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There are still plenty of places across London with sports facilities. If you have deep enough pockets, you could buy a sports ground and that would sort the training base problem. When the LDA was running and all their development sites were available, I found a pretty decent site in Mottingham, which is on the border of Bromley and Greenwich boroughs. However, the RFL has never been interested in getting involved, Skolars are skint and the Broncos have always had all the vision of Mr Magoo. It's harder now for various reasons. Partly because of lack of land, partly because some councils are loosening up regulations on building on metropolitan open land. I thought I'd found the perfect place in Beckenham many years ago but somebody else had designs on it and it was sold for development. Very sensibly, Crystal Palace bought up a lot of the land around there and have two sites across the road from each other. Millwall are moving to a 50-acre site West Kingsdown in Kent, down near Brand's Hatch, because the demands on a training ground for a football club are just ridiculous now. However, if non-league Cray Wanderers can get a project together and get planning permission for a site - still delayed by financing - then what's the excuse for the RFL or Broncos.

Somebody didn't get the memo that you're supposed to launch the site when the clock does to zero.

They were very good at marketing but at what cost? They were in massive debt before Covid and they still owe people money now. It's this Silicon Valley model of "creating a brand" and "developing a customer base" but not caring about the bottom line in the hope somebody buys you out. They might try to come back but haven't they damaged the game and damaged the possibility of North American expansion?

I live in the countryside now so, though I am not from Yorkshire, I am still allowed to be tight. EDIT: Also, there's a discussion (here or on the Community Forum) about somebody charging £6 for a tier 5 game and it was taking the mick a little.

I genuinely left the forum for a long time because of how crazy that guy was. He's still around and will likely be here soon.

The European part of the World League of American Football actually worked. They just couldn't get anybody to watch it in the US. However, when they came back as NFL Europe, the bloom was most definitely off the rose and nobody outside Germany really got into it. That actually spurred on the CFL USA project because the owners of the WLAF Sacramento and San Antonio teams became the CFL franchises, eventhough San Antonio pulled out and never took the field. That created a pattern of taking on these undercapitalised owners because they thought they needed to expand to pull the whole league out of financial trouble. They announced new franchises and then there would be issues with the ownership. Even then, Baltimore were very successful, on and off the field, and Birmingham drew decent crowds, though you wouldn't have known it because they played in the cavernous Legion Field. Problem was, just as the project was in serious trouble, the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore. So they moved Baltimore to Montreal and we had the new Alouettes. The CFL didn't learn their lesson until the 2000s where they were much stricter on ownership groups and accepted they needed a strict salary cap. Still, the best paid CFLer earns more than anybody in British RL for instance.

Contrary to how it may seen, I genuinely hope they can finally make a go of it. British Columbia has had a bit of an amateur RL niche and managed to sustain something resembling an actual league. I hope they can get to a critical mass in Ontario.

They would've flashed their collective knickers if there was any kind of TV money coming from Canada. Or players. Or sponsorship money or anything at all to suggest that something - anything - was coming to benefit the sport. However, what we had was a racist Australian who stiffed players for money and a city where you can't play a home game until May in a broken-down CFL practice field. What we had was a half-baked idea for another club in a city even colder than Toronto and a non-starter of a team in New York. It's not that they couldn't see the vision, it's that no viable vision was presented. It's a level of optimism unseen outside Trotskyism or the Scottish National Party. I don't wish to go back to this nonsense of justifying reality in the face of fantasy. Debates over the Wolfpack made this forum incredibly toxic. People being so certain about hypothetical situations is maddening. I am sick of the debate because, even now, it's all based on supposition. I remember having to wade through threads where people were talking about how they'd have a world class team in a sport where they have no history when they can't even get a world class team in basketball where they actually have world class players. One of the few people I've ever blocked on this forum was insistent that Canadian Football players in U Sports are the greatest athletes in the world. Bear in mind that eventhough they're playing basically the same sport, the NFL doesn't scout Canada and there are only 25 Canadians in the NFL, almost of whom either played in the CFL or went to college in the US. You can't deal with that level of delusion. There's not one shred of evidence that Toronto was a Golden Goose. Seemed more like the Canada geese in my local park who just s*** all over the place.

Oh for f****** f***'s sake, we've got to hear this inane nonsense again. Stop talking in platitudes. It's boring.

