Big Picture

Did you even bother to read that linked report? It makes clear what @Worzelsaid about tier 1 sports driving subscriptions. That aside, the 100,000 or so RL fans who have Sky (if the number is even that high) are just a drop in the bucket compared to the total of 6 million subscribers they have. So whatever growth they might gain from having little English clubs in SL rather than Catalans and Toulouse would be a trivial number of no account whatsoever to them.

Unfortunately the easy, lazy options are likely the only options they can afford.

How do they expect reserve grade Aussies to qualify for a pro athlete's visa though??

So they're back to the worry about "no away fans" to boost their revenue, how appallingly small time. We can be sure that no one in big time major pro sport ever worries about such a trivial amount of extra revenue, they make enough from TV, sponsorship and their own fans that revenue from fans of the visiting ream is pretty much irrelevant to them.

The 1895 rebels left the RFU on their own accord.

And not needed either, total points can be used to determine the series winner in that event.

How incredibly Mickey Mouse and small time. No wonder Eric Pérez abandoned the sport.

One problem with a Wales-France series on FTA TV would be embarrassingly small crowds.

Lebanon isn't a Pacific country.

As you can see here the Dockers' home average is currently 46,140.

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.