The IMG scoring system - things you may, or may not have realised

[The Phantom Horseman]

Reading across social media and forum land, it seems clear that there are lots of RL fans who still haven’t really got much of a grasp of what teams will and won’t score points for in the IMG scoring system that will replace promotion and relegation from next year. There are even one or two fans who haven’t realised that traditional P & R ends after this year, but they’re probably beyond help.

Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been much insight from the world of RL journalism (with a couple of honourable exceptions), so here’s my take on what I think some (not all) people may have missed in terms of the impact of the new scoring system. Not claiming to be an expert here so this is just my own opinion but these are the things that have struck me from reading the handbook.

A reminder that the Grading Handbook can be found here
https://www.rugby-league.com/uploads/docs/Grading Handbook (Final Version).pdf

On-field performance won’t matter as much as many people think:
We know that teams are ranked from 1-36 based on league positions (where they finish after the play-offs), and that these numbers are compiled over three seasons.

We also know that these positions are divided by 0.1111 point ranges between each finishing position, so for instance the team ranked 7^th will earn 3.3333 performance points and the team ranked 8^th will receive 3.2222 points.

You might think this seems a fairly narrow margin, and you’d be right. But it might be even tighter than that. For instance, if one team finishes 14^th in the Championship each of the three years (ie losing Grand Finalist each year), and another team 17th in each of the 3 years, the team that finished 14^th might still only have 0.1111 more points than the team finishing 17^th. That’s possible if, say, the teams finishing 15^th and 16th have one good year (eg a year in SL) that sends their average up above the team finishing 14^th.

Given all the different criteria that can earn much more significant chunks of points, on-field performance is going to be relatively insignificant when separating teams that are likely to be challenging to be one of the 12 SL teams.

It will be a massive advantage to have been in Super League at some point in the last 3 seasons:
When IMG first announced the criteria for their points scoring system, some of us thought they must have forgotten to include an important component – how the various figures would be weighted depending on what division a team had been.

It gradually became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten that component – they simply were not taking it into account at all.

So if a team that has been in SL for the last 3 years has an average home league attendance of 3,010 and a team that has been in the Championship has an average attendance of 2,990, the former will gain 2 IMG points and the latter only 1.5.

This makes little sense, surely – both the attractiveness of the opposition, and the away following, means that you are inherently going to attract far bigger crowds when hosting the likes of Wigan, St Helens and Leeds than when facing, say, Whitehaven, Sheffield and London. A case in point is Leigh, who are averaging around crowds of around 7,000 this year having struggled to reach 3,000 against some of the less attractive Championship opponents last year.

Additionally, there are other IMG point-related benefits from being in Super League. The massively larger central funding leaves more financial possibilities for spending on infrastructure etc, and being in SL is also likely to provide a boost in areas such as merchandise sales, TV viewership and social media following. And of course, finishing bottom of SL in three consecutive years will still score more points in the Performance aspect than finishing top of the Championship three years running.

It doesn’t really matter what your stadium is like…

From a spectator’s point of view, anyway. All the IMG points-scoring system is concerned about is whether or not a stadium ticks nine very specific boxes, almost all of which are concerned with the needs of broadcasters and sponsors. It’s all about things like…whether there’s at least 50m x 50m space for broadcasting trucks, whether you can get at least 50 people in the press box, whether the directors’ box has at least 40 seats and is positioned near the halfway line, whether the corporate lounge has at least 200 capacity etc…it’s nothing at all to do with the spectator experience.

Having a shiny new stadium with great fan facilities won’t score you any points, nor will you lose any if you haven’t improved it a jot in the last 50 years. Think of the worst stadia in RL…they won’t lose any IMG points. There is the theoretical possibility that you could lose points for failing minimum standards tests, but there have been minimum standards throughout the SL era yet they never seem to be enforced.

There are no IMG points for having a Women’s team, an Academy team, an LDRL or wheelchair team

You do have to have a Women’s team to be classed as Grade A, and you have to have an RFL-approved Talent & Performance Pathway. But otherwise, zilch.

The seemingly random thresholds for the Catchment Area scoring boundaries look extremely suspicious

The way that points are awarded for the Catchment Area aspect of the IMG system is that you take the population of the Local Authority District where each stadium is situated, and then divide it by the number of tier 1 and 2 clubs.

