Toby Chopra
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Posts posted by Toby Chopra
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13 minutes ago, Coggo said:
Perez buys Truro City FC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/67546796
I guess that confirms Cornwall will move to Truro when their new ground is ready.
Not exactly the most inspiring quotes from Perez in terms of rugby league:
"I don't think too many people would say 'let's buy a football club to support a rugby league club', I think that's a strange play to make," he said.
"I'm a football fanatic, a lot of people on the group are football fanatics and we're here to take this club up, that's what we're here for.
"If it wasn't for the rugby league club we wouldn't know about this operating environment so that is a factor, but we're talking football."
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39 minutes ago, Harry Stottle said:
Such a shame in very recent times Salford have been up there playing some very attractive football, been Grand Finalists and CC finalists and with the 'whip round" receiving well into the 300K's shows that there is still some affinity for them in the locality, but there in lies the problem there is simply not enough of them and with the recent success one must question will there ever be and minus the benefactor that is the difference of keeping their heads above the water line or sinking.
Reading between the lines if anything positive is going to improve the situation it is not going to happen till mid spring at least 4 months away and probably up to about round 8 or so into the new season.
Basically the RFL is inbetween a rock and a hard place, do they sorry Salford or take the decision that they will grant them the goodwill and forward their funding in the hope that it will all come good in the spring?
I think we're all getting ahead of ourselves a bit on what the exact situation is at Salford, and assuming we're reaching some sort of crisis. It might not be.
But (getting ahead of myself a bit
) ...IF it is serious, then the only decision the RFL has to make is what will ensure 12 clubs complete a full season in Superleague in 2024.
If stabilising Salford is the best bet for that, then they should. If replacing them now with another team gives the best chance of a full season then so be it.
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1 hour ago, MZH said:
I don't like the way the gradings have been done either, however, and I'm sure this will have already been mentioned, the current gradings are only provisional, and they will change next year. If London have a decent year on the field and can address a few of the little off field things they have been graded down on then there's no reason why they can't keep their place on SL. They have a lot of work to do, but its not a lost cause.
It's not a few little things, it's several massive things. The biggest downgrades are due to the fact they've no fans and therefore very low revenue compared to comparable clubs. Nothing suggests 2024 will do anything to change this, even crowds like 2019 (which were poor) won't move the dial.
All credit to what Mike Eccles achieved at the end of last season but London are not remotely a Superleague club in waiting.
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Just now, Toby Chopra said:
It not pointless work. Its work that will help IMF sell the sport for more than the pittance we currently get. If you only see stadiums in terms of "regular fans" coming through the turnstiles you're missing half of what modern sports stadiums are supposed to do. Which is why the sport is so undervalued.
Lol, if the IMF were involved we'd really be in trouble! I mean IMG of course.
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30 minutes ago, Griff said:
Box ticking is worthless. In itself.
Odsal scores well on the IMG scale. Lots of boxes ticked. Is the fan experience good? No.
Now we have Cas proposing pointless work on the ground. Just to tick boxes.
It not pointless work. Its work that will help IMF sell the sport for more than the pittance we currently get. If you only see stadiums in terms of "regular fans" coming through the turnstiles you're missing half of what modern sports stadiums are supposed to do. Which is why the sport is so undervalued.
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It will only be a fraction of the domestic deals of course, but there's definitely some revenue to be had in the UK for overseas sports, and given the coverage is already there, it should be easy enough to tap.
The NFL has built a small but loyal audience in the UK, which gets around half the viewing figures of rugby league, but also has a similar number of subscribers to gamepass. All in, that'll be worth something in the low single millions in revenue to them, especially as the broadcaster has no production costs. The NFL says it has more customers in Germany now, so across Europe as a whole they're definitely found a way to extract extra revenues.
Whereas I can't see how the NRL currently gets much at all. Surely it's worth the effort to try and build it up a bit - at least as much effort as they're going to make in the US.
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4 hours ago, Dave T said:
I don't disagree with this. The NRL don't need Europe. It's an inconvenience. Even though England stages the biggest international tournaments and has the main interest for things like World Cups, in the grand scheme of things the returns are modest to the NRL and they can just afford to buy the SH nations.
They have the NRL, Origin and SH internationals, they can do things like Vegas. They are insular and this is the outcome.
I agree with all of that on their approach, but I do still find it odd how little effort they've made to boost the profile of the NRL in Europe and particularly Britain, even purely for their own benefit.
