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nadera78

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Posts posted by nadera78

  1. 3 hours ago, gingerjon said:

    Should have happened a while back but good to see it laid out like this. Hopefully will make a difference.

    Wales do need to actually play some games though.

    I agree with you 100% but, just to put things into context, a couple of days ago the WRL issued an update where they said their total external funding last year was circa £45,000 and only £7,000 of that was allowed to go on performance. Sending the women's team to the RLWC qualifiers cost £12,000. Everything below the senior men's and women's teams is self-funded by the players.

    https://wrl.wales/richard-hibbards-first-year-reflections

    It's a difficult environment for them - playing more games would help get more (perhaps bigger) sponsors, but would that be enough to fund the games? IDK. It's tough. Whatever money they get from the IRL under this scheme will obviously be a huge help.

     

    • Like 6
  2. Just now, langpark said:

    Well, to me it seems very achievable.  NZ's turn to travel.  Then the Aussies get to play a home series.  They will probably play 2 Pac Cups and one Ashes between World Cups from now on.  Seems like a reasonable sequence to follow.

    Where does it say Australia will get to play a home series? Unless you mean the 2026 RLWC then I don't see it in that calendar.

  3. You've got to admire and respect Ken Davy for his financial backing of the club, but the concern (from the outside admittedly) has always been that the club doesn't really seem to do much to grow it's attendances. Lots of cheap tickets, sure, but that always felt like the limit of their approach. They needed to do more than that and moving to Halifax will only exacerbate that.

    • Like 1
  4. 9 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

    Going on past experience, Brewdog could have secured that simply by providing a venue for a few post game drinks. Broncos (pre Hughes) quite famously had Bartercard sponsorship that turned out to be worth less than the cost of eating out at Pizza Hut.

    Don't forget the time the London Junior RL negotiated a sponsorship deal with Selco, only for the Broncos to get wind of it and undercut them. A particular high point of Hughes' time in charge.

    • Like 1
    • Sad 3
  5. 24 minutes ago, Coggo said:

    The 2026 14-club scenario is an open goal for an investor in London (including the NRL) to secure a semi-permanent Super League presence.

    Let's hope it's taken.

     

     

    OK, let's run with this. What would you be investing in?

    The Broncos have no fans, no players, no academy, no staff, no sponsorship base and no assets. It's going to cost you a couple of million p/a just to put a team on the field. Every year.

    Can you build a fanbase? Maybe, but in a city where only one sport matters and everything else is so small as to be invisible outside of long-established major events, and playing a sport that very few people know exists (and even then often confuse with another, rival, sport), that's going to be very difficult. To make matters worse, the events of the past decade make that even harder because an existing group of fans have been driven away meaning you don't have anyone to call upon to help get things going. 

    Can you find the players? Well, all the best local ones have moved to other clubs, leaving you with the leftovers. You're going to have to pay over the odds to attract players from the north or overseas. That's a constant drain on a limited salary cap.

    Can you rebuild the academy? Yes, but it'll take time. And the wider decline of the sport in London means the community game is also in a weaker position so your source of young players is smaller. That's a very long term project.

    Can you build the off-field staff? Of course, but it's more money you need to find.

    Can you build a sponsorship base? Sure, but it'll be difficult when you're playing Championship games in an empty stadium that creates no real atmosphere or buzz. And, again, it'll cost you in the short term.

    Can you build an asset base? No. There's just no land left in London that you could realistically buy and build a stadium or training ground on. 20 years ago, definitely, 10 years ago possibly. Now, no. That means you'll always be renting and at risk of relocation if/when relationships change or fail, just look at the Broncos history on that score.

    TLDR; you'd be taking over an empty shell of a club with a damaged brand. Professional rugby league in London is dead.

    • Like 2
    • Sad 1
  6. 4 hours ago, gingerjon said:

    I mean, it's so magnificently simple there is no need for any debate.

    David Hughes has never had a plan, let alone a succession plan, and, whilst being the sole funding source for the Broncos, has also lunged from disaster to disaster around any aspect of it as a sustainable club for a decade.

    And, yet, some people still don't see this.

    • Like 1
  7. 9 hours ago, Big Picture said:

    But....

    London is unquestionably a major league sports town to use North American parlance, but the opponents available to London in RL all come from minor league sports towns.

