whatmichaelsays

I don't doubt that there are some cultural challenges and you will never be all things to all people, but the principle still stands that if we are a community sport not offering what the community wants - or at least, assuming that the community is and wants the same that it wanted a generation ago - then there is a challenge there. But that's why it's important for clubs to really hone in on the audiences they think they can reach and develop the product for that segment - if the answer to attracting one audience is a Toronto-style beer festival, then the trade-off is that isn't likely to increase our appeal to the Asian market and it's up to clubs to work out who they want through the door, and how they can get them. We also shouldn't just look at this through the prism of match-going fans and match attendances, but in the context of any sort of engagement with or consumption of RL. You also won't find a lot of people from the Asian community at a lot of Premier League or EFL football stadiums, yet if you go to any five-a-side football centre in any major city, you will see an awful lot of players from that background playing - so there is clearly an interest in the sport, even if they're indugling that interest in a different way. That same principle applies to other groups RL might want/need to reach. Young people currently find it difficult to get into Premier League football grounds (due to ticket price and/or tickets usually being held behind membership or loyalty programmes), so they consume football differently - digital and social media for example. That's an area where RL is particularly poor, even though we have no shortage of good content. I've said it on previous threads, but RL is incredibly difficult to "buy" or follow if you aren't in the heartlands. It was almost impossible for me to follow Leeds in a meaningful way when I was living away from West Yorkshire if a game wasn't televised - often the best I could do was text updates on the club Twitter feed, or a Radio Leeds stream that jumped from ground to ground. That's a real barrier to audiences when we have had a generation of more transient and mobile populations.

I think this is the key thing for me. The communities that our clubs represent have changed significantly around them, but has what RL or the RL clubs offer materially changed to reflect that? Do our clubs really have a good handle on the audiences that they want to attract, and what those audiences want from either a day at the RL, or RL content in general? Saying things like "we tried reaching the Asian / Polish / Student / Yuppie / Millenial community and they don't care" is a problem on two fronts. Firstly, it seems to suggest that the clubs have just seen this as an issue of promoting themselves to those audiences, without actually understanding and adapting to what it is those audiences want - sticking some posters up in the Student Union and calling it a day is not "reaching out to students". Secondly, "the Asian community" isn't a singular homogenous group where everyone in that group wants, likes, values and behaves in the same way. It's poor segmentation and it's how you end up with situations like Huddersfield believing that the best way to appeal to "Gen X-ers" (as if all "Gen X-ers" are the same) is to just make the ticket cheaper and keep offering the same thing that they always do. @The Masked Posteris right to say that you can't force people to like something, but the survival of any business usually depends heavily on how well you can make that "something" into something people like and if the premise of RL as a business is tied into the fact it is embeded in its communities, it needs to recognise that the communities it serves are changing and wanting different things.

I suppose the key difference is that whilst the sporting landscape might be identical to what it was 50 years ago, are those communities where the sports are embedded? And in RL, given the narrow geographic footprint, I think that is a big challenge. In RL, we talk about the heartlands being "former mining towns", but the makeup of those towns the clubs represent is so different now to what it was even just a generation ago. These "former pit towns", where people probably spent their entire working lives, are are now commuter towns that pull in people from other cities (place like Huddersfield, for example, are popular with couples where one works in Leeds and the other in Manchester). These towns now have much more diverse communities, higher immigrant populations and many young people from these places go on to leave for study or career opportunities - many never coming back. And I think that people just don't have that same attachment to their local town than they once did. So the question then is whether RL and RL clubs, which pride themselves on being key parts of their community, actually have adapted to reflect those communities as they are today? And I'm not sure you can confidently claim that they have.

Is it ambitious to give away so much of your profit margin? Surely ambitious would be trying to get that big crowd without massively discounting the tickets? Huddersfield have been trying this cheap ticket thing for years. It's not working.