So for example Bradford and Keighley are in an area with a population of 546,400, which divided by two leaves a Catchment Area figure of 273,200.

Featherstone, Castleford and Wakefield, all in the Wakefield district, have a total population of 353,100, which divided by three gives a Catchment Area figure of 117,767.

IMG have decided to award three tiers of points in this area, so teams will either score 1.5 points, 1 points and 0.5 points.

So where have IMG set their thresholds? A sensible suggestion might have been, say, at 300,000+ for 1.5 points, 150,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for less than 150,000.

Or maybe 200,00+ for 1.5 points, 100,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for under 100,000.

But no, they have come up with the seemingly arbitrary figures of 260,000 for 1.5 points, and 130,000 for 1.0 points. There is no explanation on their Grading Handbook as to how they arrived at these thresholds.

That seemingly artificial threshold is very convenient for the two Bradford-area teams and very inconvenient for the three Wakefield-area teams. It’s almost as if the thresholds have been deliberately chosen to ensure maximum points for the former, and minimum points for the latter.

 

 

There are other aspects of the scoring system that are questionable too, but these are some of the main ones that struck me.

This isn’t intended as an anti-IMG crusade, I hope it will work and overall we have to give it a chance and support it. But when the first set of “illustrative gradings” are announced at the end of this season, my prediction is that there will be bemusement, and maybe uproar, at how some clubs are scoring higher than others, because I just don’t think the scoring system is well understood by fans yet.

 

[TheReaper]

What's "questionable" about realizing that broadcast facilities are more important to getting better TV deals a.k.a. the main source of funding for most sports leagues?

[The Phantom Horseman]

2 minutes ago, TheReaper said:

What's "questionable" about realizing that broadcast facilities are more important to getting better TV deals a.k.a. the main source of funding for most sports leagues?

That's a fair point but I'm not trying to pass judgement on that or say those things are unimportant. I've seen quite a lot of posts on social media saying that team A or B won't stand a chance under the new system because of the state of their ground, and as the title of that section suggests, the point I'm making is that it doesn't really matter whether your stadium has fantastic modern fan facilities and looks and feels great, or is a delapidated throwback to the 1950s, you won't lose or gain points because of those factors.

[marklaspalmas]

I do feel that so far there has been a dearth of articles from the RL press about 2024 will work out. No P&R will surely have a big impact on how the season looks and feels at all three (at the moment) pro levels 

[ATLANTISMAN]

ABCDEFGZ doesn't matter this really is totally ridiculous.

 

Edited September 21, 2023 by ATLANTISMAN

[sentoffagain2]

      Top marks a Sl club can get is !5.And for The Championship 7.5 am i right so far? So to already be in SL your points count double a Championship team with the same marks.Am i still right? So whichever team is promoted to Sl this season they would only have to score 4 points out of 7.5.Double them for SL status=8 points.So surely they will be safe as no other team below can score more than 7.5 points.Who will be marking the homework?.Or is my explanation daft.I think it is iogicai.

[sam4731]

It does mention that in time (no time frame is given), a team will need to run a women's team to be included in Super League. This could theoretically mean that they put out 17 random players into a pub league though.

[sam4731]

22 minutes ago, sentoffagain2 said:

      Top marks a Sl club can get is !5.And for The Championship 7.5 am i right so far? So to already be in SL your points count double a Championship team with the same marks.Am i still right? So whichever team is promoted to Sl this season they would only have to score 4 points out of 7.5.Double them for SL status=8 points.So surely they will be safe as no other team below can score more than 7.5 points.Who will be marking the homework?.Or is my explanation daft.I think it is iogicai.

The top mark anyone can get is 20 right? To be guaranteed a place in super league you need 15. In reality only maybe 3 or 4 teams will get that and the rest will be populated by teams with between 7.5 and 15.

[Mumby Magic]

Have sufficient IMG points to play in SL if you're a championship club. Tell everyone who is eligible for promotion start of season. Have competitive championship competitive with standards set. Simple.

[StandOffHalf]

Thank you for your interesting analysis. You raise some very concerning points.

