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League Restructure Thread (Merged Threads)


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2 hours ago, Moove said:

Where do we get these mythical multi-millionaire newcomers from?

 Top RL at the moment is a closed shop run largely by fairly old but rich men. It has no attraction for newcomers as it currently stands. Ask Koukash or Argyle. Most of the owners will be dead within 10 years - what then ?

Hull K R can't find a new owner because the present system is simply not attractive enough . And yet they are a well managed progressive outfit compared to some of their SL compatriots.

Who knows what the marketplace  could yield. To test it we need a fundamentally different approach - stand still  and we will be the equivalent of ' Waiting for Godot '

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6 hours ago, NW10LDN said:

Well David Hughes had spent a lot of money on the Broncos but they still have an attendance of around 500. 10,000 people turned up to their first game as Fulham. London Irish moved back to London and are already reaching an average of 3000.

I do think we need close off the SL for a few years and let's clubs apply to join when they are ready. Pro/Rel offers no stability for Leigh or Toulouse.

Still? What do you mean still? The club was averaging over 4,000 when Mr Hughes took over. He's driven it down to less than 400.

"Just as we had been Cathars, we were treizistes, men apart."

Jean Roque, Calendrier-revue du Racing-Club Albigeois, 1958-1959

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6 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but how do you achieve that in practice?

In the limited number of areas it is played in, RL competes with RU, Cricket, Soccer and all the other sports for athletes. Only a limited number of those athletes take up RL and naturally only a handful of them will ever be good enough for the elite. Simple evolutionary theory suggests the bigger your talent pool the better quality you end up with?

The small English RL player pool has punched above its weight for years. However, due to our extremely narrow source of talent, declining player numbers (due to a whole myriad of reasons) acutely affect our sport. So how do you increase that talent pool?

You can either keep mining the same ever thinning seam whilst the walls are caving in, hoping it will eventually get better, or you can spread your search.

We don't just need more kids playing RL we need more kids in more areas playing RL. And this gets to the crux of how we spend the little money we have. The two areas central resources should be prioritised for are the very top, where exposure, profile and popularity is driven from; and the very bottom junior grassroots which sustains the whole game. The middle, the part of the game with neither the profile of the top or the value to player production as the bottom, is where any pinch has to be felt before the other two.

The talent pool is increasing not as you say contracting.

Its the players who continue to play for fun as adults thats contracting.

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10 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

I'm saying that some money should have been spent to build them a stadium??

Quoting part of a post is a great way to make a point against something not being said btw, well done.

How much is ' some ' Tommy ?

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6 minutes ago, GUBRATS said:

How much is ' some ' Tommy ?

About the same as they were pumping into the championship each season for... what?

£40 million a season has served us fantastically we're in such a great position now...

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1 minute ago, Tommygilf said:

Significant 7 figure investment at least.

 

So what % of their central funding would you suggest ? , Bearing in mind the need to spend to maintain the stadiums from a H and S point of view , and of course the potential to lose your central funding every year ? , So using central funding to plan for a 10 stadium build isn't really viable , outside money as the likes of Leigh and indeed Leeds have managed to source is the only way 

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3 minutes ago, Tommygilf said:

About the same as they were pumping into the championship each season for... what?

£40 million a season has served us fantastically we're in such a great position now...

Sorry , I obviously thought you meant individual clubs money , not the pre distribution money , so you mean instead of ' giving ' the lower tier clubs cash , we should have built individual clubs a stadium , this despite other clubs finding funding individually ? 

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5 minutes ago, GUBRATS said:

Sorry , I obviously thought you meant individual clubs money , not the pre distribution money , so you mean instead of ' giving ' the lower tier clubs cash , we should have built individual clubs a stadium , this despite other clubs finding funding individually ? 

The luck of having a benevolent council shouldn't be the determining factor in an RL club's success. That epitomises the total lack of strategy that plagued RL from day dot. 