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. During the Richard Lewis era, there was a definite mindset that it was better to have 5k people locked out of a 25k venue than 30k people rattling around a 40k venue. The sport moved away from that, tried some larger venues, and it quickly descended into the era of discounting. I do agree with @Tommygilf that having games in both Huddersfield and Leeds will lead to a bit of cannibalisation of the market, but there's no reason why the right product, sold right, couldn't shift 50k tickets across three ~20k venues.

I'd agree with that. Great news that there's an international in the pipeline but it's disappointing that London, the city where the England team consistently gets its best attendances, isn't included. It does feel a bit, dare I say it, "on the cheap" and "low risk", where they're going to be asking the same audience to buy three lots of tickets, rather than reaching out to new audiences.

Isn't the point of the criteria under this arrangement that, over the course of a 12-year partnership, it becomes something of a moving carrot? Surely we aren't still going to be judging clubs by the same standards in 5, 7 and 10 years time? If we get to the point where 12 clubs either hold or are knocking on the door of an A licence, I would hope that IMG / the RFL then look at how they review the criteria and raise the bar, based on the trends and commercial realities at that time. Not so that holding an A licence becomes an impossible dream, but so that clubs don't just see a A licence as the "end game"?

This all feels very "correlation is causation" with plenty of confirmation bias thrown in for good measure. None of what you say really answers that question of how we get more people - and a more diverse range of people - watching rugby league. It's just "everything is fine, the product is fine, we just don't have enough cities". It seems to place all of the blame on just one of the "four Ps" of marketing, and neglecting the possibility that the other three could also be the problem. If Leeds can't pull in wealthy punters from the "golden triangle" of North Leeds for a game against world champion St Helens, why would they find it any easier for a game against London or Newcastle? How many people are genuinely thinking, "I like the look of that, but the population of St Helens is only 180,000 people?". If we are struggling to pull in younger audiences in the heartlands, why would a team in Bristol be able to pull in younger audiences, and why would they be able to do something that our heartland clubs can't do? If a city-based club like Bradford finds it difficult to engage the Asian community on their doorstep, why would a club in West London find it any easier? Like I say, geography is a right answer to a particular question. But for the big question - the real question - that we should be trying to answer, it's really not the issue. The issue comes down to the people the sport wants to reach, what those people want in return for their leisure time and money, and what the sport can do to deliver that. The location is, at best, secondary.

That's not my assumption. I'm not saying that this can be achieved without changing the way the sport does things, but that those changes are well within the sport's capabilities with the appropriate strategies, carrots and sticks. Is it that those people aren't interested, or is it that RL isn't offering what those people want? Or that RL isn't engaging with those audiences? Just because they aren't coming now, it doesn't mean that they cannot and will not ever come. Why do we think affluent audiences in distant cities will flock to RL when we aren't appealing to those under our noses in Alwoodly, Sandal and Cheshire? This doesn't address the fundamental issue of how we make RL something that more people want to dedicate their time and money to. Let's start from a basic premise that we want to increase the number of "ABC1" audiences watching RL (because we have plenty of ABC1 people within our heartland) - what evidence is there that the lack of city-based teams is the reason they aren't buying RL in one way, shape or form? Why have we concluded that that is the reason, as opposed to the many other potential reasons - facilities, image, advertising, matchday experience, merchandise, branding, etc? If we address those issues first and we don't move the needle, then maybe the city argument stands to scrutiny but until then, arguing about geography is simply moving the problem somewhere else. If the real reason we don't attract more ABC1 audiences is the poor quality perception of the league, then putting a team in London or Bristol or Milton Keynes doesn't really change that - we just end up looking for more "people like us" in areas where there likely are fewer of those people than what we have now.

Crack on then lads. Nobody is stopping you doing that in Keighley.

