whatmichaelsays

I think the point about Michael Carter's suggestion is a fair one and whilst I think there is a lot of fair criticism to be levelled at him, I think that, buried deep within his argument, was a decent point. The problem with what he said was that the things he was proposing were very much within his power as a club leader at the very point he said them - making rugby league in Wakefield more attractive, increasing the audience his club (and by extension, the sport) reaches and being the "FOMO" ticket in town. I think this is why people like Carter and the anti-expansion argument leaves itself open to the "we've been focusing on the heartlands for 120+ years...." argument - he seemingly knows what needs to be done, but isn't doing it. So the obvious question to put back is why isn't the sport succeeding in increasing it's appeal within the north of England and the heartland communities. Is it a lack of resource? Is it that the clubs don't know the audiences they want to reach? Is it a lack of knowledge of how to appeal to them? Are the clubs waiting for the RFL/SLE to do it for them, effectively creating a void of responsibility where the RFL sees this as a club issue, and the clubs see it as an RFL issue? We can't just default, as some in this thread have, to the argument that "people in the RL heartlands are all skint" because that's plainly not true. There are pockets of wealth all over RL land that, presumably have money to spend and a demand for entertainment. Offices in Leeds and Manchester right now will be full of people in well-paid tech, legal and finance jobs, and our 'RL towns' around them are now commuter towns for those people. Even within five minutes drive of Belle Vue, there are huge housing developments where some plots are going for close to half a million pounds - surely any RL club would love that sort of audience on their doorstep and should be doing whatever they can to make themselves appealing to their new neighbours? I think the other problem with his point was the "in the north" qualifier and again, whilst I understood why he said it, but just because the sport is strongest in the north and predominantly played in the north, it doesn't mean our appeal has to be limited to the north. If our content is as good as we all like to think it is, why can't it travel? Is the sort of stuff that Tom Johnson can do more impressive if he does it in the south east rather than the rhubarb triangle?

But I would argue that you can't really have geographic expansion without starting with that audience. If we were to ask what the "point" of geographic expansion is, it's more than likely "to have more people watching / playing / buying RL". If we were to ask what the point of expanding our audience is, it's more than likely "to have more people watching / playing / buying RL". So if the end-goal is the same, surely the best way to frame this entire subject of expansion is to prioritise the things we can control with the tools we have, rather than wishing for things we can't control with tools we don't have? You might be fair to say I'm talking about "growth" rather than "expansion" but if that's the case, then maybe "expansion" is an unhealthy distraction? And the reason why I think that the "audience-first" approach to expansion is the way to look at this is because I think that much of the game, particularly in the heartlands, is relying on inertia. We're relying on the same people to keep buying the same product, attend the same events, accept the same things and drag their kids along with it. That's the "mould" we expect people to conform to. That's a problem both for heartland and expansion clubs. When we expand, the game tries to take that same mould, apply it somewhere that doesn't have that same inertia, and acts surprised why it doesn't work. In the heartlands, where our communities are changing, the RL club is less and less the "heart of the community" that it may have been generations ago, and it has to work harder to stand out in a crowded leisure market. Again, I think if you got the 12 SL club chairmen in a room and asked them who their priority growth audience is for the next 3 years, I think the best case scenario is that you'd get 12 different answers - and the more likely scenario is that you'd get more than a few puzzled looks. If that's the case - that the sport doesn't know how to appeal to the people on it's doorstep, how can it possibly know how to appeal to any new market? We can probably get more people watching RL in <spins random city generator> Milton Keynes by putting a team there, throwing millions and millions of pounds at it, and waiting to see if we can find enough "people like us" to make it viable. We can probably also get more people watching RL in Milton Keynes by making it easier for people in MK to consume RL content, engaging them through all manner of different media, improving the image or RL to make RL merch more appealing and encouraging them to watch RL on TV, on YouTube and whatever other platforms the cool kids are using these days.

