whatmichaelsays

I'm not sure you can reasonably argue that new owners at 25% of the top tier clubs is "spinning" a narrative around progress and inward investment. Similarly, existing owners at other clubs are putting more investment into their businesses. Hull KR has invested heavily in infrastructure and product. Leeds has invested heavily in infrastructure and its Foundation projects. Your own club, Leigh, has invested heavily in brand and product - that's now six clubs we're talking about making significant investments. These sorts of things happen because there is an environment where those clubs are confident of a return on those investments.

One of the big issues that is related to this is that RL has really not adapted well to younger generations becoming more geographically, socially and economically mobile. RL lives in a part of the country where young people might once have bought a house next to the factory / industry in their home town where they would spend their working lives, but that doesn't happen now. Today, RL lives in a part of the country where young people tend to leave for education or career prospects. I was one of the first of Tony Blair's "50% of kids should go to university" generation and that is what more and more young people did - they moved away, at least from their home town, and often from RL land entirely. Some might come back, but many don't. Until IMG, it was difficult to follow and "buy" RL in any meaningful way if you didn't live close to the heartlands. More than 50% of our fixtures most weeks weren't televised, those that were sat behind a bundled paywall, digital content was sparse and that left you with whatever BBC Radio coverage you could get. Now, what should have happened (because this generational trend was obvious to anyone who was paying attention) was greater investment in things like student rugby, because that is a brilliant way to keep people from RL land engaged with the sport when they move away, and it brings people not from RL land into the sport. Not only that, but if you work on the basis that most of the country's future business decision makers or political leaders are university graduates, it increases the sport's changes of breaking down historical issues of "old school ties" and the challenges we have being taken seriously at those levels. But the sport didn't do enough of it, or didn't do it well enough. And I think that's why your point about Leeds is fair. The student population of Leeds is around 80,000 - that's close to the population of Castleford and Leigh combined. It's a major untapped market. Leeds has a very competitive leisure market and I think it does OK to get the market share that it does, but there are bigger issues around why RL doesn't have as much appeal in the 16-25 sort of demographic that I think it arguably should.

I think this is where Headingley does make some sense. There's a good chance that by the time tickets go on general sale, and even by this afternoon, one of the three venues has gone. That's great both from a message of "this is an event people are fighting to see" but also from a message of "if you want to see it, this is where you need to go". A sold out Headingley helps sell Wembley.

Got our groups for all three. From the sounds of it, South Stand terracing is close to sold out.

There has never been any forced segregation at Leeds and I don't believe for a second that anyone ever thought there was. You're free to buy a ticket in whichever part of the ground you choose, subject to availability.

I've got no issue with try music, although the playing of Tom Hark should be an automatic deduction of 10 IMG points.

Depending on the club you support, football has a "use it or lose it" element that encourages fans to keep buying / attending as demand often outweighs supply for tickets. A Leeds fan wanting a ticket for their trip to Sunderland this season needed to have attended 12 away games in the previous season to have a chance of getting a ticket. On the other hand, I'll have no problem paying cash to the Leeds end at Salford next Thursday.

The "least bad" option here would be to use what is left of Salford's central funding share to run a skeleton side until the end of the season, and provide cap and quota dispensations for current Salford players so that the club has a fighting chance of raising some capital / cutting costs through player sales. Realistically, all of this should have been sorted months ago, but that's spilt milk now. The competition and RLC are in too deep with the competition and events such as Magic to lose Salford at this stage.

They will, but I don't know to what extent. For what it's worth, a group sale is classed as 10+ tickets per game.

Liverpool

Headingley

For those wondering about ticket prices, I've been forwarded this with Group ticket prices... Wembley:

I think it's the other way around. There will be genuine FOMO for the Headingley game - the idea that a long-suffering RL fan might be locked out of the first opportunity in a generation to win a series against the Aussies? That is going to shift tickets before any others. Once Headingley is sold out, it will push fans who did miss out to the other two games. For all the consternation about Headingley as a venue, it has a lot of plus points and this is one of them.

