Smudger06

Spot on

Sky would naturally offer less because they are not stupid, they would probably of gotten it at a right bargain had BT not jumped in. And because of the potential effects of Covid on their profits, as a business why not chance it at a lot less. Very doubtful it would be due to a few fans ringing them up or even ads around RL programming blocks.

The total domestic rights value Dave. The increase in international rights made this slight problem go away though.

We have 3 years to sort ourselves out now. Needs to be done right, for once. BT coming in is a positive to take away, it was speculated as a £25m - £30m deal initially, would have gone like this.......Sky £25m, (Sky sat thinking nice1) .......BT pop up late with £28m ??? Sky (FFS) £30m. BT, we are out but never mind we gave it a go and at least we've made our competitor pay more.....in a nutshell, perhaps.

Yes, unfortunately I fell into that trap, I see the system for what it tried to do now.

Very true but it looked good on paper when if was first announced and it unified the game substantially with provision for growth at League 1 level. It must have looked very good to Sky too. We Should have presented a unified front to the public and our TV Partners, we gave them cold feet and we gave them loop fixtures as an alternative, grave errors. especially public spats.

I must admit the 8's outside of the middle, MPG comp, i.e SL8's and Champ Shield 8's were a right drag on but minor tweaks would have been the order of the day not SL trying to split and grab more power, and not replacing them with an even worse Loop fixture solution.

We proposed a whole game structure that looked attractive and promised that for once we would stick to it? We let them down.

Whilst you have been making a lot of sense recently Michael, I think you put too much importance on the advertising part of Sky's Business model. Subs are King. Ads are just a bonus on the side for them.

Yeah it's quality and certainly what League is all about. I'd love to see Digicel Cup in the Challenge Cup, if only, and also match ups between Elite 1 & DigiCup sides to see where we stand with Club Land depth in PNG & France.

That's understandable. But observing the nastiness in general, on many different subjects on various threads it seems to extend a lot deeper than that. There's an obvious difference between banter / wind - ups going way too far by accident on here, which, yeah is quite often and genuine hatred on display. If you tell us where all this stems from maybe we can help.

Yeah we already know you pure hate Northern England, especially mining towns where our code was built, obviously looking for aussie allies, doubt they share your twisted irrational thinking though. Your perogative, crack on mate.

Yes I can see what you are saying. I agree with a lot of it. Tier 1 is the 2 x MPL's (Telstra Premiership (16 Clubs) & Betfred Super League (12 Clubs)) yes, NRL is by far the #1 League of our code in the world. Tier 2 is Championship (14 Clubs) NSW Cup (12 Clubs) Queensland Cup (14 Clubs) Tier 3 is League 1, QRL & NSWRL ain't really big on Tier 3, been strong in tier 1 & 2 and been huge areas with small populations. Tier 4 is NCL (Prem, Div1, Div2, Div3 = 49 Clubs) French Championship (Elite1, Elite2 = 21 Clubs) & PNG Digicel Cup (12 Clubs) Tier 5 is Yorkshire Men,s League, Northwest Counties Mens League, 3 x Queensland Regions, 6 x NSW Regions + Sydney Metro, 7 x NZ Zones. Yeah, a lot of your tier 5 sides could easy step up to NCL Prem level, no probs. But many of your tier 5 sides would also have trouble with the top Yorkshire mens league sides. fluid at this level, as you say fresh people come in all the time, players move and move clubs etc.

The likes of Hunslet, Barrow Raiders, Workington Town or Keighley Cougars would walk over any NSW Group level side you'd care to present. League 1 is Tier 3, NSW or Queensland Regional RL is Tier 5. I'm sure Grafton Ghosts or Macksville will go well against em. Don't let reality get in the way of your weird hatreds though.

That Sky Try money is absolutely critical for the foundations and spreading the game though.