I'd agree with a lot of these points, although my view of "expansion" is slightly different. I don't think we should be looking at expansion as an issue of geography, but as an issue of audience. I think you can take many of the questions you ask and reframe them not as "where is the game watched / played? ", but as "who is watching / playing the game?". On some metrics, RL has done some good work on that front - we now have free-to-air TV coverage for example - but on many fronts, I think this is still the big question that hasn't been answered - who do we want to get watching RL, and how does RL cater to what they want? Do the clubs know who their target growth demographics are? Geographic expansion will not and cannot work without answering this question, no matter how much money and resources you want to throw at it. If the sport's main source of new fans and young players is dads and grandads dragging their reluctant kids along, then that is never going to work in an area where there isn't that same established culture. It also, arguably, isn't going to work in existing heartlands where those communities are changing (eg, more transient populations in cities, increased ethnic diversity, young people leaving towns for work and study and not coming back, etc). The tools that RL has available to it now include the ability to reach all manner of audiences anywhere in the world with content that is objectively brilliant, yet many clubs have a token effort to digital and social media, a PR strategy that doesn't extend beyond local newspapers with falling circulations, and still think that "advertising" means a poster up outside the club offices. Why is this? Is it a lack or resource, a lack of knowledge, a lack of effort, or a combination of various reasons? The new TV deal was supposed to include broadcast-quality filming of every fixture to allow the sport to distribute that digitally, yet it hasn't materialised. Why? So to me, "expansion" isn't about how we get teams in different geographic areas, it's about how we expand the number and the diversity of people watching and playing the sport, whether that is in our heartland areas or not. We often talk about RL being a working class sport, only popular in low income areas and areas affected disproportionately by austerity, yet that ignores the sizable pockets of wealth that exist in, or in easy reach of, our heartland areas. If we answer the questions of "do we know the audiences we want to reach?", "do we offer what those audiences want?" and, as importantly, "do we have the "image" that these people are attracted to?", the point about geographic footprint actually starts to address itself. Expansion is about how we build a bigger, more diverse TV audience that makes the sport's media rights more valuable. It's about how we build a digital audience that allows us to share our content around the world, and create an audience that advertisers want to pay to reach. Expansion is about how we make it easier for someone outside the heartlands who wants to follow RL to follow it - it's currently far too difficult for people outside the heartlands to really follow RL. The TL:DR version of this is that when we frame expansion as a "geography" problem, it becomes a problem that we can't really fix - because the sport doesn't have the resources to fund any meaningful expansion, the clubs themselves (with a small number of exceptions) aren't particularly enthusiastic about it either, and so we're reliant on another wealthy individual with some cash to burn (and all the risks that come with that). However, when we frame this as an "audience" problem, it is very much something that the game and the clubs in particular can - and importantly - have a stake in finding a solution to.

I'd be surprised if Hardaker is on any significant amount of money anyway - he simply doesn't have the leverage to command the sort of cash that his talent should really be worth.

State of Mind is just a T-shirt campaign. See also: UEFA's "Respect" campaign. Isn't RL Cares the new name for the Benevolent fund?

Indeed. The issue is not necessarily Wigan supporting / suspending their support of Hardaker, but rather the pompous tone in IL's statement when he signed for the club - neglecting that Leeds had provided Zak with plenty of support (alongside disciplinary action) before deciding to move on.

But isn't the more important thing to understand why, when it comes to the cup and play-off games, people's reaction to being asked to pay £18 is "f--- that"? In the wider context of sports tickets and even tickets to other forms of entertainment, is £18 that outlandish? If the product on offer isn't worth £18, surely that's the issue to fix? Rather than trying to find ways to work a product that people don't feel has value into yet another bundle of tickets? And it's not as if RL is the only sport that has a largely working class audience. The difference is that other sports have found ways to engage other audiences in addition to that working class core - something that RL seems particularly bad at.

I think the issue here is that RL hasn't really adapted to reflect modern ticket buying habits. The clubs rely so heavily on a captive market that pays up front, struggles to appeal to more casual ticket buyers who might buy on a match-by-match basis and don't really want the commitment of a full season (and when you consider that it's now so easy to 'unbundle' so many other package deals - mobile phones, TV/Netflix, holidays, etc, that's a growing segment of society). Then, when we have "all pay" games, we struggle. The play-offs have the same problem. Why is it that fans of the so-called "the greatest game" are so unwilling to pay to watch the climax of the season amongst the best teams still standing? Is it that they don't want to, is it that the offer isn't good enough, or are we selling to people who can't buy it? Whatever it is, bundling in tickets to the season ticket just masks the real problem - the RL product isn't attracting people outside that core group, and that core group arguably bored and/or tired of being asked to buy a lot of RL that, in many cases, all looks exactly the same. If we're just going to start bundling in the cup, play-offs and anything else into one "all inclusive" subscription, is there really any point in having the cup and play-offs at all, aside from the two showpiece events?

