The Great Dane

I listened and Mr Robinson is totally ignorant of what it actually takes to crack a competitive sports market that is new to the sport. All of his suggestion were incredibly one dimensional and parochial. If he thinks throwing £13mil (or whatever) into grassroots football in Toronto, or Canada more broadly, would have had any impact whatsoever then he's beyond delusional. In a totally new market like Canada that kind of investment into the grassroots as they are would have quickly disappeared down a money pit and they'd have nothing to show for it. Here's the reality, you need well f

He's an ex-advertising guy isn't he. He's just trying to build hype.

If true it is enormous, but I'll have to see it to believe it. The NARL would be by far the smallest entity that Fanatics has ever worked with, and I struggle to see where they'd see the value in it.

Unless they've got way more money up their sleeves than it seems, the only way I can see them getting any significant mainstream coverage in the US is if celebrities get involved. I mean look what the Rock has done for the XFL and CFL, yes that's a bit different but you get the idea. If I was them I'd be contacting every celebrity with any connection to RL whatsoever, and trying and get them involved in someway, even if it's just a shout out on social media. I'd start with Rusty, who would probably be up for it assuming they aren't expecting him to put any money or effort in, and the

We also have to keep in mind that this is Utah we are talking about. For obvious reasons a lot of Mormons from Aus, NZ, and particularly the PI's, migrate there. So keeping that in mind it's not beyond the realms of possibility that somebody could drum up a significant amount of interest in a RL program there. In saying that the numbers probably are fudged, but they aren't impossible.

Except that the NSWRL weren't wealthy because of their football operations! Aside from specific exceptions when certain clubs were going through periods of significant success, every single one of the NSWRL clubs football teams were loss making enterprises that were propped up by pokies. In other words they weren't even popular enough to support themselves, and if they didn't have the pokies every single one of them would have folded! So from the very beginning you've got everything ###### backwards because you fail to understand that the BRL clubs (and others) weren't competing

Sydney's population is just over twice as large as Brisbane's, not 4x or greater. And though this may have changed because of covid, Brisbane's growth rate is on a greater upward trend than Sydney's. Brisbane, and Queensland more generally, may not have an economy as large as NSW, however, covid aside, they're not lacking cash either. There's a huge amount of sponsor and corporate interest in RL in Queensland, so much so that corporates and broadcasters are constantly begging for more NRL teams in Queensland, and particularly in Brisbane, hence why the NRL is expanding to Brisbane over ne

There isn't one what if in the main body of my argument. So yeah, you are massively full of . The rest of your argument is BS because it assumes that all the clubs were competing on equal footing in a free market, they weren't. Why weren't they you ask? Because the laws surrounding gambling and pokies were radically different in each state and territory. That means in certain states the clubs had a massive advantage because their leagues clubs could have pokies (or significantly more pokies), where as others could not. Particularly in the case the of Queensland, where it was il

Not all markets are equal. Even after the BRL had started to fall on hard times in the late 70s-mid 80s, the average BRL team was just as popular locally as the average NSWRL team was in Sydney. In other words, RL was way more popular per capita in Brisbane than it was in Sydney (and that's still the case to this day). Give them similar resources to those that the NSWRL clubs were getting through their pokies and you'd almost totally steam the flow of players heading south through the years. If most of the star players don't move south during the 70s, and particularly the 80s, then

It's a good job that I didn't argue a hypothesis that didn't happen then isn't it. Read the discussion again, he says "Sydney clubs have ALWAYS transcended their boarders that's why it became the league that grew into the national competition". That's just a total rewriting of history. It spread to be the national competition because it had rich leagues clubs that could afford to pay players significantly more on average than the other regions whose leagues clubs, on average, weren't as big and/or profitable for all sorts of reasons. What happened is the NSWRL clubs would suck m

Licensing fees are standard practice in sport. It's sucks that most clubs will just ###### it down the drain, but if anything it'd be weird if they didn't ask for one.

Firstly, the NSWRL's growth to be the national competition had nothing to do with the popularity of the clubs outside of Sydney. It was because they had the biggest leagues clubs, and as such had the money to suck all the talent out of their competitors competitions and then takeover their 'territory'. Change that accident of history and make it so pokies are legal in Queensland, or some more of the clubs in the bush have the finances to compete with the Sydney clubs, and the whole history of RL in Australia is turned on it's head. Also a following outside of their Sydney base doesn't mea

Only if you consider getting lucky and finding a Hollywood star with rich mates willing to bankroll the club, or lucking out and having an already established leagues club in a growth corridor, "good management". Unless you can convince Hugh Jackman to get some mates together and blow tens of millions of dollars saving the Sea Eagles, it's pretty unlikely that they'll be so fortunate.

Juniors aren't really a problem for either of them (well at least not in this regard), the problem for both (and many other NRL clubs) is that they refuse to adapt the environment changing around them. They need to make meaningful changes to make themselves more appealing to a broader group of people to grow their fan base, but they refuse to make those meaningful changes because 'tradition'. It's the biggest difference between the AFL and the NRL which has made the AFL more successful; even if they need a bit of arm twisting at times, the AFL clubs are willing and capable of making

The $30mil upgrade at Brookvale is a band-aid on a cancer. It won't fix any of the real problems that the stadium has, and it's nostalgia soaked regressive thinking like this that has held the game back for decades on both sides of the equator. Keep playing in rundown stadiums that are difficult for 90% of the population to get to if you like, but don't then complain when you are going broke and watching the AFL average tens of thousands more then you could ever dream of.