We were getting £40 million a season. For the first time ever the governing body had cash to support clubs strategically with long term goals. For Wakefield that might be helping them buy back the land the stadium is built on - so that any council support could go to actually building something. Likewise support for clubs like Oldham, Sheffield, Swinton could have left the game in South Yorkshire, East Lancashire and Manchester in a far stronger position than currently.

Instead we decided that trebling League 1s central funding and creating a championship of two massively imbalanced funding blocks in a vain attempt to impersonate Unions full time second tier (a failure btw) was an excellent way to invest in the games future!

Instead the sports assets from this period of unprecedented, and unlikely to be repeated, investment amount to a hole in Bradford that the Bulls said was unworkable for them and left for a season.

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wonderful thing hindsight, from day 1 part of the SKY TV money should have been put to one side for the development of facilities.

Clubs whose grounds weren't up to scratch should gave been able to apply for match funding or even very low interest loans from the the RFL umbrella, who could have linked up to a major bank to modernise stadiums and in the case of the Swinton's and Oldham's of this world, work in tandem with the local authorities to find these clubs a permanent home.

Unfortunately that ship has now sailed and we are left with the mess of years of mismanagement and falling standards both on and off the pitch.

I can't see where any billionaire will be willing to stick £100 million on the table as a starting point to get Martyn Sadler's proposal off the ground, plus it's too 'american' a concept for our game.

Before the game rushes into yet another restructure, the RFL need to find out what people's perception of the game is, and that can only be done by a forensic review from the top to the bottom of the game. 

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14 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

Instead, that money has been ###### up the wall to see a handful of teams get slightly bigger crowds whilst the rest of the game has shrunken massively

And it always get blamed on other clubs rather than the (big) rich ones or who should be the pace setters, these clubs are the leaders in our game it is those who set the height of the bar, but you know what it is not the fault of other clubs that they can no longer jump as high as they once could.

There have been a few of us on these pages who for a few season's now have expressed an opinion that the sport is losing it's sparkle, the number of boring televised games has been increasing season on season, that is not the fault of the teams that do not get television exposure, it is down to those who are aired around 10 times a season, the quality of players is reducing as time passes, the rules are stifling the sport, the standard of the on field (and off field) officials is not as good as in previous seasons, and the gamesmanship that is so prevalent is disgusting, I used to have great pride in telling football fans how honest our game is as opposed to the mass cheating that goes on in the 11 a side game, sadly those days are well and truly behind us.

I for one am not at least bit surprised that if true Sky are saying improve or lose any future contracts, and that statement is not only directed at the governing body it is also at those who set the standards, those who's exposure is most prominent.

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13 hours ago, Toby Chopra said:

Genuine question: how many of those full timers are dual reg/loan and how many are primarily contracted to the 'hybrid' club? What do the latter group do when their part time team mates are at work? 

I'd guess that most do work for the foundation, but some of the higher earners will just play/train.

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5 minutes ago, Harry Stottle said:

I for one am not at least bit surprised that if true Sky are saying improve or lose any future contracts.....

Something has been said but AFAIK it's around some of the matches that were televised during this contract not being up to scratch. I can't see SKY criticising this last two years too much as COVID has been a great spoiler, before that maybe we were losing our way.

Looking back, the best TV with the most fans interest revolved around the big clubs games including loop fixtures in which crowds held up very well, and I assume TV interest for these was also high as well.  People on here may have enjoyed such as  London.v.Salford as purists/for a change (like I do)  but I feel this was the area where SKY are not happy.

That two clubs are planned to be cut signals that SKY are happy with loop games, but unhappy with sub-standard teams. It therefore seems to me that is that and it's business as usual. The bottom line is that people are always saying it's boring when clubs play each other so many times, which is a personal view, however the overall view of the TV audience and audiences at grounds beg to differ and they pay the money, with the latter providing the atmosphere.

It's a shame some posters were rude to Mr. Sadler he keeps a great tradition and a great read alive in the "Rugby Leaguer", he's a fan and is perfectly allowed to play "League structures" which we have all done done years.