But is that a failure of pricing, or is it a failure of product, positioning or promotion? It's most likely a combination of all four. I understand the argument that if the CC was bundled in to the season ticket, crowds would be stronger, but that certainly doesn't mean that the cup is more appealing or commercially viable. Including the cup into season tickets just seems like we're relying on inertia and apathy to make the cup feel more popular, rather than actually making the product on offer more valuable (whether in real terms or perception terms). That's not really a great strategy for any business, let alone one in the leisure and entertainment industry.

If we're just bundling in the CC cup with season tickets, what's the point (commercially at least) in playing it in the first place? Surely the aim should to be to make the cup something that people want to pay for?

I've got no real issue with the club bringing out products to sell (although there is a question about whether this sort of stuff devalues the brand - and particularly if it's constantly at a discount). But it does seem that the club shop is disproportionately full of this sort of tat, with relatively little on offer for people who are happy to pay for a bit of quality. I still wear the shirt I bought in the Leeds Rhinos Superdry range that the club launched some years back. It wasn't a cheap range by any means, but it was brilliant - quality stuff, nice to wear day to day and it looks good. It would be nice if the club, EPS and Oxen learnt from that and better catered for people who don't want to walk around in something you'd expect to see hanging outside beach-front souvenir shop in Magaluf.

I know for cup games it has sometimes been a factor because I think some clubs (I'm sure Man Utd is/was one) have either a compulsory or opt-in "auto cup" policy that automatically charges you for a cup ticket if the team is drawn at home. I'm sure it's great to sign-up for Champions League semis or a home FA Cup quarter final, but less appealing for those third-round Carabao cup games against Burton and Crewe. Arsenal also got a lot of stick for the attendances they quotes during the height of the 'Wenger out' movement.

On a slightly related note, whilst I didn't go to the game, the timing of my son's swimming lesson meant that I managed to sample the Huddersfield Giants street food festival/fanzone at the weekend and, well, it was a little underwhelming. One burger van that couldn't serve chips because it had run out of electricity, one sweet stall and two blokes pumping pints of Strongbow - was this just a bad day, or is it not all that the promo videos on social media crack it up to be?

Most football clubs announced based on ticket sales, rather than turnstile clicks. It's probably more noticeable for cup games where fans are often compelled to buy tickets even if they don't attend. If anyone genuinely cares, they can put an FOI request into the local authority for actual attendance data (which clubs have to report for H&S reasons).

I don't think that's by accident to be honest. I don't think it's unfair to say that the Leeds strategy seems to be focused on pushing a more premium offering (at least off the pitch), and to that extent, having fewer people paying more is probably a sign of success. I don't think Hetherington would lose sleep over the empty seats in the north stand if the restaurant upstairs was throwing out thousands of chicken dinners every matchday.

I'd agree with most of that, but I'd be a little careful around this bit. I recall at the end of last season there were some unattributed quotes flying around from one club leader bemoaning the loss of another group of "away fans" after Toulouse won the Championship final. I'd like to think the comments made by that individual were an outlier, but I worry that's somewhat wishful thinking.

How many sports routinely play on weeknights, other than football, PDC darts (and some smatterings of cricket)? Football gates tend to hold up fairly well on weeknights depending on the draw of the fixture (and remember that RL fans don't have anywhere near the same travel commitments that football fans do for away fixtures), whilst the PDC sells out 13-15k arenas across the country for the Premier League on Thursday nights. Most other sports generally seem to avoid school nights (Friday excluded). I would argue that this issue has come about because RL has really struggled to diversify its audience from the one it traditionally speaks to. There must be people out there, living in RL land, looking for some form of entertainment on a Thursday or Monday night, so the question is around whether RL is doing enough to attract those people, or offering what those people want. The cinema industry did exactly this with Wednesday nights, turning it from the worst-performing night of the week into the second best night, simply by tapping into a new audience with the right incentives. If RL wants the Sky dollar and if Sky wants us to play on Thursdays in exchange for that dollar, then "Thursday nights" needs to be consigned to the same bin as "they bring no away fans" for why crowds are below expectations.

