Big Picture

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.

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?