How daft can the grading system get?
THE revelation of the IMG grading scores last Wednesday turned out to be a damp squib, with all of the changes to the results from a year earlier having been widely predicted.
No one was really surprised to see Leigh, Castleford and Wakefield awarded grade A scores and the fall of Hull FC from grade A to grade B was also widely predicted.
St Helens have won the accolade of having the top grade of all the 35 clubs in the three competitions, with 17.02 points out of a possible 20, but for some reason they haven’t arranged an open-top bus tour of the town to celebrate their success.
Of the clubs that will play in Super League in 2025, only Hull, Huddersfield and Salford didn’t earn a grade A in the published scores.
Toulouse were in the top twelve a year earlier, but the 2025 gradings saw them come in 13th place, keeping them in the Championship in 2025. I hope they will not pull out of that competition, even though in their position I would be sorely tempted to.
And the big improvers were London, who were ranked 24th last year and went up ten places to 14th in 2024, despite having very few signed-up players for their 2025 roster.
What some people don’t seem sure about, however, is what will happen at the end of the 2025 season.
Several people have told me that the nine clubs with grade A scores are now safe from demotion to the Championship at the end of next season.
That isn’t true.
If Castleford, for example, register a grading score next year that gets the club a grade B and they are the 13th-graded club, then they will still go down to the Championship if the Super League remains at twelve clubs.
There are some clear anomalies with the gradings results in the case of individual clubs.
For example, Oldham have registered a lower score than last year, despite the club being in an incomparably better position now.
Part of the problem in that case is that they moved from Whitebank Stadium, with its 1,500 capacity, to Boundary Park, which can fit in around 13,000 people. So despite their average attendance having risen sharply, their percentage utilisation of their current stadium is lower than it was previously, which earns them fewer grading points. How crazy is that?
Then there is Halifax, who have improved their grading score for finance by a full point despite reportedly being served with yet another winding-up order (which the club have denied).
The problem with the gradings system is that numerous anomalies have been revealed that I don’t think were fully appreciated at the time the original proposals were put forward and which are only fully coming to light now.
The only one that was picked out right from the start was the ridiculous provision about catchment areas, which is illustrated by
Hull FC owner Adam Pearson’s comment that his club derives much of its support from the population west of the city that lies just out of the City of Hull boundary.
I understand that some people are even putting forward a proposal to get round this anomaly by allocating other towns to individual clubs that can be counted in their catchment area if they do some development work there.
For example, there has been talk of Hull ‘adopting’ the town of Middlesbrough, trying to develop the community game there and having the population of Middlesbrough added to half the population of Hull to boost the club’s gradings score.
On hearing that, I had to check that it wasn’t April 1st.
But honestly, how daft can the game get!
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