I think the context that @Jugheadputs on it is also not helpful. There's more to marketing an RL club than just turnstile clicks. It's about growing the reach of the club, building it's audience both locally, nationally and (ideally) beyond that and creating a sense of positivity and optimism around a club that is doing things that are engaging and forward thinking. Doing that doesn't necessarily put an extra few thousand on your gates, but it does help to increase the value of your sponsorships (there's currently a video going viral-ish of a kid driving around the field in a sponsored toy BMW), it helps to improve the likelihood of your games being selected for TV, it helps you to sell merchandise, it helps you monetise your digital content..... The whole "yeah, but how many tickets does it sell?" is important, but it's also a very out-dated mindset. It's just one part of a much bigger puzzle

Using local population isn't really a useful barometer. Populations in cities are much more transient and there is more competition for their leisure dollar. Populations in smaller towns are much more 'connected' with that area and RL is often the only show in town. People move from all around the country to larger cities for study and work. Nobody willingly moves to Castleford.

A client of one of the agencies that I used to work with was a main sponsor of Wigan. When their 12 month contract ended, they had no intention of renewing because they just didn't feel that they were getting enough value from the deal, or the club. They later told me that Wigan practically gave them the second year as they were that desperate after failing to find a replacement.

They aren't the responsibility of the Catalans club. Those are the responsibilities of Super League / the RFL and, in the case of the latter point, the FFRXIII. None of which the Catalans have any control over. It's also worth mentioning that one of SL's main sponsors is a division of Renault. Following that logic, you may as well argue that Michael Carter is personally responsible for the fall in TV income, the pizza sponsorship and the fact that Kallum Watkins wasn't fast enough to evade that ankle tap in 2013.

Agree. I understand why the clubs do it - as a sport RL is reliant on supporter income more than many others and that means that clubs rely on having something new in the retail department every year. But at the same time, if you looked at the 'trophy lift' photos from Leeds' golden era, you wouldn't necessarily know straight away that it was the same club in those photos just from the shirts. It's not even the design that's different - Leeds don't seem to be able to decide what shade of blue and what shade of amber they should be using from year to year. It really is a bit of a mess. Yes, play with the design slightly from year to year, but at the very least keep some degree of consistency - choose a colour swatch and stick to it. Choose a design element (eg, irregular chest band) and work with it. I'd also agree with @Wellsy4HullFC about the quality and I think this is an area where most clubs do really badly. Some of the Oxen stuff in the Leeds shop feels like the sort of stuff you'd see in a 90's market stall with "Super Leeds" written across the front - it's a far cry from the excellent range the club did with Superdry a few years back which, whilst pricey, is still going strong in my wardrobe and is something that I'd actually be happy to wear day-to-day.

You sure about that? The below makes it sound like Tesco's involvement was pretty significant. https://www.sthelensstar.co.uk/news/2201985.mp-warns-morrisons-over-objection-to-stadium-plans/ As does this line: https://www.constructionnews.co.uk/archive/council-backs-25m-stadium-21-05-2008/ It's also quite common for retailers not to own their property. I stand by my point. If the St Helens stadium project was just a couple of years later, when supermarkets were changing their business model and house builders paused new projects, the development may well have been very different.

Most of those companies will have been sold (either in full or in part) and their branding will form part of the assets that the buyer purchased. (British Coal was bought by what became UK Coal, and it's mining operations have since been sold). So the brand is still owned by someone and they still have the intellectual property rights. There are some principles around "use it or lose it" when it comes to some trademarks (see RL's previous use of "rugby world cup" as a good example), which is why companies defend potential infringements very vigorously. Even for defunct brands, they tend to defend them as it gives them the option to use them at a later date (for example, some "heritage" marketing activity, although I'm not sure that would be relevant with a former coal plant).

There are a lot of selective memories going on when it comes to how clubs have come about their new stadiums. Those stadiums that relied on a supportive local authority or one with a telecoms company that it was able to sell-off? Good for them. Those stadiums that relied on big supermarket developments? It would only have taken a delay of a couple of years, getting caught up in the midst of the global financial crisis and the "big four" moving their business strategies away from big "hypermarket" models, for those projects to be in serious jeopardy. People ask "why don't Wakefield/Castleford do what St Helens or Warrington did?" and the truth is, they did - they did exactly what Warrington and St Helens did. They sought developments through the use of Section 106 but, for different reasons, the relevant developments fell through. In the case of Castleford, it was an issue of timing, the global financial crisis and the collapse of "big box" retail developments and, in the case of Wakefield, it was down to the council poorly policing the planning condition and leaving a gaping loophole to get out of the obligation. Had Tesco pulled the plug on their hypermarket model a few years earlier, it's not unfair to suggest that the new grounds at St Helens and Warrington may not have happened when they did.