Big Picture

Not recognizing that the European Super League was a byproduct of the Australian pay-TV fight between Murdoch and the Packer-backed ARL does not invalidate the report in any way. Whether Murdoch intended to save the British game doesn't change the fact that the money which News Corp. put up effectively did save it. A few years earlier Framing the Future showed that British RL was in big trouble, and the money from News Corp. was undeniably a lifeline for it.

On what basis do you say that?

Not at all surprising in view of what Sean McGuire had to say in his interviews with Tony Collins though.

The Wolfpack packed Lamport Stadium to capacity and beyond for their playoff matches in 2019, just how then is what I said "demonstrably untrue relating to crowds"?

This is an important point which seems to get overlooked at times. The only successful converts to what we all know is a tough contact sport have come from another contact sport which had given them transferable skills and game sense. Realistically the only potential converts who'll ever play top level RL will have that sort of background.

No they didn't generate a team of Canadians but they certainly did create a lot of interest in the sport as their crowds proved. A lot more interest than the Canadian national team has created so far too.

Those will only apply to a handful of players at the few clubs which can afford to pay out that much. With half (or more) of the SL clubs spending less than the full cap the SL average will still be much lower than the RU Premiership average even with those dispensations figured in.

They're in the division below, does it have the same salary cap as their Premiership?

So even after the cut in the RU cap their players will still get about 1/3 more money on average than SL players at the few clubs which can afford to spend the full SL cap.

They're not twice as big; Bristol Bears' 2020-21 squad lists 42 players according to Wikipedia and SL teams often use 30 during a season so that's less than half again as many players. Even allowing for the fact that the SL cap just covers the top 25 players on a team, RU still pays a lot more than RL now, even after that 28% cut in their salary cap.

Do those headlines then stimulate/increase interest in the game in those countries though? That's what really matters.

You could always have used Google translate to render your search text into them. I did that and found one report in Italian from Turin's La Stampa.

@langparkwas asking about coverage in Italy or Lebanon. I notice that none of those are from either of those countries.

They didn't want to start in tier 3, they wanted to start in SL with a full share of the central distribution, but the RFL said they had to start in tier 3 and win their way up, pay the visiting team's expenses, etc. That's when Pérez lost his initial investors.

As I pointed out on another thread, national teams with a sprinkle of heritage players in the national team are only found in soccer, RU and lacrosse. The other international team sports which I checked out don't allow any heritage qualification. RL's allowance of whole teams of heritage players stands well out from other world sports, and certainly not in a good way.