Europe is a wealthy, highly developed sports market that has multiple pay TV options and a familiarity with rugby, yet the NRL must be getting almost nothing for its TV rights here. Compare with the effort the NFL has made to introduce an "alien" sport in Europe. NRL is leaving money on the table in Europe for my mind.
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49 minutes ago, Griff said:
That's the problem with "tick box criteria".
People keep using the phrase "box ticking" like it somehow means the actions are worthless, whereas they're actually getting points for making the specific improvements that IMG have asked for to improve the commercial value of the sport.
You might wish to see other improvements made, and of course in an Ideal world every club would have a state of the art stadium in all aspects. But that's not what they've been asked to do.
IMG have asked them to improve their provision for broadcasters, media, high value sponsors and potential investors, because that's how they're going to drive up the sport's revenues. So that's what they're doing.
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49 minutes ago, JohnM said:
If there had ever been easy answers to the questions surroung Rugby League at International level, I'm sure we'd have by now a thriving International scene.
It's more complex than "chicken and egg" and more like "what existed in the universe before the big bang."
I think the decline started in the 1960s, when rugby league in England was dying on its feet, some 60 years ago, but with a brief revival of internationals in the late 1980-1995 period. Ove.r that period theres been some great games Vs Aus to attracting big crowds and lots of media attention: we had stars, we had characters, we had a competitive team, we had the funds, we had ..... Since then, SuperLeague and its wars, summer rugby, societal changes, lack of imagination from an ineffective International body, no money to run a high-energy event-driven program, a congested fixtur list (though no worse than when we had the Challeng Cup, the Regal Trophy and BBC2 floodlit competition) . Having the game on pay TV has injected money into the game, that's true, but at the expense of general exposure in the free-to-air media.
There aren't really that many fewer games on terrestrial now. We still have the challenge cup and internationals on the BBC, including recently wall to wall coverage of a world cup. And now even a few league games on C4, when there were never league games shown on Grandstand.
From your list, I think it's rugby league's struggle to keep up with societal and economic changes that's been the biggest challenge.
By contrast Australian rugby league has been able to remain at the forefront of Aussie sport and society, and now they don't need matches against England/GB to attract attention.
I really do think the international game is the best chance we've got to change things here - all the years successfully bringing southerners to high level internationals but failing to entice them to club games tells me that.
But unfortunately the Aussies and Kiwis don't need the same thing, so I fear we're just not going to get what we need from them.
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1 minute ago, Les Tonks Sidestep said:
There'll be no material change. The Cas bodge will confirm that......
What Cas bodge? They're doing the work to meet the criteria, that's the idea.
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48 minutes ago, kiggy said:
Still promotion and relegation for next year so they have a chance of staying up
Nope, gradings will set the 2025 line up
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Just now, Les Tonks Sidestep said:
Minimum standards have been ignored for 15 years +. It's not going to change.
Well, the system is about to go through a massive change with an outside actor who has real power and little incentive to let weak clubs off the hook. We'll see.
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Reading the club's statement again I do wonder if they've cooked this up with Mayor Dennett so he can swoop in as executive mayor and get the deal done.
It's a old political trick to blame the civil servants for something that the politicians have power to decide.
Dennet can direct the deal to be done providing it's within the law, he just needs cover to do it and overruling "prevaricating" officers is a classic way of doing it.
However, if Salford are freelancing on this they're taking an incredible risk with that statement.
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15 minutes ago, dboy said:
If they lose their tenancy at the end of the month, it's over, there will be no "next season".
"Our current tenancy arrangement expires on 1st December. A failure to resolve places the Club at risk of a compliance issue with the RFL in respect of minimum standards due to not having a minimum 5-year tenancy agreement in place. As a result, this would severely impact our IMG grading and potentially put our Super League status at risk, reducing our central distributions from £1.31m to circa £50k per annum and effectively liquidating the Club."
So for me, the issue is not, 'Why didn't IMG account for this in the gradings?' but rather 'Are the RFL/SL about to kick Salford out of the league entirely because they haven't got a stadium?'
I'm kinda amazed this hasn't blown up as an issue already. How does a club get within 4 months of the season starting without a stadium deal in place? I know for a fact that in football and in the dark side premiership these things need to be locked in place midway through the preceding season.
Or is there something I'm missing?
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36 minutes ago, Archie Gordon said:
Surely the IMG system needs to be robust enough not to green light a club without a ground! This was supposedly a dry run for what 2024 would look like under the new regime.
But let's take Salford out of it. If any club doesn't have an agreement to play at a ground in 2025, I'd expect them not to be among the 12 SL clubs announced in October 2024. The IMG system seems not to be able to cater for this.