This was discussed before on this forum. I believe a chunk of the answer was that Sport England cared only about participation numbers. It didn't care about creating clubs with roots or investing in facilities the sport could use, it was about getting kids into six week camps and just seeing as many kids as possible. It was never meant to deliver legacy, such were the metrics used to determine success. I don't think it helped that a number of people involved were utter chancers. That sounds bad but I knew a few of the development officers and I wouldn't trust any of them with my wallet. Perhaps it was a few bad eggs...

It was an ill-conceived idea that should've been laughed out of the room but David Argyle turned up with a wodge of cash so the RFL felt the need to make it work. It would've made more sense to expand the CFL to London than it does to expand European Rugby League to Toronto.

Ontario Rugby League; Toronto City, Brampton and Brantford playing a 3-team round robin. Details are in the International forum. $5 for an amateur game seems steep but hopefully they get a programme for that.

I genuinely hope they can make a go of this and have a few more teams next season.

Graeme, it's not about finance, it's about people being involved with club who want to make some money from what is essentially a hobby for all involved. Whenever people are charging entry fees, that money is going into somebody's pocket.

I remember the whole thing where there was the Romans and then there were two clubs and then the Romans went under. Was this his doing?

I think I know Rodrigo from Griffons. I don't think he'd wilfully get involved with deception, though I would think he was keen enough and naïve enough to take the former president of the Federation at his word.

I will not claim to be an expert. In saying that, I doubt few others have founded two clubs in the last 10 years and been on the ground floor with another, done the work with getting venues, developing a player base and dealing with the RFL. Up until the pandemic, I would've described my work in Rugby League as reasonably successful. However, my chairman at one of the clubs has basically walked away from Rugby League. He says that the RFL doesn't support the game in the South of England. They also play favourites really badly. One of our ex-players said that a lot of the admins from his previous clubs had left the game due to cronyism. The same people always seem to get the limited amount of grants going around and the same people always influence the RFL to see things their way. If your face doesn't fit, you really will never get the rub of the green, no matter how hard you politick. There's no real plan to expand the playing base. Every season, they forced better teams into higher leagues so Hammersmith, Chargers and, later, Wests to play against and it caused those teams to suffer somewhat. Elmbridge fell back on having their own ground and a decent junior base. Brixton are RFL's pet project and are one of the odd teams that do get help. However, what happened to Guildford/Surrey? Some of it is player commitment but some of it is because there's no help and no teams to play. One team goes under and that's a fifth to a quarter of your season gone. I miss the lads and running the club but dealing with the RFL was like pulling teeth and nearly caused me to quit the game until I actually did quit. The current clubs and competition guy is good and there will always be some well-intentioned person trying to fan the dying embers before leaving for less-frustrating climes but otherwise the RFL has this collection of "survivors", disingenuous people who I don't care for. Somebody else said, there should be 50 clubs. To my mind, it's 12-15 clubs in Greater London and then another 20-25 across the Home Counties. Problem is, we're in a numbers crisis right now across amateur sport. Union clubs that once had 10 teams and, pre-pandemic, had six senior teams now have two. Even if it were lab conditions and everything was hunky dory, everybody is renting facilities. Union is still hostile or place unrealistic expectations. Players are knackered after League and don't want to go out on the p*** so they're not getting these big bar takes. The RFL don't do enough but, also, it would be very hard even if they did. Clubs from an earlier generation were getting grants and there was more sponsorship around. That was reduced and assigned just to junior clubs and they hired good academy players as Development Officers, who ran junior clubs and even got it into the schools. However, looking back, it seemed a wee bit scammy, given there were clubs that existed on paper but never played games. All the Sport England money dried up in 2012 and it's all been self-funding. I think the schools league fell apart too. So it's not that they didn't try, it's that it required grant money they don't have. However, if the money ever comes back, I'll put my hand up to be a development officer. Sounds a great gig.

