gingerjon

About as long as you persist in creating a new identity to keep trolling? Or probably not, because no one normal could keep going for so long. Or, to be really obvious for the terminally stupid: 40,000 in the north is the same 40,000 who go to other games. 60,000 (ish) in the south will include thousands for whom this is there only direct connection. Therefore, the latter is more valuable if you wish to sustain and/or grow the game, the former is what someone who loves to contract the game would propose.

Spoken like a true believer that rugby league can never be bigger than it is now.

Not a cover version as such, but I just love watch musical people being creative for fun and revealing a little bit of how the magic works

Paul King, later: https://clip.cafe/the-sting-1973/youre-not-gonna-stick-around-your-share/

I am now going to use my favourite film line of the twenty-first century: THIS CAN ONLY END BRILLIANTLY.

I’m sure they know some guys

Madness.

I do see your point but it reminds me of our Australian friends before the first Vegas (before they’d twigged it was event for them not Americans) going on about how there was a collision sport market to be filled because the NFL season is over by February. There’s no evidence that’s really how sports or entertainment seekers see things.

Pretty much this. No need to go pile em high on this. Play it is a prestigious fixture worth winning.

There is no “collision ball sport” market. You spent too long in Australia. You’ll be thinking anyone outside of Oceania gives a tinker’s cuss about football code wars next.

I absolutely respect the subtle trolling of calling Nantes one of the best handball clubs in the world.

Is that a home with or without a sundeck?

Rugby Union is the premier code of rugby. In the same way “association” is the premier code of football. This mess, though, is, fantastically, an absolute joke of a tournament that no one really wants in the form it has come into existence. It is almost too beautiful for words in terms of how poor it is going to be and just how much it is not going to fix RU’s money leaking problems.

Lowest non Covid, official Wembley final attendance is 50,672. It’ll be a worry if we’re not much above that.

Anyway, to bring it back to attendances. 60k looking likely or unlikely for the Challenge Cup final?

23.3m watched England beat Germany in the Euro 2022 final. It’s a lovely argument to say no one is watching or the coverage isn’t justified by the viewers, crowds and engagement but it’s not actually true. RL could learn a lot from the years of hard work put in by multiple people. But, instead, it keeps wanting a magic bullet.

My view on the Eggchasers thing is that it showed a canny way of getting interest in them - rather than a real belief that a huge number of people in the UK are crying out for level 2 French union. That said, in the absence of anything else, I did livestream some level 2 French handball yesterday. A surprise win for Caen, since you ask.

Indeed. The world has changed a lot. Popularity is not as simple as being on grandstand - and our actual attendances and income show us that it never really was.

Interestingly, even talking about RU like this reveals a bit of Anglo prejudice. I was doing some googling and by a fair number of metrics - albeit I didn’t get on to money because that didn’t seem easily comparable across sports - RU well behind basketball, a bit behind handball, and possibly behind volleyball in terms of participation, audience and visibility. And that’s before you get to how big tennis and cycling are. So RL in France is tiny compared to a sport that is big but far from the obvious “second only to soccer” it might appear to us.

That women’s football didn’t overtake rugby league - a sport which had the chance to grow its women’s visibility and chose not to - because of some woke plot by the BBC.

And yet there is now more rugby league on the TV than during the Grandstand era.

As in “the sport”. RU’s tournament should have no influence on what works best for RL as there is no context about it that we share.

How many people watched when RL was on Grandstand - a TV programme that ended twenty years ago? Because my memory is that we had really low crowds and the sport went bankrupt during that time. Because it’s not that simple.

We’ve had literal decades of rugby league having significantly more coverage than women’s football. What was the end result?

And yet you yourself have talked about the non match pleasures of attending as being a reason to keep doing it - beers beforehand, meeting friends etc. So, even for you, it’s more than the game. It’s always about creating that for as many people as possible in as many ways needed.