I think the catchment area one is going to prove to be a real point of controversy.

[sam4731]

15 minutes ago, Mumby Magic said:

Have sufficient IMG points to play in SL if you're a championship club. Tell everyone who is eligible for promotion start of season. Have competitive championship competitive with standards set. Simple.

Do they not have a similar system in Union? You notify the RFL at the beginning of the season if you want to be a candidate for promotion (there are certain clubs who wouldn't want to be in Super League), they assess you and if you win the championship you replace team 12 in super league. Otherwise team 12 in SL gets a reprieve. The crucial bit is that it wouldn't go to the Championship runner up, it would have to be the winner.

[The Phantom Horseman]

52 minutes ago, sam4731 said:

It does mention that in time (no time frame is given), a team will need to run a women's team to be included in Super League. This could theoretically mean that they put out 17 random players into a pub league though.

The only bit I could find said that  - in the future - Category A teams (rather than SL teams) would need to run a women's team.

 

[sam4731]

2 hours ago, The Phantom Horseman said:

Reading across social media and forum land, it seems clear that there are lots of RL fans who still haven’t really got much of a grasp of what teams will and won’t score points for in the IMG scoring system that will replace promotion and relegation from next year. There are even one or two fans who haven’t realised that traditional P & R ends after this year, but they’re probably beyond help.

Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been much insight from the world of RL journalism (with a couple of honourable exceptions), so here’s my take on what I think some (not all) people may have missed in terms of the impact of the new scoring system. Not claiming to be an expert here so this is just my own opinion but these are the things that have struck me from reading the handbook.

A reminder that the Grading Handbook can be found here
https://www.rugby-league.com/uploads/docs/Grading Handbook (Final Version).pdf

On-field performance won’t matter as much as many people think:
We know that teams are ranked from 1-36 based on league positions (where they finish after the play-offs), and that these numbers are compiled over three seasons.

We also know that these positions are divided by 0.1111 point ranges between each finishing position, so for instance the team ranked 7^th will earn 3.3333 performance points and the team ranked 8^th will receive 3.2222 points.

You might think this seems a fairly narrow margin, and you’d be right. But it might be even tighter than that. For instance, if one team finishes 14^th in the Championship each of the three years (ie losing Grand Finalist each year), and another team 17th in each of the 3 years, the team that finished 14^th might still only have 0.1111 more points than the team finishing 17^th. That’s possible if, say, the teams finishing 15^th and 16th have one good year (eg a year in SL) that sends their average up above the team finishing 14^th.

Given all the different criteria that can earn much more significant chunks of points, on-field performance is going to be relatively insignificant when separating teams that are likely to be challenging to be one of the 12 SL teams.

It will be a massive advantage to have been in Super League at some point in the last 3 seasons:
When IMG first announced the criteria for their points scoring system, some of us thought they must have forgotten to include an important component – how the various figures would be weighted depending on what division a team had been.

It gradually became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten that component – they simply were not taking it into account at all.

So if a team that has been in SL for the last 3 years has an average home league attendance of 3,010 and a team that has been in the Championship has an average attendance of 2,990, the former will gain 2 IMG points and the latter only 1.5.

This makes little sense, surely – both the attractiveness of the opposition, and the away following, means that you are inherently going to attract far bigger crowds when hosting the likes of Wigan, St Helens and Leeds than when facing, say, Whitehaven, Sheffield and London. A case in point is Leigh, who are averaging around crowds of around 7,000 this year having struggled to reach 3,000 against some of the less attractive Championship opponents last year.

Additionally, there are other IMG point-related benefits from being in Super League. The massively larger central funding leaves more financial possibilities for spending on infrastructure etc, and being in SL is also likely to provide a boost in areas such as merchandise sales, TV viewership and social media following. And of course, finishing bottom of SL in three consecutive years will still score more points in the Performance aspect than finishing top of the Championship three years running.

It doesn’t really matter what your stadium is like…

From a spectator’s point of view, anyway. All the IMG points-scoring system is concerned about is whether or not a stadium ticks nine very specific boxes, almost all of which are concerned with the needs of broadcasters and sponsors. It’s all about things like…whether there’s at least 50m x 50m space for broadcasting trucks, whether you can get at least 50 people in the press box, whether the directors’ box has at least 40 seats and is positioned near the halfway line, whether the corporate lounge has at least 200 capacity etc…it’s nothing at all to do with the spectator experience.