But presumably minimum standards will? Perhaps the gradings are a bit of a red herring here - if they don't have a stadium agreement at the end of 2024, they won't be playing in Superleague in 2025, and that would have been the case pre-IMG.
That said, on reflection I do think you have a point in that the COMBINED gradings/standards regime does need a forward looking ability and if there isn't one then that does need looking at.
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17 minutes ago, Archie Gordon said:
So the IMG system will green-light a club to play in SL without an agreement in place to play at a ground. This really shouldn't be coming to light as part of the public dry run. This is why stress-testing needed to happen much earlier.
Salford were fairly graded based on the situation at the time of this year's dry run.
However, if they don't have an appropriate stadium deal in place by the time the real gradings are done then not only will their grading sink but also they will potentially be in breach of minimum standards, threatening their SL place - as the club's statement itself says.
So I'm not sure what you think needs to change. If Salford don't fix this soon then it won't be IMG they'll need to worry about.
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1 hour ago, Mathius Hellwege said:
I would expect a little bit more due to migration, but the main goal is of course thee BBC1 viewer
what a success the viewership against Tonga has been, we have to replicate that
Has it been a success? An average of 640,000 is a very poor number for sport broadcast on terrestrial TV, it's certainly not going to turn heads of other broadcasters to come in and pay money for it. The BBC may continue but it covers RL more as a license fee justification than a commercial operation.
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11 minutes ago, Gooleboy said:
It was never in doubt. We will all get our names put up in LED Lights!
Grade A's all round for us!
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13 minutes ago, GUBRATS said:
Seeing your hard earned fan base dwindle , and your finances with it will be catastrophic , which will then in turn reduce interest at the other clubs
It's only catestrophic if you don't adjust your spending to your income.
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1 hour ago, GUBRATS said:
Or they support a lower tier club , this will kill them all
It really won't, that's hysterical. There's about three clubs below Superleague that have a (distant) history in the top flight in the modern era that will have to evolve to not being in the flagship competition. Widnes and Fev most likely.
The rest were never getting there even with P&R and playing to win a semi-pro RFL Championship centred round the heartlands is where they should be.
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1 hour ago, GUBRATS said:
True , but for the minority ( the ones at the top usually , Leigh Wakey,Cas Bulls,Fev,Widnes ) it will be catastrophic, and that will have a knock on affect lower down , take the top 4 clubs out of SL and would the rest be better ?
No reason for it to be catastrophic if the clubs are properly run. Indeed several of those clubs have hit the buffers of their own accord anyway. There's two or three clubs who will have to become used to playing long term in another competition than Superleague - Fev and Widnes is my guess - for every other club below SL it was never a realistic goal anyway.
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2 minutes ago, Griff said:
I got told off for saying it's licensing.
As I said about a million pages further up, if I can fault IMG/RLC on one thing, is not being braver in spelling this out to the general readership.
The clubs understood as that's why some of them voted no.
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9 minutes ago, Harry Stottle said:
As will relegation.
Promotion and relegation is over. We're back to licensing, albeit done slightly differently. There's not supposed to be regular annual change, and there won't be.
Whatever one thinks about that approach, once you look at it like that, you realise the minutiae isn't something for people to pore over unless they're anoraks (like us!).
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1 hour ago, phiggins said:
I don't know if I'd be done, purely because a Sunday afternoon at the rugby with a few of my mates would still be good. But it would be pretty unpalatable if we are relegated based on a metrics system that is including data collected before the system was even known about.
I have tried to explain the system to some people at work, who are in London, who were perplexed by it.
The mistake is to still think about it like promotion and relegation - it's not, it's licensing. Plenty of sports have, or have had, that, including our own.
In the end, all people need to know is that we've scrapped P&R, and replaced it by licensing the 12 strongest clubs to play in Superleague, like we did before.
We're picking 12 and you're not meant to follow the minute detail unless you want to as there will be very little change going forward, that's the idea.
One can disagree with that approach of course, that is anyone's right, but that's a different matter.
Cornwall - how long do you give them?
in The General Rugby League Forum
Posted
Indeed.
I suppose on the upside if the article is accurate they're not giving up on RL - they'll need another tenant for the stadium and with Pirates staying in Penzance there's opportunity for the RL side to carve a small niche.
But it doesn't sound like the group will be pumping significant investment funds into the RL club, football is the focus for growth now and the RL club will have to wash it's own face, albeit with potentially a good stadium to work out of.
Time will tell if Cornwall RL is embedded enough now to survive. I hope so.