Big Picture

Do fans of lower-tier pro soccer clubs continue to follow their clubs, or do they give up on them? Their continued existence suggests the former, so what would stop fans of those pro RL clubs continuing to follow their clubs?

Terms would obviously have to be worked out if a player who's under contract is going to be signed, just as in any other case of such a player moving from one team to another. No fees are legally mandated for players who are out of contract, they are legally free agents.

I mean players of a certain age, e.g. 19 or older, from either the non-professional or professional ranks. Sure a draft system would work, it works in basketball and ice hockey where players from Europe and elsewhere beyond North America are routinely drafted and signed. The potential to play in a high-profile multinational league should stimulate player development by giving more boys and young men an interest in playing RL, in just the same way as the NBA admitting franchises in Canada stimulated the growth of basketball here.

i.e. the players could come from anywhere.

I suggest that Swinton's rebranding being scuttled by opponents shows that going that route is pretty much a non-starter. Better to leave those teams as they are and they can continue as before and make a clean fresh start. All over, just like the NHL and NBA do. They'd have to be free agents to be signed though, tampering with players who are under contract couldn't be allowed without opening up a legal minefield.

Drafts have been standard practice over here for a few decades now and they pretty much follow one standard template. Every year the leagues conduct an entry draft of players from the non-professional ranks and in some cases from pro teams elsewhere in the world; an example of the latter is Spanish basketball player Pau Gaso who was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in 2001 though he'd previously played for FC Barcelona's basketball team. Teams typically draft in reverse order of their finish from the previous season, and when a player is drafted that team owns his rights in respect of playing in that league and no one else in the league can sign him. Sometimes a player refuses to sign for the team which drafted him and that team trades his rights to another and he then signs with that other team instead. An example of that is quaterback Eli Manning who was drafted by San Diego which made him the first pick overall in the 2004 NFL Draft and then traded his rights to the New York Giants for quarterback Phil Rivers and three additional draft picks which were a third-round pick in that 2004 draft, a first-round pick in 2005 and a fifth-round pick in 2005. Rivers and the players chosen with those additional picks helped turn San Diego from an also-ran into a contender.

The same way as other drafts are conducted of course.

Players don't always get drafted from universities, most players taken in the NHL entry draft come from Major Junior leagues or overseas leagues and varsity players are a minority.

University scholarships aren't funded by pro leagues, but by the universities themselves and their financial donors. Of course I'd have a draft, that's an integral part of the successful North American model.

Like other things, in the same manner as the major North American pro leagues. Their operating methods are the proven way to make pro sports a profitable investment for franchise owners so I'd adopt them all lock, stock and barrel.

Why would they mess about with the small time traditional teams in SL though? They won't fit in a big city league and relocating them would make plenty of enemies, so better to set up a whole new league and leave the small time traditional teams where they are instead.

No it doesn't, the CFL is a minor league already and has been for many years now. The number of players in the CFL who wouldn't gladly move to the NFL if they were good enough is very small, if there even are any players like that at all.

Of course it sounds ridiculous, Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg are all good size cities, the first two both have more than a million inhabitants and Winnipeg almost 800,000. They're all bigger than the biggest of the traditional RL towns. As it happens, when Winnipeg did lose its first NHL franchise in 1996 the city got an AHL team and Winnipegers backed it strongly enough that it's still there today, eight years after the NHL's return to Winnipeg.

RL hasn't prospered in those 2 big cities with teams there playing in a league populated mostly by teams in "small northern villages" as one other poster here described them a couple of months back which most Londoners and Parisiens won't know or rate as worth their time, attention or money. That does not mean that RL couldn't prosper in those cities if they had teams in a league populated entirely by teams from globally recognized cities though, because that would be a whole different ball game.

I saw the crowd reported as 64,102 in the BBC's live text coverage of the match.