Having a shiny new stadium with great fan facilities won’t score you any points, nor will you lose any if you haven’t improved it a jot in the last 50 years. Think of the worst stadia in RL…they won’t lose any IMG points. There is the theoretical possibility that you could lose points for failing minimum standards tests, but there have been minimum standards throughout the SL era yet they never seem to be enforced.

There are no IMG points for having a Women’s team, an Academy team, an LDRL or wheelchair team

You do have to have a Women’s team to be classed as Grade A, and you have to have an RFL-approved Talent & Performance Pathway. But otherwise, zilch.

The seemingly random thresholds for the Catchment Area scoring boundaries look extremely suspicious

The way that points are awarded for the Catchment Area aspect of the IMG system is that you take the population of the Local Authority District where each stadium is situated, and then divide it by the number of tier 1 and 2 clubs.

So for example Bradford and Keighley are in an area with a population of 546,400, which divided by two leaves a Catchment Area figure of 273,200.

Featherstone, Castleford and Wakefield, all in the Wakefield district, have a total population of 353,100, which divided by three gives a Catchment Area figure of 117,767.

IMG have decided to award three tiers of points in this area, so teams will either score 1.5 points, 1 points and 0.5 points.

So where have IMG set their thresholds? A sensible suggestion might have been, say, at 300,000+ for 1.5 points, 150,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for less than 150,000.

Or maybe 200,00+ for 1.5 points, 100,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for under 100,000.

But no, they have come up with the seemingly arbitrary figures of 260,000 for 1.5 points, and 130,000 for 1.0 points. There is no explanation on their Grading Handbook as to how they arrived at these thresholds.

That seemingly artificial threshold is very convenient for the two Bradford-area teams and very inconvenient for the three Wakefield-area teams. It’s almost as if the thresholds have been deliberately chosen to ensure maximum points for the former, and minimum points for the latter.

 

 

There are other aspects of the scoring system that are questionable too, but these are some of the main ones that struck me.

This isn’t intended as an anti-IMG crusade, I hope it will work and overall we have to give it a chance and support it. But when the first set of “illustrative gradings” are announced at the end of this season, my prediction is that there will be bemusement, and maybe uproar, at how some clubs are scoring higher than others, because I just don’t think the scoring system is well understood by fans yet.

 

The problem with the system in general is that it was very clearly devised in order to appease 12 Super league chairmen so it could get the votes to pass. This in essence is what the status quo is but these 12 chairmen can claim that this system is better for the game because an independent body has devised it.

[Mumby Magic]

1 hour ago, sam4731 said:

Do they not have a similar system in Union? You notify the RFL at the beginning of the season if you want to be a candidate for promotion (there are certain clubs who wouldn't want to be in Super League), they assess you and if you win the championship you replace team 12 in super league. Otherwise team 12 in SL gets a reprieve. The crucial bit is that it wouldn't go to the Championship runner up, it would have to be the winner.

For me it's the only fair way. Keeps it open. Clubs not up to standard have to raise them. Gives jeopardy and interest for the TV etc.

[RP London]

1 hour ago, sam4731 said:

Do they not have a similar system in Union? You notify the RFL at the beginning of the season if you want to be a candidate for promotion (there are certain clubs who wouldn't want to be in Super League), they assess you and if you win the championship you replace team 12 in super league. Otherwise team 12 in SL gets a reprieve. The crucial bit is that it wouldn't go to the Championship runner up, it would have to be the winner.

Not sure ifnthey declare at the beginning of the season or if the rfu just know who is and who isn't eligible..  season to season its 1 new club from the league below and any alterations to the "grading" of the teams already there.. but basically yes you know who can/can't go up or at a push those that could do but need to have xyz in place by the end of the season.. 