You missed the "player from my club didn't make the squad so I'm not watching" stage of anger. Let's hope, for the sake of this forum, Tom Johnstone makes the squad this time.

Pre-sale is 2 April. That's one week today. This sort of approach is common for high-demand events.

I'm not advocating for the removal of the salary cap (although I believe it needs reforming and linking to inflation). I'm simply arguing that it's a bad-faith argument from McMannus.

Of course I do, but I do find it something of a bad faith argument. "If we're allowed to do this, we'll be forced to do it" absolves the club ownerships of agency and responsibility for their actions. But I also think that the focus on the salary cap is something of a diversion tactic - the salary cap is perhaps the one thing about running an RL club that has got cheaper over time, yet we seem to spend a lot of time talking about this as if it is the problem rather than, for example, the lack of commercial growth at the clubs. That's on McMannus and he knows it.

I'm not really sure I follow his point about the salary cap. Is he basically saying that the salary cap is needed to save these people, (who we're told and intelligent, classy, business and financially-savvy people) from themselves? The salary cap has been cut in real-terms by around £1.2m in the last 20 years - player earnings are not the problem and they're the ones who are paying the price for the poor commercial performance of the clubs. Also, he is responsible for the business model at St Helens. If the business model is wrong, it's in his gift to correct it - either by growing revenues or cutting costs. If the issue here is that the clubs haven't adapted to the new realities of the broadcast market, I'm not sure why comes across as someone who doesn't think that's his mess to clean up.

This all does seem rather odd. I don't personally believe that investment from the NRL is likely on the sort of scales people seem to be talking about but let's assume it is; is this essentially a plan to leave Wood "holding the baby" whilst the top clubs go running off with the younger, hotter Australian model?

I'll be honest, I didn't take the original comment as being particularly envious. I think it is often the case that the stories of many "self-made men/women" is selectively curated. That's not to say that those stories don't have intelligence, hard work, determination and dedication behind the success, but that the stories often omit the role in which some sort of "leg up" or safety net (or both) often underwrites those things. I think we all are guilty of under-playing or under-appreciating the role that luck has in where we are in our lives - whether that is through birth, upbringing, health, relationships or someone's willingness to take a chance on us. I'm sure that's also true of the people who have found themselves in the position where they can afford to run an RL club. It's not envious to point that out and say "that's why lots of people can't just "entrepreneur" their way to success" - it's simply an acknowledgement of how society works. I'm not envious that Jeff Bezos was fortunate enough to have parents that could invest $250,000 in his website idea - I just think that should be a bigger part of the "started it all in his garage" story.

I also think this Leeds team needed a lot of "tough love" that Arthur has brought to the club. You saw it in the documentary where the players were clearly tired of Rohan's light-touch, "focus on the positives" approach - the sight of Rhyse Martin with an obvious "I want to strangle you" look when being told to take the positives from that defeat at Hull said a lot about what that team needed.

I'm not saying it couldn't have been open to interpretation (indeed, I'm saying it's fine to infer things). What I'm disagreeing with your assertion that I implied what you suggest. If you want to keep digging on that, that's on you, but there is a very important difference that I think most posters in here can see. And I'll leave it there.

Which didn't imply any suggestion of racism. You're embarrassing yourself.

It's taking some serious mental gymnastics to say that I implied anything of the sort. The incidents were similar in that they involved two sportsmen being reprimand for historical tweets. Had Ollie Robinson's comments been sexist, homophobic, ableist, ageist or otherwise politically questionable, the comparison would still apply. It's fine to have inferred something from my comment, but it in no way means that I implied it.

This will shed some light.... Huddersfield: John Smith's Stadium owners at risk of administration - BBC News The council has been very keen to get shot of its equity in the JSS before these bills landed on the doormat. I don't blame the Giants for wanting to do the same.