The Great Dane

There's no NRL standard stadiums in Ipswich, and no realistic plans to build one anytime soon. So where would they play if not Suncorp? With the possible exceptions of QSAC and the Gabba in the south, both of which iare terrible experiences for rectangular sports, the only NRL standard stadium in Brisbane is Suncorp. In other words the only way that the 18th license makes sense in Brisbane is if the club is based either centrally or in the south, not out west in Ipswich. Which, BTW, is where the 17th license should have gone, but that is neither here nor there.

Playing any games at NSO would be totally counter productive to building a team Perth/WA can get behind, which should be the goal. It'd also be a massive mistake as playing games in the old market is a massive red flag to the new market that the team isn't committed to it, which is commercial cancer. As a Bears fan there's no way you could trust the club not to focus on NS over Perth anyway. In other words such a move to Perth will only work if it's a merger where the Bears are minority partners with no say in the day to day running of the NRL club, which the Bears (as well as the supporters group) will never agree to after their experiences with the Northern Eagles. So in other words it shouldn't, and almost certainly won't, happen. If it does and they get the license it'll be an even more regressive decision than Redcliffe, and would further cement RL's image in Australia as a deeply Sydney centric game. Perth doesn't need the Bears anyway, and shouldn't be used as a backdoor way for a handful of nostalgic old men (including myself BTW) to backdoor the Bears back into the comp.

I honestly can't be bothered to give you a history lesson that you probably don't really care about anyway, but the Bears merging with a Perth based bid, or being incentivised by the WA state govt to play games in Perth, isn't at all comparable to the Swans or Lions situations. It'd honestly be more palatable if the proposed 'Perth Bears' situation was a copy of the Swans relocation to Sydney or Fitzroy's assets being sold to the Brisbane Bears.

St. George Illawarra has worked better than the other mergers because it was less a merger and more a hostile takeover... The Steelers were always minor partners whom were expected to be seen and not heard, right up until they were pushed out of team completely of course.

By that definition 95%+ of all sports fans aren't 'true fans' of their chosen sport.

Yeah, that's a weird one isn't it...

To be honest the AFL is doing more damage in this regard than RL ever could. Through no fault of RL's mind you. In the last twenty years they've wriggled their way into most of the private school systems in Australia in a way that RL is incapable of doing because of discrimination. As a result they've provided an alternate to kids in the private schools that didn't exist in most places until very recently. That has more or less halved RU's participation in said schools, which has totally thrown their junior system into chaos. Add in the NRL, and to a lesser extent French and Japanese rugby, coming in and poaching most of the best of the rest and the vast majority of juniors whom thirty years ago would have ended up playing RU are ending up in other sports or overseas. It's no coincidence that the AFL's growth in the eastern states this century has centred around traditionally strong RU regions (Northern and Eastern Sydney, the posh parts of Brisbane, Canberra, etc), as RU's decline has more or less mirrored the AFL's growth.

If anything you lose braincells from watching New's analysis lol.

Moving exclusively, or even mainly, to a FTA broadcaster in NZ would almost certainly mean taking a revenue hit of tens of millions of dollars, which simply isn't going to happen. Pushing for Sky to allow for more content on FTA would be a good move, but realistically it's unlikely to be successful considering that they begrudgingly allowed a larger FTA component in the current deal as a sweetener and if anything will probably try to reel that back in. That assumes that there's no serious rival bidder for the rights of course, which again, is most likely going to be the case.

The NZ broadcast rights only saw a large jump because Spark Sport (streaming service in NZ) put in a competitive bid for the rights, which caused a small bidding war for the rights which has basically never happened before in NZ. The problem is that Spark Sport has struggled since then and are unlikely to be able to put in such a bid again. In other words Sky NZ will probably be the sole serious bidder again meaning there'll be no competition for the rights again. In such circumstances it's unlikely that you'll see another significant jump in the rights value, Sky may even try to low ball the NRL. I imagine that they would be open to negotiations to pay for the extra local content that a second NZ club would bring, but you'd have to ask them that question to be sure, and even so realistically there's significant more opportunity for growth in WA, SA, Qld, and Vic, than in NZ. In saying all that broadcast rights value isn't/shouldn't be the only factor when considering expansion.