I'm loathed to go into specifics because I don't make what is essentially a small time squabble into some awful thing where my former chairman is getting abusive phone calls. However, there were a group of then-young players who followed Aussie Dave Roberts from Greenwich to Skolars when he moved over. A lot of those players stayed around Skolars and then left the game altogether. When we started our new club in 2017, a number of players from Greenwich came to play for us at South London and there were people from Skolars talking to those players, trying to get them to leave us and go to Skolars. I just looked at the Skolars squad page and there's our former captain and one of the players that went with him. We didn't own him, he played semi-pro before he played for us and has known Joe for years. We previously lost our stand off, who looks better than he is, to a development opportunity with Skolars A. I'd prefer if people didn't go off and try to cause issues about this. We've moved on, the pandemic has claimed a lot of clubs, us included. However, a big part of why is because of how other clubs relate to each other and how the RFL governs the game, or how it doesn't govern the game more like.

I'll be completely honest. My amateur club had terrible issues with London Skolars. We had a few players who'd played for Greenwich and then had a crack at Skolars but left the game. We brought them back into the game and, from the very first game, there were Skolars people at our ground, trying to poach these players and anybody else who tickled their fancy. This continued throughout our existence. At one point, they signed our captain and he tried to take a number of players with him. So I have no sympathy for them being stripped, bearing in mind what they did to us. Sure, it's a paid gig but it's not paid well enough to make it worthwhile for most players. They were stripping a club who did the work of bringing players back into the game, giving younger players more experience or, in most cases, converting players from union. That's fine to an extent, players move up when they're good enough, but they didn't want to give back the other way. They didn't just want their bit, they wanted ours and we were supposed to like it. It would be an idea for them to actually have relationships and a dialogue to push players who want to drop from semi-pro to amateur clubs or place players they're trying to develop to get some game time. They don't want to do that themselves and then they don't want anybody else to do it. So Skolars wanted to steal our players and Broncos are wearing a kit that looks like one we would have rejected.

Where am I arguing for franchising? I'm arguing against it. I'm saying that there two options are a franchise system or having an open system. I'm for the latter and think it's unfair to marginalise teams. However, if we are doing franchising - and licensing, grading or whatever you want to call it is franchising - can we do it properly? Can we apply basic standards across the entire game and then open it to anybody who meets it irrespective of where they are in the country, be it Blackburn, Barking or Bangor? This system doesn't work. It was shown not to work before where the great success was Langtree Park (which would have been built anyway) and the failure was the collapse of the London Broncos. Either way, how is this plan going to fix anything? It's not transformative enough to have a massive effect but just transformative enough to erode what's left of the semi-pro game. And then we're not even looking at issues further down, like why the RFL won't let teams in the heartlands go pro or why there's no amateur pyramid. They're always trying to fix things and expand the game when all I want the RFL to do is just administer the game properly. Is that too much to ask?

I think I've made a hamfisted point from an original, much-longer post that I seriously truncated. Essentially, my argument is that there's no money in many RL communities. Saying these clubs need to go out and market themselves and get better sponsorships is pointless when they're in communities where the economy is shot. Where something is geographically very much matters in sport and virtually every city or borough that these clubs are in has been in long-term decline. For instance, Keighley can only try to succeed on the field because there's no way for them to succeed off the field. Besides, it's a sporting competition, not a corporate dick-measuring competition. There needs to be an economic resurgence in these places for there to be a renaissance for these clubs. The only other option is to try to get pro RL into places where there is money and experience tells us that this is not possible with the way they do things right now, otherwise London would have been a success by now.

121 pages and nobody has convinced the other side of anything. The criteria are going to be biased, it's completely unavoidable. My concern is that every time the RFL comes up with a new set of ideas as to how they'll fix the game, it makes things worse. The unavoidable truth is that Rugby League is played in poor communities and we've lived through times where inequality has become bigger. The only way to make the game bigger is to get it into communities where there are larger disposable incomes. If you are going to do that, you need to disassemble the game as it currently exists including the salary cap and everything that is supposed to protect small clubs but actually protects big clubs. Everything else is a waste of time

IMG are perhaps their third or fourth choice of partner. They wanted Matchroom and couldn't come to an agreement.

I feel embarrassed for all of us wasting time on this sport. It's substantively the same proposals for substantively the same reasons. It didn't work before. In fact it had a detrimental effect on the entire sport.

What's the point of this? How will it improve things? It looks exactly the same as 2008 but with a fancier PowerPoint presentation. Also, will the RFL stick by these impartial ratings or will they do whatever they want like last time? The RFL love marketing agencies that charge them big money for very old rope.