Don't think many people really have an issue with it (except Mr trailfinders who seems to moan whenever given the chance)

[glossop saint]

4 hours ago, The Phantom Horseman said:

Reading across social media and forum land, it seems clear that there are lots of RL fans who still haven’t really got much of a grasp of what teams will and won’t score points for in the IMG scoring system that will replace promotion and relegation from next year. There are even one or two fans who haven’t realised that traditional P & R ends after this year, but they’re probably beyond help.

Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, there hasn’t been much insight from the world of RL journalism (with a couple of honourable exceptions), so here’s my take on what I think some (not all) people may have missed in terms of the impact of the new scoring system. Not claiming to be an expert here so this is just my own opinion but these are the things that have struck me from reading the handbook.

A reminder that the Grading Handbook can be found here
https://www.rugby-league.com/uploads/docs/Grading Handbook (Final Version).pdf

On-field performance won’t matter as much as many people think:
We know that teams are ranked from 1-36 based on league positions (where they finish after the play-offs), and that these numbers are compiled over three seasons.

We also know that these positions are divided by 0.1111 point ranges between each finishing position, so for instance the team ranked 7^th will earn 3.3333 performance points and the team ranked 8^th will receive 3.2222 points.

You might think this seems a fairly narrow margin, and you’d be right. But it might be even tighter than that. For instance, if one team finishes 14^th in the Championship each of the three years (ie losing Grand Finalist each year), and another team 17th in each of the 3 years, the team that finished 14^th might still only have 0.1111 more points than the team finishing 17^th. That’s possible if, say, the teams finishing 15^th and 16th have one good year (eg a year in SL) that sends their average up above the team finishing 14^th.

Given all the different criteria that can earn much more significant chunks of points, on-field performance is going to be relatively insignificant when separating teams that are likely to be challenging to be one of the 12 SL teams.

It will be a massive advantage to have been in Super League at some point in the last 3 seasons:
When IMG first announced the criteria for their points scoring system, some of us thought they must have forgotten to include an important component – how the various figures would be weighted depending on what division a team had been.

It gradually became apparent that they hadn’t forgotten that component – they simply were not taking it into account at all.

So if a team that has been in SL for the last 3 years has an average home league attendance of 3,010 and a team that has been in the Championship has an average attendance of 2,990, the former will gain 2 IMG points and the latter only 1.5.

This makes little sense, surely – both the attractiveness of the opposition, and the away following, means that you are inherently going to attract far bigger crowds when hosting the likes of Wigan, St Helens and Leeds than when facing, say, Whitehaven, Sheffield and London. A case in point is Leigh, who are averaging around crowds of around 7,000 this year having struggled to reach 3,000 against some of the less attractive Championship opponents last year.

Additionally, there are other IMG point-related benefits from being in Super League. The massively larger central funding leaves more financial possibilities for spending on infrastructure etc, and being in SL is also likely to provide a boost in areas such as merchandise sales, TV viewership and social media following. And of course, finishing bottom of SL in three consecutive years will still score more points in the Performance aspect than finishing top of the Championship three years running.

It doesn’t really matter what your stadium is like…

From a spectator’s point of view, anyway. All the IMG points-scoring system is concerned about is whether or not a stadium ticks nine very specific boxes, almost all of which are concerned with the needs of broadcasters and sponsors. It’s all about things like…whether there’s at least 50m x 50m space for broadcasting trucks, whether you can get at least 50 people in the press box, whether the directors’ box has at least 40 seats and is positioned near the halfway line, whether the corporate lounge has at least 200 capacity etc…it’s nothing at all to do with the spectator experience.

Having a shiny new stadium with great fan facilities won’t score you any points, nor will you lose any if you haven’t improved it a jot in the last 50 years. Think of the worst stadia in RL…they won’t lose any IMG points. There is the theoretical possibility that you could lose points for failing minimum standards tests, but there have been minimum standards throughout the SL era yet they never seem to be enforced.

There are no IMG points for having a Women’s team, an Academy team, an LDRL or wheelchair team

You do have to have a Women’s team to be classed as Grade A, and you have to have an RFL-approved Talent & Performance Pathway. But otherwise, zilch.

The seemingly random thresholds for the Catchment Area scoring boundaries look extremely suspicious

The way that points are awarded for the Catchment Area aspect of the IMG system is that you take the population of the Local Authority District where each stadium is situated, and then divide it by the number of tier 1 and 2 clubs.

