iffleyox

Exactly - and as predicted certainly by me and I think I remember a few other on here the week after it happened - assuming you’re right the charge isn’t for ‘fielding a weakened team’, it’s for ‘disrepute’, which is a brush about as broad as a governing body needs it to be at the time they’re using it.

This comes up regular as clockwork. Though if I was a massive horse racing fan, I might be a bit more miffed about the treatment of Britain’s most attended sport after football…

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Would they have space to fall over?

Decent on and off pitch management and lots of money? The former paid for by the latter and generating more of the latter… it’s completely replicable. All a club needs is the personnel and the cash. see also Wakefield.

*All* at the start of your second sentence is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting though. Especially when implicit but left untyped is ‘and deep pockets which they have a hitherto untapped desire to empty in the direction of a rugby league club’

Except Bristol Sport - Bristol City, Bristol RU and Bristol Highfliers basketball. admittedly that’s only been going as a group since 2012 so there’s maybe one generation there that thinks it’s normal now, but the idea was to explicitly copy Barcelona.

Some people play down to their surroundings I guess. Weird phenomenon, but it happens.

Do you know, exactly this was running through my head?

You…

A small town a long way from the M62? Hardly the centre of the universe compared with Leeds…

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Wesfarmers/Bunnings famously recently did. Cost them $1bnAUS it’s not like we don’t have hilarious recent examples of largeAustralian operations thinking they can come to the UK and do *exactly* that… we in the UK might stop having that expectation when a bit more water has gone under the bridge since the last time it was tried.

Favourite -Cas - now where like it when it’s packed and rocking. least favourite - Whitebank, hands down

Yes, didn’t miss them off for any reason - it was twenty historically successful big town/ big city clubs off the top of my head. I missed Huddersfield too but not for any reason either. All of them would be level 1 or in the 20 clubs level 2, with probably less of a gap between the divisions and big clubs/gates at level 2. anyway, this is a real off-season thread so I’m going to get on with something else!

Plymouth talk a very good game but if you actually look at their history they’ve never been a ‘big’ club. Similarly Cornwall did very well coming together from penny packet clubs for the county championship but if we’re hypothesising actual ‘top clubs’ I can’t see it. bottom line is IMO we’d have had a strong ‘rugby’ code where the top flight was an amalgam of the larger places that have always played top RU or RL. It would be north/midlands biased a la football, but there would be clubs south of Birmingham and more top club presence in the SW than football has ever managed.

Though overall football (potentially internationally) might not be as strong as it is now - there was serious code competition that really cut association loose when the schism happened in 1895. So, assuming no split, I actually think the bigger RU clubs that stayed RU and were located in cities would have maximised their gates and the smaller/old boys clubs would have fallen away (like football). I suggest a top flight league table (without getting into placings within the table) and as @Harry Stottlesays playing something that looks more like rugby league would actually look a lot like an amalgam of the top RL clubs and the 1980s top RU clubs. Because a rugby code that remained United would have fought harder to compete with soccer I also think the top flight would be bigger than either code can manage now. so at least 20 clubs, in no particular order, Leeds, Bradford, Wigan, Hull FC, Hull KR, Trin, Warrington, at least one of Hunslet/Headingley/Roundhay, St Helens, Moseley, Coventry, Blackheath, Harlequins, Gloucester, Leicester, Northampton, Bedford, Rosslyn Park, Bristol, Waterloo. or something - that assumes that a stronger rugby kept a market for a Leeds derby, Cas never came through in the 1920s because no need for them (though they might exist lower down), similarly Saracens - who only really came up the leagues in living memory wouldn’t have done etc….

That might get them Gateshead. It wouldn’t get you Sunderland etc. The ‘problem’ is Newcastle and Tyneside not being the whole North East. I’ve got relatives in Seaham Harbour that won’t eat humbugs because they’re black and white (Seaham’s a Sunderland town for the uninitiated)…

Well ‘constitutionally can’ and ‘can afford to’ are obviously two different things

It’s already been posted but if anyone British is desperate to live in the EU then the common travel area with the Irish Republic, which pre-dates the EU, is very much still a thing… if you live in the Republic of Ireland you can travel to and live in the UK no questions asked. And vice versa. This is basic constitutional stuff. You could move to Dublin tomorrow.

Surely if we dropped town/geographic names Hull KR would be ‘Rovers’?

I like the way they do Barcelona, Galatasaray, then throw in eg Oxford Harlequins RU (not quite plucked at random, they did them the other week so top of my mind). Bonkers, but fascinating .

I’m saying you won’t get League 1 level southern clubs hanging about unless they’re 10+ years old. You’ve got to buy success for the first decade. I agree ‘buy your way to the Championship grand final then bust’ is bad. The ideal in the current sporting market is ‘buy your way to the Championship grand final then don’t bust’

I get that. With a mercenary head on I think Oxford were close to making it work with bussing northerners down so they were close to beating northerners. Winning against the north is key to southern development IMO, and ideally what you want in year one onwards is to look good against all-comers (Oxford were in the play-offs in their first season). I don’t think there’s much of a better idea than hosing money at Southern clubs (a la Melbourne), until winning and success becomes habit and more people invest. Consequently I’d be looking at more funding for the south than the north… I also think that’s a complete non-starter and am not advocating it. But I’ve come the view that success in the south is only going to be achieved by prioritising such clubs, even at the expense of the heartland clubs at the same level. Again, I’m not advocating it. What I’m saying is that unless you’ve got wealthy investors willing to do a Toronto, or an RFL that can carry a policy of sending the money south and letting the existing clubs look to their own fundraising or fail, then I’m now at the point of thinking it should be about maximising coverage of what RL currently exists, on national television and encouraging people to engage with that, and not trying to expand. Grow digital eyeballs rather than physical clubs and attendees. I’m aware I probably sound depressed. I think even at League One level an expansion club is doomed if it can’t routinely spank the opposition straight out of the traps. No one now has got the patience for plucky losers slowly building.

Had some great (RU) visits to Blaydon. It’s a good little set up and while clearly Newcastle need the support if you’re wavering then that might help sway it!