Big Picture

New York as a city, not the current application by the guy from Huddersfield.

Unless I'm mistaken Australia went entirely metric. Unfortunately here in Canada we only went halfway so although temperatures are only given in Celsius now and highway signs all use kilometres most Canadians still use primitive measures for things like their height and weight.

Whether they know it or not, they are in a desperate situation. Their game is gradually falling further and further behind the other sports in Britain and without the likes of Toronto and New York it has no way to turn that around. During the 25 years since the SL money saved the sport in Britain from collapse it has failed to deliver sufficient value to Sky to maintain its place on their schedule. Being ejected from the Saturday night time slot they once had and having to make do with one on Thursday night instead is one indication of that. SL matches being shunted onto lesser Sky channels is another. However whether a way can be found to make the Toronto venture financially viable within the constraints under which the SL and RFL operate remains to be seen. Can a square peg fit into a round hole?

And that's undoubtedly why BeIN Sports wasn't willing to pay more than the 70,000 € per season they paid before to renew their contract earlier this year.

I have watched a good many ARL and International matches from between 1990 and the first half of 1993, all played under the 5-metre rule. They put the dull, repetitive bilge being served up nowadays to shame.

Kicking for distance would be important again if teams sometimes had to kick from inside their half.

The 5 metre rule would certainly produce more variety in attack because that would be the only way for teams to advance the ball any great distance on one set of six. Nowadays they can gain 7-8 metres with ease on just about every play, which is ######.

I agree with all those except #4. There was less scoring under the 5 metre rule, leaving the corner flag out of consideration on scoring plays will enhance scoring.

You've illustrated the sport's Catch-22 situation there. On the one hand it needs the likes of Toronto in order to raise its profile and stature and increase its audience and income because the traditional northern clubs aren't capable of doing that, but on the other hand the current structure doesn't have the resources necessary to include the likes of Toronto on an equal footing with the traditional clubs because they can't afford it.

And in that report we read, "That’s going to change quickly, Waller [that's Mark Waller, the NFL’s head of international development at the time] said. By continuing to play games in London — and making them free to watch via the BBC — the NFL has succeeded in slowly building a fan base. Half of the fans who went to a game at Wembley last year had been to a previous football game, and one-third bought tickets to the full series. "With enough fans, Waller said, 'media values go up, your sponsor values go up and the commercial side of the arrangement reaches scale.' As it is, the price of the U.K. media rights for the NFL has already doubled since the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins at Wembley in 2007, and Waller said they will be more valuable when they come up for bid again. The BBC owns the rights to the London games and the Super Bowl for the next two years; Sky Sports will air the NFL’s U.S. games in the U.K. through 2019." So they were losing money on the series back in 2016, since which time they have sold their UK rights to Sky for more money and then renewed them for more money again. The series being profitable for them is just a matter of time if isn't profitable for them already. It's interesting that the matches were on the BBC initially. Does anyone know what they showed in the places where the North American broadcasters were showing commercials?

All of his podcasts are good.

As you can read here, they decline to state whether they have or have not lost money, but "the NFL’s gate revenue from ticket buyers at London’s Wembley Stadium has regularly exceeded $30 million in recent years" and they have new and improved UK TV contract now too. So the series becoming profitable is only a matter of time if it hasn't happened already.

What makes you think the NFL is losing money on their London matches, have you seen the financial numbers?

No it's not all of us Americans, it's just the Usonians.

Their pounds are the same, but their fluid ounces, cups, pints, quarts and gallons are all different.

Is that an imperial gallon or a US gallon?

No, metric is for everyone because the relationships between units are all consistent unlike the dog's breakfast which is imperial measurement.

Do they now? Evidently Home Depot here in Canada has sets which come in metric.

You do know that many countries never used imperial right?

A sport with 92 pro clubs and hundreds of senior clubs outside the pro ranks is "dying" because participation numbers are down a bit???? That's a bit melodramatic I'd say.

Metric rules!

I think you'll find that both RU and RL use metres in their rule books. I've gone totally metric in all things, no halfway measures for me.

Complaints about metric are just weird. Metric is superior to primitive measurement systems, that's the reason why other than a few holdouts in the Anglosphere, every country in the world uses it.

Other than northerners and displaced northerners living down south, who else is tuning in though? And if anyone tunes tunes in, is a match between teams from two towns up north going to impress them any?

That's because the business models are different. Decades of experience in at least 5 sports has proven that the franchised North American model is the way to make investment in a major league pro sports franchise a profitable investment.