With respect, I disagree. When we frame this as a geography problem, we look for solutions from the wrong premise. The key question here is "how do we get more people to watch rugby league?". That isn't a problem of where we have teams, but how the sport as a whole engages people beyond the few demographics that we do engage fairly well. We have a lot of untapped potential right under the game's nose. We have pockets of wealth all around the heartlands that we struggle to engage. The north isn't full of people working in mines and mills any more - instead, it is full of people working in "new money", well-paying industries like digital and fintech who have disposable income to spend if only the game can offer what they want. The north has more university graduates than it has ever had before, and is more ethnically diverse than it has ever been. When we talk about expansion as an audience problem, we look for solutions to un-tap that potential and engage valuable demographics. We look for ways to appeal to those pockets of wealth, people who work in "new money" industries, people from different ethnic backgrounds and people with those university connections. When we position expansion as a geography problem, we don't solve those same issues and that invariably means that we just go to new cities (usually at someone's great expense), looking for "people like us" - and then act surprised when we don't find them. Don't get me wrong, geography is part of the picture - but it's not the core issue the game needs to solve. The game needs new people watching and buying it - where those people are is immaterial and it cannot be allowed to be an excuse for not trying to solve those challenges I mentioned above.

Without knowing the specific KPIs being measured, it's not really possible to answer. There are metrics that you can easily manipulate and ones that you can't. If the ones being measured/graded are the ones that are much harder to manipulate, then the answer is "no".

It's like any other marketing metrics - a lot depends on what you're measuring and how. To use a simple example: Can you manipulate your social media followers? Yes - you can just buy them if you really wanted to. Can you manipulate your social media engagement? That's a lot harder - the followers you buy likely aren't going to be engaging with your content and there's not much you can do to make them.

Not necessarily. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Some clubs will invariably question how well their branding translates across social media but, frankly, they probably need to. Personally, I'd replace the word "fandom" with "audience" and then you probably get a more balanced view of what I suspect IMG is looking for here. They're looking for more diverse audiences watching the game - ones that go beyond our typical demographics and may be tempted to buy different things at different times. This is something the sport needs to do for its long-term future. They're looking at how clubs are making it easier for people outside their typical catchment area to "buy into" the club - through mediums like merchandise, media and memberships. This is important when you have much more transient populations - especially for a sport based largely around towns where young people are likely to leave for career or study. They're looking at how clubs can keep their audiences engaged once they've got them - how they ensure people remain connected to the club when there are competing factors that may break that engagement (the aforementioned moving away from the town, poor team performances, other distractions in the leisure industry, etc). They're looking at how clubs can build audiences that can be monetised through means beyond just ticket sales - for example, building an engaged digital audience that becomes something sponsors are willing to pay to reach. This is a revenue stream that RL has historically neglected, and why we can only sell these sorts of rights for a delivery of pepperoni stuffed-crusts. They're looking at what clubs are doing to fill their grounds, but also what they're doing to get people engaging with them generally - whether that is getting more people to watch them on Sky/C4, watch their social media content or otherwise buy into the club and/or sport. This is key to proving to media and commercial partners that our rights really are worth as much as we think we should be getting for them. These are the sorts of things I mean when I argue that "expansion" isn't a geography problem - every club can do this, and it doesn't require any pins in any maps.

It could, although I do have somewhat more faith in the IMG approach. "Fandom", whilst it might sound somewhat nebulous, does encompass much more than just turnstile clicks - and that's particularly important where the strategy is to grow media and commercial income.

I think the problem with the old licencing system was that it measured the wrong things, measured them badly, and encouraged the wrong behaviours. One of the criteria was an average gate of (IIRC) 10K. Rather than encouraging clubs to market themselves to new audiences, all it did was encourage mass discounting - something that the sport is still paying the price for today.

I think the "% of population" thing also ignores the dynamics of that population. For starters, not far off 10% of Leeds' population are students. That's a significant chunk of the local catchment with no affinity to Leeds, likely some affinity to their own team, and not a lot of disposable income to spend on Leeds Rhinos even if they wanted to. Then you have a significant proportion of people who come to Leeds for their career from elsewhere in the UK. I'm typing this from an office in Leeds where born-and-bred Loiners are very much the minority. You just don't have that sort of dynamic in smaller towns - people there are much more likely to live in the town they are born and bred in. And then there's the issue that Leeds are fighting in a much more competitive leisure market. Personally, I always think that the whole issue of expansion comes from the wrong place - it sees expansion as a "geography" problem, rather than as an "audience" problem. There are so many untapped demographics - in and out of the heartlands - that we can expand our appeal to without putting a single pin in a single map.