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I'm not seeing how the Sadler plan addresses two issues.

1.  It's nice that a sixth placed team has the incentive to earn an extra £240,000 in funding but it's not clear how they could hope to achieve that on funding of £80,000.

2.  At a time when Sky are whinging that the games aren't as good as they used to be, is this the time to be introducing a huge number of lop-sided games into the fixture list ? I watched West Wales v Widnes.  But not for long.

"We'll sell you a seat .... but you'll only need the edge of it!"

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12 hours ago, Moove said:

Where do we get these mythical multi-millionaire newcomers from?

Whenever someone comes up with a different way forward we get the same response.

I assume that you have a house and a car … how did you get those.  Did you just sit on your ar$e and moan that no one is going to give you the money or did you find a way to make money?  It’s the same process that a club or a sport has to go through.

There are people out there that want to invest in sport.  No doubt there will be multi-millionaires - and people that have connections with big hitters - that were born in and maybe followed their local RL team.  These people will have made their money in a competitive environment where there are few restrictions as to how they grew their business.  But RL has a massive drawback and that is the ridiculously low salary cap which I believe is the biggest barrier to attracting big investment.  Try explaining to a multi millionaire that you want their investment BUT no matter how much they want to invest the club can only spend the same amount on players as a basket case club down the road.  Total lunacy!

Scrap the SC and make it a percentage of turnover then clubs have a better chance of finding these ‘mythical’ multi-millionaires.

Or do you have a better way forward?

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2 minutes ago, Adelaide Tiger said:

 But RL has a massive drawback and that is the ridiculously low salary cap which I believe is the biggest barrier to attracting big investment.  Try explaining to a multi millionaire that you want their investment BUT no matter how much they want to invest the club can only spend the same amount on players as a basket case club down the road.  Total lunacy!

Scrap the SC and make it a percentage of turnover then clubs have a better chance of finding these ‘mythical’ multi-millionaires.

Or do you have a better way forward?

Nice - but it doesn't really solve Sky's issue with there being too many one-sided games.  It just makes it worse,

"We'll sell you a seat .... but you'll only need the edge of it!"

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2 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

The luck of having a benevolent council shouldn't be the determining factor in an RL club's success. That epitomises the total lack of strategy that plagued RL from day dot. 

We were getting £40 million a season. For the first time ever the governing body had cash to support clubs strategically with long term goals. For Wakefield that might be helping them buy back the land the stadium is built on - so that any council support could go to actually building something. Likewise support for clubs like Oldham, Sheffield, Swinton could have left the game in South Yorkshire, East Lancashire and Manchester in a far stronger position than currently.

Instead we decided that trebling League 1s central funding and creating a championship of two massively imbalanced funding blocks in a vain attempt to impersonate Unions full time second tier (a failure btw) was an excellent way to invest in the games future!

Instead the sports assets from this period of unprecedented, and unlikely to be repeated, investment amount to a hole in Bradford that the Bulls said was unworkable for them and left for a season.

I completely agree about strategy and the support of clubs and areas. Whether it is through their fault of their own or not I hate to see clubs like Oldham and Swinton being nomads and once proud RL areas fade. RL is much weaker for it.

The previous TV deal saw every SL club get an extra £500,000 and Championship and League 1 clubs get unprecedented levels of funding. Would SL clubs have really missed say £100k of this? It really wouldn't have been unfeasible for everyone to have took a little less and been putting away £2 million a year and they would all have still been better off than the previous TV deal. With all the usual grants available it really wouldn't have been unfeasible to create strategic hubs and bolster the game where it is fading.

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45 minutes ago, Adelaide Tiger said:

Whenever someone comes up with a different way forward we get the same response.

I assume that you have a house and a car … how did you get those.  Did you just sit on your ar$e and moan that no one is going to give you the money or did you find a way to make money?  It’s the same process that a club or a sport has to go through.

