steavis

And six countries have taken up the sport - or returned to the sport - since I set up the accounts. I hand over all the assets and walk away. Algeria will get a logo, a jersey design and about 1000 followers when they start.

Great post. RFL and IRL may be pushed together by having a common enemy now A summer Nines series in British cities with teams called Samoa, Ireland, England, USA but using unknowns to mirror The Hundred ('The Nines") would be a great start to this new relationship. Sky want our sport to be more dynamic and forward thinking. That's the start. The international game must learn to do without NRL players if it is to realise its commercial ambitions.

But those tactics drive down the value of the asset they are trying to buy. You destroy it and you get it cheaper.

Simple: Nine and Fox don't want an upstart like SportsFlick entering the market. The NRL changed their rules for Nine and Fox and took the games off their own platforms to placate them. Nine and Fox run rugby league in Australia. Also the IRL want to commercialise their calendar. That means getting sponsors from event to event like other international sports and selling TV rights like other international sports. This is a threat to the NRL, who see the sport of rugby league as their exclusive commercial domain. So they are sabotaging the IRL and have already started recruiting people to value it for a hostile takeover.

Simple: Nine and Fox don't want an upstart like SportsFlick entering the market. The NRL changed their rules for Nine and Fox and took the games off their own platforms to placate them. Nine and Fox run rugby league in Australia

Here's some audio from the briefing https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode?id=845501

Your definition of success is different than mine. No current team in a fulltime professional league - not successful. Sure it's probably BS. But it's my BS and I believe it. No-one else has to. Every team in Super League bar Catalans is pre-WWII and the sport has contracted from being coast to coast in Australia in 1995.

If it hasn't still got a team in a fulltime professional competition, it's not a success.

And TV rights and government assistance, two things which administrators crave. There's not much of either in these second world countries.

The IRL doesn't have the resources to serious target anywhere. And when enthusiasts pop up organically, they don't have the resources to seriously support them either.

Because everyone involved wants more OUT of it. The IRL had a report targeting wealthy countries because they want someone out of it. Going to Cuba or Brazil etc is almost purely altruistic.

A, not in the top flight and B, has been a rugby league area since 1898!

I live in London. It's considered a whippet-and-flatcaps northern sport when people think about it at all. And generally speaking, no-one even thinks about it.

126 years of failure - five generations - will do that. I'm not giving up on expansion. I'm giving up on doing it the same way we've done it for five generations.

Guys there has only been one successful true expansion franchise - in a non traditional area and still in the fulltime professional top flight - since 1895! And News Corporation's investment of A$80 million is what's kept Melbourne Storm alive. It is 100 per cent a characteristic of rugby league that these ventures fail over and over again. Rugby league is rugby for poor people. There is almost no-one in the game with a combination of resources and altruism, the necessary combination for expansion to proceed. The altruists have no money and the people with money are out to make more. The only way to break the cycle is to go to a new place, not rely on the old demographic, and start again in a completely different paradigm where the sport is NOT automatically associated with the working class - the western suburbs of Sydney and the north of England. Nines and North America represent the best opportunities to do that. But it needs a spark: one person with altruism and resources. It seems NARL, as usual, had one and not the other.