Hello

Selective mentioning that not so long ago the national RU team was getting around ten times the size crowds as the national football team? I'd say that is a pretty relevant point. Also, up until ten tears ago the pubs across Wales would be much fuller for RU internationals than for club or international football matches. Since Euro 16 there has been a lot more interest in international football than there was previously. I went to school in Wales and spent most of my youth there, surrounded by the culture of the sport in pubs etc so I think that I'm a lot better qualified to talk about this than most on here to be fair.

Go back not many years and the national Wales football team were struggling to get ten thousand crowds, where the RU team were selling out the millennium stadium 80 thousand or so every game. My son goes to nearly every Wales football game, as does a friend of mine, and they can remember looking at near empty stands. There has been a big decline in the last thirty years in crowds watching RU at club level from a time when they were much higher.

Surely that remains to be seen

Could be interesting to see the response to "hookers needed".......

Damn, my sarcasm detector was having an off day

Sorry Blues Ox, but that's not exciting to anyone outside of that bubble. Exciting would be significant investment from an ambitious investor/investors which was put into a club in a location that stirred media interest both nationally and globally. But best wishes to Huddersfield, I genuinely hope that they can somehow increase local interest.

Scoreline sits well with the narrative of the sport shrinking rather than growing to be fair.....

Hello to all. Apologies if this has been posted but I haven't seen it. The Hurricanes website describes their crowd against Crusaders as being decent. Can anybody please tell me the attendance, I can't find it.

I think that there may have been a late payment after COVID kicked in prior to them pulling the plug. I do know that they were paying the maximum salary cap and requested to extend the cap showing that they wanted to spend even more money. Of course, non payment of wages is a real bad one though

Which was as we all know a consequence of the unforeseeable COVID and it's subsequent effect on revenue streams. Toronto, naturally, hadn't taken into this into account

I'm going to stick my neck out and say Crusaders to remain unbeaten.

How do you think that football went from just being played on England to dominating the world? How do you think that union amongst other sports is spreading so much around the world? The excuses for the failure to spread RL are hard to take

Great post, thank you.

What are the TV viewing figures like this season? Wondering how successful IMG is so far in spreading interest in the sport

Further indication that the general plan towards reducing the footprint of RL in the northern hemisphere to the area of a postage stamp is working well

We can look for all the in-depth excuses that we like, and make comparisons with "lucky" other sports. At the end of the day, though, RL seems to blow all opportunities to further itself - except for Austrlia and maybe NZ

Dave, you're a poster who I regard well and I'm sure that you understand my point. I particularly agree with your final paragraph, and that kind of completes the circle for me, aim low and you will reap low.

Sponsorship is almost universally directly proportional to the number of people who see it, that is the answer. Businesses are only willing to pay for the relative exposure, whether that is the number of people in the stadium or the number of people viewing on screens

Because of Covid depriving them of the significant income streams they were going to make from home games in SL with crowds above the average for the league, and because of a vote by other teams with vested interests in kicking them out. Your analysis is ridiculous and bitter

Good question. I am not interested in banging on about Union (which I watch sometimes) on this board. The problem is that this particular article invites a response, and compares the internation game of RL and RU. People who have read my posts know that I am pro expansion domestically and internationally, and it is a source of disappointment to me that RL fails to spread itself effectively (with a couple of exceptions). To claim that the international game is catching up with RU, though, invites ridicule, and I am just one of a few who are trying to point that out. On these boards we should be focussing on what RL can do to further itself.

Lol you say I can´t name playyers from these teams, but you haven´t even asked me to. You seem to have a lot of anger that is manifesting itself in nonsense posts. In this article you will find several world cup players from the current Argentinian team alone (for the record I´ve watched them play a number of times and am familiar with many of the names);- https://www.planetrugby.com/news/argentina-player-ratings-pablo-materas-all-time-great-shift-inspires-los-pumas-to-a-famous-victory-over-the-all-blacks

With this post you further undermine any credibility that you have in this discussion. Argentina second tier lol - they beat the All Blacks this year, play in front of large home crowds, and have reached three world cup semi finals including the last one. Wales second tier and no world class players? They are currently on a downer but still play to over seventy thousand and have professional clubs with home grown players and a history of winning the six nations. I could go on but these two cases alone blow your argument out of the water. (PNG second tier - wrong code)

Yes indeed, and now others coming through like Japan and Georgia who have both had home international crowds over 50,000, and countries like Portugal and Uruguay where there has been significant improvement

And I would see crowds touching on 10,000 in the second tier. But then when an unforseen global pandemic kicks in we are unable, due to the scheduling of fixtures, to reap the financial benefits of even a single home game in superleague before getting voted out.......................

Surely this analysis does not recognise the fact that a Championship club on somewhat less than 5,000 average crowd would obviously gain a significant percentage increase in terms of crowds from a) the interest of their fans of being in SL as opposed to the championship and b) the larger on average away following. This for me is one of the reasons that IMG are creating a closed shop with subsequent negative impact on the sport in general. Throw into the mix that some SL clubs struggle to get 5000 despite the advantage of being in SL and this argument makes no sense sorry.