On average all the regional clubs struggle to sign upper echelon and star players unless they luck into them. The Titans are the possible exception, but even they only sweep up the Queenslanders that want to stay in SEQ but can't get a good deal at the Broncos because there's been no other competition. It's a by-product of having 9 clubs in Sydney and the poor structure of the salary cap and associated rules that highly advantage clubs in larger metropolitan markets, and has little to nothing to do with where the clubs are based outside of their market size and access to corporates and third parties. Besides, you're one to talk. I mean when was the last time the Dragons signed a genuine star player in his prime without extenuating circumstances contributing to it? It's got to have been at least 20 years.

It shouldn't happen under any circumstances, but considering the current political climate there will almost certainly be a lot of political pressure for PNG to win a license. So there's a chance that they could get one, it's a slim chance, but a chance none the less. Considering the circumstances it's very hard to justify it though, especially when considering big markets like Perth and Adelaide still haven't got representation.

The problem with this place isn't trolls, there're very few genuine trolls on this site. The problem with this place is that a lot of people on here seem to believe that anybody that presents an idea or piece of information that challenges their preconceived notions is a troll by default, and that gives them the right to try and bully them off the site. That leads to fights and a lack of civility, which leads to a bad atmosphere. In other words, if you want to fix the atmosphere problem you need to crackdown on the people who add absolutely nothing to a discussion except to insult or mock other people.

Where's the lie? If what I said was spin then it should be easy to address it.

The strange thing about Super Rugby is that the split SR Australia and SR Aotearoa competitions were both reasonably successful in comparison to SR Pacific, Super 15, or 18. But despite that the ARU and NZRU both seem to be determined to persist with a Trans-Tasman comp that nobody cares about. It's obvious why the NZRU wants to continue with SR Pacific, they want access to the Australian market, but what makes absolutely no sense is why the ARU continues to persist with SR when 20 years of it in it's various forms has almost totally crippled the sport in this country. If they had any balls they could save RU in Australia by telling NZ and World Rugby to stick it, building a humble national league, and lightly modifying the rules to get rid of some of the nonsense and incentivise running rugby to compete with the product on the field in the NRL and AFL. Unfortunately for them they don't have any balls, and for whatever reasons seem to believe that they can't exist without NZ, when in reality NZ is what's killing them at this point.

You are so unbelievably ignorant of the state of RL in Australia, it's position compared to it's competitors within Australia, the opportunities afforded to players depending on where they are from within Australia, and the amount of talent with the potential to be NRL players that it loses in each age group each year because of a lack of opportunities. You don't even seem to really comprehend the geographical constraints in play in Australia. In other words you haven't got the faintest clue what you are talking about, and what you've said is such nonsense that it's not worth responding to because it doesn't map onto reality in the slightest. Look, put simply growth in PNG cannot be allowed to come at the expense of growth in Australia because Australia is where the money is. It's really that simple, look after Australia or risk loosing everything, and considering the basic facts of the matter the NRL is doing a terrible job of looking after the vast majority of Australia.

Two major problems have harmed the NRL's on field product in the last 15-20 years. Somewhere in the mid 00s the referees adopted a philosophy to refereeing, commonly referred to as 'game management', where instead of simply enforcing the rules to the best of their ability they would try to subtly manipulate the game so it 'flowed' better and would in theory be more entertaining. In practise what ended up happening as a result was the refs were effectively given the discretion to decide whether or not they'd enforce the rules when they were broken, which lead to totally inconsistent rulings which not only totally stuffed the game, and allowed prior unforeseen amounts of bias to leak into the game, but lead to a whole bunch of other knock-on effects. Jumping ahead, instead of removing that refereeing philosophy and removing as much of the subjectivity that had leaked into the rulebook as a result, i.e. addressing the real issue, PVL and the current NRL's 'solution' to the problem was to introduce the six again rule, which not only failed to fix any of the problems it was specifically introduced to fix, in fact it exacerbated most of them, but has so completely screwed the game in a bunch of other ways that it's to the point that the game's so different from what it used to be that it may as well be considered a completely different sport, and not for the better. If you truly believe that the current confused trash is better than what was on the field even a few years ago, then I strongly suggest that you do yourself a massive favour and look up some older footy. If you're interested in some suggestions then a good place to start would be the 2015 GF and round 22 2019 Storm vs Raiders. Those games are great examples of modern footy at it's best, and what it could and should be with a few minor changes. If you're willing to look at older, golden age, stuff then the 89 and 97(ARL) GFs are a great place to start. BTW, you're simply wrong if you think that field position was bought more cheaply in the NRL 5 years ago then now, when these days the refs regularly give cheap possession and field position to teams for reasons that even they can't explain after the fact because of the 6 again rule.

