategies as designed. Clubs always had to spend money in this project, and do more work. Some haven’t.
- Advocating a return to promotion & relegation, removing the security that has attracted investment (that you say you agree with)
- Now even talking about kicking Catalans out of the league “because they take money from the English game”, when in fact they add huge value
If there was a better path proposed, I’d be right behind it. But all I see is the usual political nonsense that has plagued our sport for decades (that sells papers I’m sure…), and lots of regressive ideas, all because they haven’t seen a miracle happen 18 months into a 12 year partnership. Don’t you?
There is an alternative world in which the post office weren’t evil, and your club is on the outside looking in. The major changes for good or ill in our game have been on a club level, largely dictated by particular individuals in the right place at the right time. Danson happened to be born in Wigan, and his family loves our game, which leads to Vegas.
I can only remember very brief periods when the clubs and the RFL advanced in lockstep. I rated Lewis very highly and thought that the early 10s were great times.
We are where we are today because too many clubs believe that the RFL’s direction is wrong. It’s a members club and many of the members are revolting. It may be that they are entirely driven by self interest and the game may be worse off, but to reach this point shows that the RFL has not carried the game with them on its current course.
I have very low expectations that the coup will improve things, but the idea that all was well and the clubs have deliberately and masochistically sabotaged it seems to me to be highly implausible.
Time will tell.
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1 hour ago, RigbyLuger said:
A place they would have had under the previous process as well.
Indeed, but this one gave the game a chance to assess things like whether a club has any money to pay people,, and failed to spot that Salford didn’t.
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17 minutes ago, Chrispmartha said:
IMG are consultants, they don’t make any decisions just recommendations
That is indeed one way of looking at them an alternative would be that they designed and carried out an assessment process which delivered Salford to SL. Now, I suppose it was open to the clubs to second guess the design and the implementation of that process. In which case what were they paying for, as they may as well have done it themselves. Anyway, the clubs have seen first hand what happened and have far more info than you and I, and so any decision they make will be better informed.
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2 minutes ago, RigbyLuger said:
And they haven't clearly spelled out why that's needed either, have they? Shocking communications.
I am not particularly shocked that they haven’t made a case, beyond we can and want to take control. It’s par for the course. We seem to under perform when the clubs take control and we seem to under perform when they cede control.
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4 minutes ago, Archie Gordon said:
Ok. But these same laser-focused folks voted all this through. And it's not the first time these laser-focused lads and lasses have set something up and then pulled it down. At this stage, I'm wondering if they are the problem.
Indeed. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic at this point. I look at the RFL/IMG Salford debacle and the club driven Vegas triumph and am not despondent about the prospect of people like Danson seizing the wheel.
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2 minutes ago, Josef K said:
Who are the clubs/Directors in favour of Mr Wood returning back as the RFL CEO (or whatever his position is), and who are against it ?.
I have no idea, but:
- we know that today’s meeting was cancelled and the resolutions (principally the new committee and Nigel becoming interim chairman) were passed by virtue of suffficient proxy votes;
- I don’t know what majority is required, but if it is a simple majority then it could be achieved by all non SL clubs plus one SL club or all SL clubs plus one non SL club voting in favour (from what I have read of the weighting voting process); and
- Beaumont’s statement suggested that ALL SL clubs were in favour of a root and branch review at the end of last year…
I know that isn’t an answer but hope it’s helpful.
SL clubs look to reinstate Nigel Wood.
in The General Rugby League Forum
Posted
They don’t have the right because of the money they put in, they have the right because the RFL is a members organisation. People can shout “it’s not fair” all they like but the clubs exercised a right they held.
You frequently see boards and other parts of organisations act as if they get to dictate terms to their owners. That often works, but there is always the risk that the members combine to oust them. The RFL failed to stop this, they failed to manage their members, and here we are… blaming Beaumont for exercising his right and successfully persuading enough others to agree with him is a waste of breath.
The RFL’s management is entirely to blame here.