The other way of framing that is that, since 2015, all but two of the current Super League teams (one of which has yo-yo'd between SL and the Championship in that time) have either won one of the three trophies on offer, or made a major final. That feels like a competitive competition to me

It's certainly reasonable to suggest that even within the relatively small confines of SL, the funding that goes into some clubs generates a better return than it does in others, but that isn't a justification for spreading that investment even thinner into the lower leagues. If anything, it's a justification for giving a greater share of funding to those clubs that provide the best returns (be that commercial, media coverage, talent development, etc). But we don't do that because I think it's generally accepted that having a league of six playing each other isn't beneficial - we accept that the funding needs to be spread to create a competitive balance, and 12 clubs at present is the chosen model. There are flaws in the grading system, but I do think it is a good enough compromise to achieve what we're led to believe it sets out to do - to encourage clubs to invest in improving the commercial performance of their clubs, to retain some element of on-field meritocracy and to preserve the value of the game's biggest asset. I know this isn't a universally popular view, but had Leeds come a cropper in one of their flirtations with the middle eights or in the Agar era, that's a huge commercial hit to the sport and one that it arguably couldn't afford to take. But if fans and stakeholders of Championship and L1 clubs feel they deserve a bigger share of that pie, I'd suggest that their argument needs to be somewhat stronger than "but what about Wakefield?". Say we divert 10% of Leeds' central funding and give that to Hunslet - what does the game get in return for that?

The counter argument to that is whether the central funding that does go to the lower leagues generates a sufficient return on investment - or at least, a greater return than other funded projects - to merit more funding. With respect, it feels like a not insignificant amount of that central funding goes towards keeping journeymen players in full-time sport - and I'm not sure that is necessarily the best use of resources.

I know I'm critical of Carter, and I do try to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I'm sorry, but: This is the whole damn problem right here. The fact that Carter, as a prominent leader at one of our 12 SL clubs and a board member of SLE - the entity responsible for the sport's commercial performance - can unashamedly and unironically say this out loud just typifies how the sport has found itself here. It as if people like him have just been waiting for a white knight to come in and do what people like him should have been doing all along. IMG is not here to be our saviour and do the work for us - they're to be a partner and help us achieve what should be achievable if people like Carter would actually do what we're led to believe their jobs actually are - to work to grow their clubs and, in their capacity with SLE, work to grow the commercial viability of the sport. If we see this as a problem for IMG and IMG alone to fix, we're setting them up to fail. There's a lot I'd criticise Carter for - some that people would say is harsh given the constraints Wakefield work in and his commitment to the club - but this sort of thing just typifies the whole issue. He's had opportunities in his roles with SLE and Wakefield to propose ways forward for the sport to engage new audiences, to attract commercial partners, to improve our attractiveness to media partners, and the best he can come up with seems to be "it's too hard and if IMG can't do it all for us, we're f*****". It's pathetic.

The planning docs suggest that the stand does run all the way along towards the try line, so I'm assuming that the gap is for the entry/exit of construction equipment? I'm guessing the last thing Wakefield needs right now is heavy machinery trying to leave the site via the pitch.

Some context.... Although I'm not sure how I feel about the sum of Leeds' "culture" being two designer shopping malls and a casino. This was, without question, an idea......

Kieran Maguire and Price of Football is probably the best example of regular investigative journalism in football these days - and delivers often quite dry subjects in a very engagng way. But you're right, there's not enough of that sort of journalism any more. Football also has moved towards a trend of 'in-housing' a lot of media as well these days. Exclusive interviews are now more often done through club TV channels, and many clubs went through a period of only allowing their own photographers into grounds - something that a lot of the press pushed back against.