The most interesting thing about that article is the amount of spin in it. Most of those costs are the same or similar for all teams, pretty much all of it is capped, and the bulk of those expenses are covered/subsidised by the NRL and/or other relevant governing bodies anyway. In other words with the exception of travel, which is significantly cheaper for Sydney teams than any of those outside of Sydney, their expenses are more or less the same as every other club. Which BTW is probably a bad thing because it's artificially enforced by the NRL to keep the weak teams competitive, but that's another discussion. The big question about Penrith, which this article inadvertently highlights, is how have they managed to stop any of their best junior talent from being poached when all the other big juniors clubs have found it totally impossible in the NRL era. The answer is almost certainly dumb luck or shenanigans, just like everything else that's gone Penrith's way in the last 5 or so years, but the fact that nobody at the NRL has gone to the effort to make sure everything is above board is one of the reasons why the RL is so screwed in this country.

Your point being? Developing leagues in other regions, and thus developing talent locally with the least impact on development within Australia as possible is the best outcome for everybody. Here's the issue; most Australian athletes are never afforded the opportunity to get picked over them because there's only limited space within the system. Starting in the late teens the system reaches a bottleneck where there're thousands of guys from all across the region of similar talent, but nationally there's only space for a few hundred of them to get an opportunity. At that point it's almost arbitrary as to whom gets to continue in the system and whom doesn't, and the vast majority of those that don't are forced to move on from RL by financial pressures. The whole system has become Americanised as a result of said bottleneck as well, with most players being selected because of their physical attributes rather than their capability as footballers, which is a huge issue. Plenty of legendary players of the past would never get a run in modern times simply because they're 'too small', 'too slow', 'can't lift enough', etc, etc, and it's leading to a dearth of footy brains in the competition. Every person from outside of Australia that is taking a position in said system is doing so at the expense of an Australian, and for the most part that's not in the NRL's or Australian RL's interest considering the state of RL within Australia and the opportunities available to us . Uh-huh, and as a business it makes sense to pursue the best opportunities that will stimulate the most growth possible, and those best opportunities undoubtably exist in Australia and not the PI's... Any of Vic, WA, and SA alone would be more valuable financially and in grassroots and junior growth alone than most of the PI's put together. You don't know that the product would be inferior. Frankly I'd argue that most top AFL, RU, [insert popular contact sport here] would easily make it in the NRL, and that their presence in the league would do more for the sport in Australia than most Islanders ever could, but the sport doesn't allow it's self the opportunity to poach them when they are young because it's priorities are totally backwards. BTW, most honest people would argue that the product on the field is significantly worse now than it was just 5 years ago. But that's a whole other discussion. Your point?

Junior development only targets the top 20-30 players in each age group in a particular region. As such increased junior development alone will have little to no impact on the AFL's growth. If you want to stop the AFL's growth then you need to do three things- Increase grassroots funding across the board. Target strategic markets on the Eastern Seaboard for targeted investment to halt the AFL's spread in those regions (Murray region, the Riverina, ACT/Capital region, GC, Ipswich, Blacktown, etc, etc). Force the AFL to play defence by investing in growth south and west of the Barassi line, particularly in the Metro markets (Melbourne, Perth, and Adelaide). Do those three things well and in the mid-long term it'll make all the difference.

The relative cultural influence each nation has on North Africa and the PI's respectively is totally irrelevant to the point I was making...

