The Great Dane

It's been done by dozens of sports across the world, including by RL in Australia (Annandale and Glebe, or Brisbane after the Broncos entered the NSWRL, being the best examples). It's not impossible, it's not even that hard to do if you've got the money and will to do it. Also it won't be that hard for the "survivors" to engage areas that have lost a team because A. most of them already cover that area to some degree or have before, and B. if you did it right the old clubs would continue to exist as they do now, they'd just be playing in the NSW Cup or another second tier competition instead of in the NRL.

Not only are they preventing somebody that would do a better job from taking their place, but they are expecting that the rest of the competition and RL establishment in this country will prop them up so that they can continue to exist as they do. Some of them outright refuse to change at all, Manly is a great example of this. North Sydney is one of the most lucrative markets in the country, but they utterly refuse to try and grow outside of the Northern Beaches in any meaningful manner. There is no question. You could take any of the smaller Sydney teams and replace them with a club from Brisbane, Perth, and maybe even Adelaide or NZ, and the replacement club would be at least as big, if not bigger, and they'd add more value to broadcasting rights and sponsorship dollars. If you replaced them with a club from Brisbane it'd definitely be much bigger from the get go.

No, not just because of attendances, but because for the most part they're broke and need to be supported by the NRL to continue exist. Here's the thing though, their need for support has lead to a situation where the NRL is annually investing $117mil in grants alone just on the 9 clubs in Sydney. Having that much invested in Sydney has lead to the NRL being reluctant to expand or invest resources in other places because they can't really afford it, which has stunted the growth of both the sport and the competition everywhere else. There's no reason why Sydney needs nine clubs in the NRL, and the only reason that the clubs are failing in Sydney is because the support base has been split to many times. In other words, instead of having 4-5 strong clubs, we've got 9 weak ones, and we're paying for it dearly. On top of that the NRL couldn't afford to invest that kind of money and those resources into just 9 clubs before COVID-19 screwed everything up, but definitely can't afford it now, so something has gotta give.

There's a massive difference between could and should. Sure the EPL probably could support more teams in London, that doesn't mean that they should.

Only the Tigers and Dragons are mergers, otherwise I agree though.

At the end of the day population doesn't mean very much if there's not enough demand for a product, and in Sydney's case, there's way more supply than demand for NRL clubs. I mean Sydney is supposedly the capital of RL right, well in the capital of RL on average only one of the clubs is profitable, none has over 30k members and none average over 20k attendance, and there isn't enough public or private money to support the clubs needs. For the supposed capital of RL those are bloody dismal facts. If the Sydney clubs were like the AFL clubs in Melbourne then you might have a point, but not only are they not, but the AFL has been trying to further rationalise Melbourne for the last 20 years as well.

You can say what you will about no club should every be culled or whatever, but it's undeniable that the NRL has over saturated the Sydney market, and that by doing so they have created a bunch of clubs that weaken each other and act as a huge weight around the competition and sports neck that stunts it's growth. That is especially undeniable is the current environment, where the practices that the NRL have been forced to take to keep all the clubs competitive (especially the regional clubs and smaller ones in Sydney), such as giving the clubs $13mil annual grants, has almost bankrupted them. Also if you are going to argue that rationalisation pushes fans away, or never works, or whatever, you have to explain how and why every other sports relocations, relegations, mergers, culling, etc, are failures, which, frankly, is impossible to do because there's no way that you can argue that some of the most successful clubs and competitions across the world are failures. Before you say it, the rationalisation after the Super League war was a failure, but it was a failure because it wasn't planned, it was rushed, and it was totally controlled by self interested parties that were trying to get one over each other, and not because rationalisation as a concept is bad or impossible. The Central Coast Bears are a pipe dream that should never happen so long as cities like Perth and Adelaide go without representation, and places like Brisbane, NZ, and Melbourne are underrepresented. If for the foreseeable future the CC (or for that matter other proposed regional clubs) get a club over big metropolitan markets it'd be the NRL choosing to stay a regional competition, to stunt it's own potential, and to pass up on hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions in the long run. That's coming from an old Bears fan as well.

Jesus mate, chill out. The way you said it, in the context of replying to Copa’s post, came off as alarmist and made things seem worse than they were. It’s not a big deal, nobodies attacking you, just relax.

You made it sound as if they were worse off than your average NRL club, when they aren't, and that they were begging for money from the NRL, when really Don was just talking about NRL's cash reserves and whether or not, and how much of it, will be split amongst the clubs. Assuming that things don't get really crazy, the Raiders should come out the other side alright.

I think he's talking about Don Furner's press conference yesterday. The way that Allora is depicting it makes it sound way worse than it is. https://www.raiders.com.au/news/2020/03/26/raiders-ceo-don-furner-addresses-the-media/

Most of the money went to the clubs and to a lesser extent players, whom demanded more and more of the money, and did everything in their power to get it even when they knew that the NRL couldn't afford it. Now many of those same club officials and media personalities that were bagging the ARLC and NRL for investments like the future fund and demanded that money be spent on them, are the same people who are bagging the NRL for having "wasted" it all. Frankly, COVID-19 is quickly turning into the disaster that the NRL had to have. At least a couple clubs are going to die, and it's going to hurt in the short term, but it's going to be a massive reality check for a lot of people, and it'll cut a lot of the dead weight.

And all 24 of them were ill informed nonsense.

I think it's inevitable that if the NRL is to continue with the season that all the teams will have to be moved into one state.

He didn't contradict himself. You have to plant the seed before it can grow, so for a place like Canada this is the organic approach.

WTF are you talking about! The NRL aren't going to ESPN trying to sell their product to them, ESPN is desperately trying to find sports content, any sports content, that hasn't been cancelled or postponed to broadcast on their channels, and it's being suggested that since the NRL are continuing on with the competition for the time being ESPN could potentially try to get the NRL. As it says in the article Fox owns the NRL's international broadcasting rights. So even if ESPN do buy the NRL's broadcasting rights it'll mainly be a deal between ESPN and Fox, and more likely than not, the NRL wouldn't see a significant financial gain from the deal anyway. So not only are the NRL not the ones that would be initiating discussions, the NRL don't really stand to gain much from the deal even if it does actually go ahead, and it probably won't go ahead because Fox already own the rights and I imagine that they won't be interested in parting with them unless there's good money on the table. What were the NRL supposed to do exactly, just go up to ESPN and demand that they pick up the NRL's international broadcasting rights!? That's simply not how it works, and you must know that. ESPN chooses who's on ESPN's networks not the NRL, and until now ESPN had no interest in the NRL whatsoever.