Hello

Hi Mojo, hope you are good. Just checking on Wikipedia for All Blacks games last year, found that the attendances for their three games against Ireland in 2022 were 48,195, 30,748 and 38,000. I don't question your knowledge and so I'm guessing that those attendances are down on figures they might have expected in the past? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ireland_rugby_union_tour_of_New_Zealand

Sorry mate but that's a pipe dream if ever I heard one. The All blacks sell big crowds for several games every year, and I was shocked at how low the attendances were in New Zealand for their home fixtures last world cup that was down under, despite the fact that they rarely play internationals. Shocked, and also very dissapointed, just a handful of thousands of fans. I hope that you are right that it is on the up, though. I hope that if they are the main host next time then we can ALL get behind them for the love of the game to help them achieve a realistic best that they can, and give the tournament respectability.

If it was a crowd of 1000 then fair play, that's genuine progress in a nation that's basically new to the sport. More, more, more of this needed. Don't listen to those voices (we all know who they are) who say that expansion can never work and actively want to hold the sport back to keep their own small club as a big fish in a small pond. Well done to Greece and Serbia for making this happen, respect

Hey Eddie, can I ask the dreaded attendance question? Genuinely curious as to how much interest you might be getting.

Another little nail in the coffin of the sport - kerching!

Once again, the detractors of the Wolfpack who say it was never going to work fail to acknowledge:- a) they brought much more attention to the sport on BBC and other media sources, attention that faltered sharply when they were "voted" out and therefore WERE having a positive impact for all concerned. b) they were verging on 5 figure crowds even in the second tier, and their fans were enthusiastic and passionate and a great look for the game and were helping to shed the stuck in the past image that so clearly holds the game back. There would have very likely been considerable future increases in crowds if they had been allowed to take part in SL and play some home fixtures, with an improved stadium on the horizon with success. c) as ever, the knockers conveniently ignore the massive world crisis that was covid, and how it's crippling effect on any income streams strangled this extremely promising club.

Where is the ambition, where are the great ideas for promoting and expanding the game? In a week when the US union competition broke it's attendance record by getting over 11,000 for an opening round fixture, I look at the composition of teams in SL, I read the general negative attitudes towards any attempts at expansion, I see the long-awaited new ideas from IMG leaving me feeling "what was all the excitement and optimism about" and I try and think of another sport that gets it so badly wrong. If anyone can think of one, please do say.

Ok

Ok

So which side of centre do you favour out of interest?

Just tuned in to the forum and am happy to find that peace and harmony are breaking out left right and centre

I clicked on the link to the scores provided by langpark and i asked it to translate to English. It told me that, in the fourth game down, a team called Living Room were beaten away from home. Fair play though, they scored a few points, not bad for a room. Doesn't say much about the standard of the opposition though!

Yep, the efforts to grow it have been shockingly bad.

I am pro-expansion and think that having Toulouse going back up and staying up would be great for the sport in general in the medium term, so I will be hoping that they get promoted. However, I respect decent posters like yourself and think that Featherstone is a great club, and absolutely you should be trying to get into SL. It would be great for the sport to have more heartlands clubs at Championship level that bring in your level of support to the game in general and, particularly if SL expands to 14 clubs (which it should) SL could do a lot worse than having Fev as a member.

The NFL is watched by many millions of people outside of the states and London sells out Tottenham's stadium easily when they play a game there, usually more than once a season so I thinking if RL had the international popularity of the NFL then the IRL would be laughing all the way to the bank. I agree with you to an extent that at times people expect the RFL to be miracle workers and blame them unfairly in some instances, but I think that nearly everyone on this forum is in agreement that they could do a damn sight better at supporting the existing game and promoting it to new areas, starting with not forcing Toulouse to pay travel if they get back to SL. The short term thinking by some is how they might lose part of their team budget in travelling whilst not seeing the bigger long-term benefits of having big name places in the sport to make it more attractive to potential new supporters and not be seen as "tin-pot" as so many say.

With due respect. At the time that football was invented in England, nowhere else had ever heard of it let alone played it, so there would be zero demand for football in Brazil, Argentina, Italy, France, Germany etc etc etc. Did that stop them getting into it when they found out about it? By your logic, football would have stayed being played in the place that it was first played if everyone had said "let's not bother telling anyone else about this game that we enjoy because they aren't demanding to know about it". Toronto was a good example of how League can expand. Their crowds were growing season on season in a City with very little league history, and if they had not been voted out by the other teams then who's to say how big there crowds could have got in a different stadium playing in Super League? Who's to say how many kids might have wanted to emulate their heroes and start having games amongst themselves? Who's to say how many other towns and Cities in Canada might have been influenced by Toronto and got into League themselves? Every sport starts from a position of zero demand in new places until those places find out about it. If you don't bother trying to bring the game to them then they won't find out about it. That is why most sports in the leauge continue to expand and League is on a downward spiral, I fear.

They managed about 8 or 9 thousand for their play off final against Fev in the championship. The opportunity to build upon this for the greater good of the sport was, as usual, missed. You can see as plain as day just from posts on these boards alone that many of the fans (not all by a long shot) are very happy that the sport is not expanding because they are desperate to keep their own small town club fighting to be king of nothing. Outside of their club, however, the world keeps spinning and increasingly giving less of a flip about league.

This thread summarises nicely everything that fans from any of the many sports that have/continue to succesfully spread themselves around the globe (football, golf, cricket, basketball, rugby union etc) need to read to understand why rugby league is not only failing to expand, but actually disappearing.

If they want to try and tap into and develop the sport in a city of 9 million people they you might hope yes.

Looking at their facebook and twitter, Valencia Hurricanes were posting quite a lot in early 2021. Then it came to a stop. The Spanish Rugby league posted just a couple of weeks ago saying that there will be a rugby league masters tournament in Valencia this spring, so there is still some kind of activity. I don't know why the previous activity fizzled out, but there has to be hope that things can get moving again and maybe build towards something more at some point. Covid can't have helped at the time, surely.

Great work, "can do" people are what all sports need, not the other types. Best of luck

For "reckon" read "hope" in your case. Don't spread the game to other countries, especially not big cities, keep the game tiny, and then certain teams from small places can be a big fish in a little puddle, ideal.

Is this a dying sport that we see before us

Many on here will be glad of this as an "I told you expansion doesn't work" message. For sure, West Wales were a mess in many ways but this example will support that large group of RL fans who will gleefully say "I told you so, we should never try and set up a new team outside of our small hearlands area". Meanwhile, Morocco just got to the semi finals of the football world cup (do I need to tell you the attendances and viewing figures of football across the globe) whilst Japan got to the quarter finals of the last union world cup, watched by a cumulative figure of 425 million Japanese viewers for that world cup, and they are basically what people still think of as an expansion nation. Expansion can work really well for any good sport. The operative word hers is "can" because it's never going to happen in RL because so many of the fans and people in power don't want it to expand. What they don't seem to see is that if you don't expand, then the VERY BEST you can hope for is to stand still, but that's never going to happen and in a best case scenario your sport will slowly but surely disappear. Worst case scenario, decline rapidly.

It has to be said that Dezza is cre And the other problem that they have is the fact that barely anyone outside of Rugby League has ever heard of Leigh.