The NRL has given the Hunters alone grants of AUD $5mil just to keep them solvent. That kind of money spent in the bush, on an affiliated state, or even split between all of them, would make a monumental difference to the sport's fortunes in Australia. Sure most of the rest of the movement in the Pacific at the professional level is simply the clubs poaching players on the cheap, however there's a large push for expensive Hunters/Silktails style programs to spread across the entire pacific, and that was what was being advocated for here if we are being honest. Those programs, should they come to be, will inevitably come at the expense of possible investment within Australia. I've already addressed that. For the most part the government's sports diplomacy programs in the pacific have failed, but even if they were a success that money still can't be relied on. Sooner or later that money is going to dry up (it could dry up within a month or so if the Libs are voted out or are forced to form a minority government), and once that money dries up somebody is going to have to pick up the slack otherwise all those programs in the PI's fold. Pressure will be on the NRL to pick up the slack since they are the only organisation with the will and the means to fund such programs, and frankly they can't really afford to be investing that kind of money into the PI's while RL is more or less functionally extinct in half of Australia.

There's no franchise fee to join the NRL. All that grassroots and junior development in the PI's comes at the expense of development locally. In other words every dollar spent on development in the PI's is a dollar that could be spent in Australia, and every Sivo, Kikau, and Olam takes a place that an Australian athlete could have had. I assure you that better investment into the Vic, WA, SA, etc, even just the bush, would produce better returns for the NRL in the long term than Fiji, Tonga, etc, and that guys like Buddy Franklin, Dustin Martin, and Christian Petracca would have been just as big of stars as Sivo, Kikau, et al., had RL realistically had a chance of converting them to RL in their youth. Furthermore, those Australian athletes that get dropped to make room for your Sivo's and Kikau's of the world don't just disappear. If they are good enough to make it in RL then they're good enough to make it in other sports, and that's exactly what they go on to do and it's increasingly biting the NRL in the ###### as a result. Alexander Volkanovski, Jordan Mailata, and many others all started in RL before moving to other sports once they ran out of opportunities in RL. BTW, I doubt you'll see much investment into the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu with the way things are going politically.

That's just excuse making to justify taking the easy route of adding the Dolphins in Moreton Bay. If the NRL was serious about using expansion to counteract the AFL's growth in Brisbane then they would have invested in the west of Brisbane (namely Ipswich), because that's where the AFL is investing the most for growth in Brisbane. Truth be told the NRL picked the Dolphins because News offered them a bonus if they picked them, and the Dolphins are an easy nostalgia sale to old fans.

The only hard evidence of 'big growth in Tonga and Fiji' that I've seen is a jump in attendance at their internationals in Australia and NZ, but for sake of argument lets assume there has been significant growth on the ground in Tonga and Fiji. Tonga is a poor country with a population of 105k. Fiji while nowhere near as bad off as Tonga, is still a politically unstable 3rd world country with a total pop of 896k spread across many islands, while Suva, it's largest city, has less than 100k. PNG is much larger than both the others, but it's population is spread over a much larger, much more rugged and dangerous, area. They still have serious corruption and security issues, and nearly 40% (the exact number may have changed since I last looked) of their population lives in absolute poverty while most of the rest couldn't afford the costs of supporting an NRL side regularly. None of them have valuable broadcast markets, none of them have a large population of people whom could afford the cost of a ticket on a regular basis, they'd be extremely expensive to operate out of with massive travel and security costs, etc, etc. Basically as markets they are high costs low value, especially when compared to value of Australian markets without any representation in the NRL. To give you an analogy you might understand; imagine if it was realistically feasible for the Super League to expand to Glasgow, Birmingham, and other large cities in the UK without any significant RL presence, then another person came along and said "nah we shouldn't invest in them, we should focus our efforts on growing the sport in Tunisia and Libya instead", that's effectively what you and others like you are suggesting, and frankly it's batshit. BTW, the fact you think 'they' (whoever they are) convinced the Australian government to invest in sport in the PI's shows you've got no clue what is going on in the Asia-Pacific region. All the money the Australian government spends on sport and infrastructure in the PI's is football diplomacy attempting to counteract China's growing influence in the region. It's not working, and that government money could never be relied on in the first place.