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What bigger champ clubs are those? Bradford don't have one wealthy owner but they have a group of owners that put money in.

What clubs would have budgeted differently if they knew what was happening the following season?

They shouldn't be catered to, no.

Well that number would be in the hundreds, rather than thousands.

And just to add to my last post - Rugby League's existence is political so if you watch it to get away from politics then they will get a shock when they find out how our sport was created.

That has nothing to do with what new fans see though. New fans won't know who is even playing in the Championship play offs, let alone know if the team knocked out was later promoted. Hell even with this Bradford discussion you could easily explain their promotion by just saying "Salford went bankrupt so were relegated, York, Toulouse and Bradford finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd and were all promoted" It isn't hard to do, new fans don't care.

Every area of this country is a football rich area, and yes there are a few stadiums that don't meet minimum standards in super league already, but they were already in super league before those minimum standards were created. As a London fan I of course want to be promoted to Super League, but I am broadly in favour of the idea of what the "IMG" framework is, as it forces clubs to spend money on other things other than just their first team. I believe I have always said that we won't be promoted via that framework as we don't have the generational support that other clubs have had when we had an owner who put 20/30 million in over the last 20 years but ended up with absolutely nothing to show for it bar a registered company. For the most part new fans of the sport won't care about how clubs got promoted to the top league, they would be watching the top league and be more interested in the top of the table than the bottom.

I have some memory of Martyn excusing them at the time by saying the RFL didn't provide a detailed report about what the partnership entailed. But then I would have to ask again "what does that make them then"

We aren't football, and if football fans can't grasp that small fact then I am not sure what to say. Besides, Football isn't based purely on onfield results, they have standards set in that clubs have to meet to gain promotion to different leagues or the national league - it is just that Football is sown into the fabric of our culture and we have so many football clubs taht meet those minimum standards that lots of fans have forgotten they are even in place.

I wonder what makes them then.

Didn't the Super League clubs also have to sign off the agreement with IMG?

That may be the stupidest thing I have ever heard on this forum, and there are a lot of contenders.

I think this is mostly existing fans own prejudices/knowledge that leads people to think new fans wouldn't understand how it works. It isn't hard to explain that P&R isn't solely down to onfield performance, new fans wouldn't start questioning the relationship between the governing body and one specific club while ignoring the fact that Toulouse & York also got promoted in the same year. New fans don't care for the governance of the sport, they just want to be entertained.

Whatcha talking about? He's been on podcasts and stuff ...

Well .. it's football so it's not surprising in the slightest.

Yes they have competed in WCs previously, but like I said they have a population of 15k so how can there ever be a return on investment for whatever money the IRL is paying for these coaching and training they're putting on there? Even in your list of other Pacific countries they are 1/10th of the size of the next smallest island. IRL hasn't got a lot of money and wasting it in the Cook Islands seems silly.

How much is going towards developing RL in the Cook Islands? I get it's a cute story of this team from a group of multiple islands competing with the "big boys" at WCs, but they have about a 15k population, I don't see how there can ever be a real return on investment there.

Some people are being quite disingenuous with this Smith Vs Connor based on last night's game. If Smith had the impact that French did they may have a point but he didn't he was just the steady one so French could do everything else, even kicking a 40-20 which should be more Smiths role.

Can't really do that as effectively while the game is stuck along a small band in the North.

Each to their own but ..

I was about to say something similar

They're supposed to have 10 seconds from when the referee explains the decision to them, not sure how much that is truly policed though.

It's awful

He isn't to blame for the performance, but he looks painfully slow on the field.

You really should have https://www.rugbyleagueontv.com/ as a bookmark and you wouldn't get disappointed so often when looking.