Big Picture

No, Richardson's diagnosis of the British game's ills is not misconceived, it's accurate. His error is in thinking that those ills can be remedied by just rearranging what it has now and adding onto that, when it fact the game's position is even weaker than he thinks it is.

You're right that that's the sort of thing the sport needs, but @Dave Tand the others are right that it's a fantasy as things stand. The sport simply doesn't have the profile and stature to attract all the new fans needed to make it work that way.

Where does this weird idea that a small suburban club changing their name would fool anyone at all come from anyway? Manchester being a big city adjacent to the heartland is not an advantage, if anything it's a disadvantage. This is because unlike Londoners and others further afield, chances are that most Mancunians already know that RL is a small, poor regional sport full of small time clubs and therefore are even less likely to be interested in a club in their city playing in that small time regional setup than Londoners and others further afield.

The NFL will never just put one franchise over there, they've concluded that's not a viable option. Instead they're trying to work out how to put a whole division of four franchises over there, possibly with two in London.

And a new league with 70-75% of its teams in smallish unfashionable towns hardly anyone in the big wide world has ever heard of is going to help fill that bill is it? Yeah right.

Gus is mistaken about one thing though, the game's base in the north isn't strong, it's weak. Weak enough in fact to undermine the whole project.

Gus is mistaken about one thing though, the game's base in the north isn't strong, it's weak. Weak enough in fact to undermine the whole project.

It could even reduce the TV deal by reducing SL's already limited appeal to outsiders and making its TV audience more stagnant than it already is.

If they're between teams from places the public either doesn't know about or doesn't rate and which therefore don't have the reach to draw a new audience, how are they going to be big games???

Those matches might have filled stadiums, but did they draw bigger TV audiences though? Remember, those drew their biggest crowds right at the time when Sky cut the rights fee on 1999 leading to SL dropping from 14 teams down to 12.

How exactly do you see that expanding the sport's stagnant TV audience which is necessary to increase revenues?

The Aussies understand that the league's current configuration isn't fit for the purpose of expanding the sport's stagnant TV audience which is necessary to increase revenues. Whether the reported list of clubs would be capable of achieving that is open to question but it is the best which might be done without starting completely from scratch with brand new franchises based in big cities. It's open to question because even it would have a majority of its clubs in smallish, unfashionable, economically disadvantaged northern towns which the public doesn't associate with big time major pro sport.

Yes it is zero, maybe even negative. @Martyn Sadlerdid Matt Ellis pay anything when he took over Wakefield two years ago, did he just pay nothing, or did Michael Carter have to right off debts to get someone to take the club off his hands? Note that the latter case would mean the club's value was less than zero. I note that this TotalRL report on Mike Danson's takeover of Wigan from Ian Lenagan doesn't mention any price paid at all either, so it's quite possible he paid nothing. That would make Wigan's value zero when he took it off Lenagan's hands.

I meant capital value, i.e. the value which someone would consider it worth paying to buy in, not revenue. And realistically that value is zero. Regarding revenue though, 7 million € is nowhere near Catalans' total budget. Their budget for 2020 was reported to be between 11 and 12 million € and it's surely gone up since then.

The trouble is that an SL membership isn't really worth a fee for a new entrant. In North America those fees grant the new entrant full membership with equal treatment and plenty of support from the league in setting up the new franchise. Realistically SL can't provide any of that to a new entrant.