So for example Bradford and Keighley are in an area with a population of 546,400, which divided by two leaves a Catchment Area figure of 273,200.

Featherstone, Castleford and Wakefield, all in the Wakefield district, have a total population of 353,100, which divided by three gives a Catchment Area figure of 117,767.

IMG have decided to award three tiers of points in this area, so teams will either score 1.5 points, 1 points and 0.5 points.

So where have IMG set their thresholds? A sensible suggestion might have been, say, at 300,000+ for 1.5 points, 150,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for less than 150,000.

Or maybe 200,00+ for 1.5 points, 100,000+ for 1 point, and 0.5 points for under 100,000.

But no, they have come up with the seemingly arbitrary figures of 260,000 for 1.5 points, and 130,000 for 1.0 points. There is no explanation on their Grading Handbook as to how they arrived at these thresholds.

That seemingly artificial threshold is very convenient for the two Bradford-area teams and very inconvenient for the three Wakefield-area teams. It’s almost as if the thresholds have been deliberately chosen to ensure maximum points for the former, and minimum points for the latter.

 

 

There are other aspects of the scoring system that are questionable too, but these are some of the main ones that struck me.

This isn’t intended as an anti-IMG crusade, I hope it will work and overall we have to give it a chance and support it. But when the first set of “illustrative gradings” are announced at the end of this season, my prediction is that there will be bemusement, and maybe uproar, at how some clubs are scoring higher than others, because I just don’t think the scoring system is well understood by fans yet.

 

Very good post. I like the system but have many problems with how it is being implemented. I'd like to see community/grass roots engagement being graded for example. And most importantly some form of weighting for none SL clubs.

I am gobsmacked that no journalist has dug deep into what each teams scores would be. There has been the occasional one based on finishing positions but surely a lot more is in the public domain and can be investigated.

[Derwent Parker]

1 hour ago, sam4731 said:

The problem with the system in general is that it was very clearly devised in order to appease 12 Super league chairmen so it could get the votes to pass. This in essence is what the status quo is but these 12 chairmen can claim that this system is better for the game because an independent body has devised it.

As I have said from the start it is just a back door way of pulling up the drawbridge.

It would have been better if they had been honest and just said these are the 12 we want the rest of you go away?

[MattSantos]

22 minutes ago, glossop saint said:

 

I am gobsmacked that no journalist has dug deep into what each teams scores would be. There has been the occasional one based on finishing positions but surely a lot more is in the public domain and can be investigated.

Are you really? The standard of journalism in Rugby League is poor at best. 

[gingerjon]

So far this does seem fairer than the Championship funding model which distributes money based on Our League member picking you as their favourite team.

[glossop saint]

15 minutes ago, MattSantos said:

Are you really? The standard of journalism in Rugby League is poor at best. 

Actually you are right. I'm not. I'm incredibly disappointed though. 

[HawkMan]

What is IMG's ultimate aim for the game? Is it expansion or financial security? Well, if an American sport had hired them and the first TV deal renewal under their stewardship resulted in a cut , I'm sure IMG would be shown the door. They certainly haven't convinced Sky to even keep the status quo funding wise.

[Tommygilf]

35 minutes ago, HawkMan said:

What is IMG's ultimate aim for the game? Is it expansion or financial security? Well, if an American sport had hired them and the first TV deal renewal under their stewardship resulted in a cut , I'm sure IMG would be shown the door. They certainly haven't convinced Sky to even keep the status quo funding wise.

Their aim is, ultimately, as a result of the 12 year partnership to make money themselves.

[Damien]

If only all this hadn't been brought up and discused on the 148 page IMG thread.

[gingerjon]

5 minutes ago, Damien said:

If only all this hadn't been brought up and discused on the 148 page IMG thread.

But people didn't end up agreeing with the OP so they must be so thick they missed all the already known details they have raised.

[Les Tonks Sidestep]

3 hours ago, gingerjon said:

So far this does seem fairer than the Championship funding model which distributes money based on Our League member picking you as their favourite team.

Well. I for one have stopped looking at other clubs' websites and SM so as to not boost their 'engagement' numbers.....