    It's no more possible to get Londoners interested in a team playing opponents like those than it would be to get New Yorkers interested in a team playing the likes of Springfield, Illinois or Lansing, Michigan rather than Chicago and Detroit.  In the big city something has to be big to attract that sort of notice.

    1. This isn't true. Take it from a born and bred Londoner who supported the Broncos for 25+ years.

    2. Even if it was true - again, it isn't - it would absolutely the last thing on the list of problems the club faced.

    • Like 1
  8. Dave Hughes' behaviour is perfectly understandable to anyone who has ever had any dealings with Vitol, the business he spent 40 years with. Their negotiating strategy can best be described as "Do as we say or the deal's off" which is fine if you are a company of their size and importance with a particular industry. If, however, you're a small club in a small sport with no money and no leverage then it tends not to work out so well.

    • Like 4
    • Haha 1
  9. 8 hours ago, Sports Prophet said:

    New talk is for a NRL owned venture in partnership with the WA Gov’t which would include the Bears.

    The Cummins cohort is said to have included characters with questionable business interests as major stakeholders of any proposed club. Strange that the WA Gov’t hadn’t detected any such issues in their DD.

    Its not all over yet, but its further than being revealed as the 18/19th club than many had expected.

    For a sport that relies on gambling addicts for a large proportion of its income, I'm very curious as to what these questionable business interests might be.

    • Like 1
  10. 56 minutes ago, Ivarr the Boneless said:

    Surely London Broncos Supporter's Association will step up...

    Yet another example of the club treating the fans with contempt and alienating good people, who had the club at heart.  Exactly the people who are needed now. As you say, that's some legacy.

    The LBSA was completely gutted a few years back when the club set up their own 'official' version, full of promises about access to the club, players, events, etc. It was solely done with the aim of destroying the LBSA and it worked. Another strategic victory for those running the club.

    Time to face the truth, it's over for professional RL in London. I mean, what remains of the fanbase might attempt to keep something going but there just aren't enough people left to do so successfully.

    Oh, and for those debating the cause of this - Hughes, RFL, sport-wide politics, apathy - there's more than enough blame to go around. 

    • Like 6
  11. 10 hours ago, Copa said:

    There’s no way Algeria would tolerate a trans woman representing them at the Olympics. Algeria would probably throw them in jail instead.

    I'm not claiming these boxers are trans, it's more likely that everyone has considered them to be female since birth.

    I'll go back to the Semenya example - born with XY chromosomes, testes working well enough to father children with help from a Dr, testosterone levels normal for a biological male and a form of DSD that only occurs in males, however, no visible male genitalia and in a South African social setting has been considered female since birth. It was only later on that she discovered that she was biologically make, which makes the whole thing so incredibly sad for her (and also difficult for sports).

    If it's true, as claimed, that this Algerian boxer failed a sex test then it's most likely that she is in the same boat as Semenya.

  12. 1 hour ago, Click said:

    Er... What? I can't recall ever reading that Caster was a man. 

    The short version is this. 

    The word formerly used was intersex, which was not only offensive but also incorrect - every human being is either male or female, there is nothing in between. The modern phrase is a difference in sexual development, or DSD, and is pretty much what it sounds like.

    Caster Semenya spent years stating that she was a woman with an abnormally high testosterone level caused by a DSD. During a court case she took against the athletics governing body it emerged that Semenya is biologically male, has male chromosomes, and a type of DSD that only occurs in men. So, she didn't have an abnormally high testosterone level, it was perfectly normal level for a man. Semenya also fathered (in biological terms) two children.

    Media interviews almost always refer to her as a woman, which is a politeness I follow by using 'she'. And that gets to the heart of the sporting issue - do sports segregate based on sex or gender?

  13. 19 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

    A woman with enhanced levels of testosterone did.

    You can debate the rights and wrongs of the testosterone levels without needing to rely on, apparently, a comment from the “too corrupt for both the IOC and boxing” thrown out boxing association.

    Now do Zambian footballers.

    My understanding is that the test this boxer (and another also competing at this Olympics) took was not just for testosterone levels but also sex. Neither of the boxers contested the outcome at the time but are now included because of the change of organisation. And if we want to talk corruption, maybe take a look at some of the boxing decisions so far in Paris.

    As an aside, for years we were told that Caster Semenya was a woman with enhanced levels of testosterone, until it emerged in a court case a year or so back that Caster is a man with natural levels of testosterone for a man and has a DSD that only occurs in men.

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