There are people out there that want to invest in sport.  No doubt there will be multi-millionaires - and people that have connections with big hitters - that were born in and maybe followed their local RL team.  These people will have made their money in a competitive environment where there are few restrictions as to how they grew their business.  But RL has a massive drawback and that is the ridiculously low salary cap which I believe is the biggest barrier to attracting big investment.  Try explaining to a multi millionaire that you want their investment BUT no matter how much they want to invest the club can only spend the same amount on players as a basket case club down the road.  Total lunacy!

Scrap the SC and make it a percentage of turnover then clubs have a better chance of finding these ‘mythical’ multi-millionaires.

Or do you have a better way forward?

I found a way to make money to buy the house and car. That isn't what was suggested by the poster I replied to though so you've got a bit over excited about not a lot.

I'm all for new ideas but just because it's a new idea doesn't automatically make it right.

The idea (which I replied to) that we all of a sudden centralise all clubs, franchise them out for a seven figure fee, and all of a sudden the millionaires who are queueing at out door to get involved in RL are suddenly going to buy a franchise doesn't seem to be (a) based on anything other than a wing and a prayer, (b) doing anything to improve the value of the product we're selling, or (c) doing anything to increase participation levels which is one of the major problems the sport faces.

The rest of your post I've no idea why that's aimed at me as I never mentioned anything about salary cap. I'm all for reworking that and have said so many times in the past.

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3 hours ago, Tommygilf said:

The luck of having a benevolent council shouldn't be the determining factor in an RL club's success. That epitomises the total lack of strategy that plagued RL from day dot. 

I am sure you will be aware Tommy that LSV didn’t cost the council a penny. Leases and land were traded for development of a college, a clubhouse and pitches, a stadium LSV and a state of the art facility for Leigh harriers - which helped to produce Keely Hodgkinson who won silver in the 800m earlier this week in Japan. The developer got to build a hotel a supermarket and a pub, plus new houses

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37 minutes ago, Griff said:

Nice - but it doesn't really solve Sky's issue with there being too many one-sided games.  It just makes it worse,

Nice … but your response doesn’t really solve SKY’s issues either as it appears that you are advocating to retain what we already have tried which has failed to deliver increased income and investment.

We have to accept that creating an artificial level playing field has failed … that is why we have 31 pages on here … and in the idea I put forward clubs irrespective of size will still get their share of the SKY money.

What I am proposing is that the sport needs an incentive to attract investors.  If we had scrapped the SC a few years ago then possibly Salford with Koucash’s investment may be the leading club in SL.  And maybe, just maybe that might have attracted other investors.  And who knows a club currently struggling might attract a investor.

Finally, what is wrong with having some clubs that are bigger than others.  I have supported Cas all my life but I am totally frustrated that because the game has failed to grow we have to have a SC than rewards smaller or less well run clubs.

Or do you have a cunning plan that you would like to share?

 

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3 minutes ago, Moove said:

I found a way to make money to buy the house and car. That isn't what was suggested by the poster I replied to though so you've got a bit over excited about not a lot.

I'm all for new ideas but just because it's a new idea doesn't automatically make it right.

The idea (which I replied to) that we all of a sudden centralise all clubs, franchise them out for a seven figure fee, and all of a sudden the millionaires who are queueing at out door to get involved in RL are suddenly going to buy a franchise doesn't seem to be (a) based on anything other than a wing and a prayer, (b) doing anything to improve the value of the product we're selling, or (c) doing anything to increase participation levels which is one of the major problems the sport faces.

The rest of your post I've no idea why that's aimed at me as I never mentioned anything about salary cap. I'm all for reworking that and have said so many times in the past.

Please accept my apologies as I totally misunderstood your quote.

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18 hours ago, Hela Wigmen said:

That would make some more sense than Sadler’s established professional sides in the same conference as clubs who would get beat by NCL sides. 

We already have Major leagues and Minor leagues.

In our case each pro/semi pro team has its own minor league via our local amateur league system.

The only reason it is being brought up on here now is by the SL teams followers who dont want to give an equal share of central funding [greed]

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