IMG have responded to the controversy surrounding London Broncos for the first time.
There has been a great deal of media attention focused on the capital club following their solitary season in Super League, with most of the controversy surrounding the fact that before a ball had even been kicked, the Broncos would be relegated from the top flight.
Of course, it all stems back to IMG’s attempts to ‘reimagine’ rugby league after signing a 12-year deal with the sport back in 2022.
With that, the marketing giants created five ‘pillars’ of fandom, facilities, finances, performance and catchment that all 36 professional clubs would be scored on.
For London, they finished in a lowly position of 24th, but their superb end to the 2023 Championship campaign meant they would spend 2024 in Super League.
Not given a hope by the majority of people, the Broncos did eventually finish bottom this season, but they pushed Hull FC mightily close with complaints that the Black and Whites should have been relegated if they had finished wooden spoon winners.
For IMG’s vice president of sports management, Matt Dwyer, London is an area that “needs to have full central support”.
“London is a growth market for the sport of rugby league but it needs to be a focused area that we as a sport invest in. You can’t just leave a team in an area and expect it to grow a whole market for you. That is not how successful expansion happens,” Dwyer told Sport Business.
“Look at the NRL when they did the Melbourne Storm. That was centrally backed for an extended period of time and that is the prism through which we are looking at it. If we are serious about growing the game in London, which we all are, it needs to have full central support to do so.
“The reality of the game at the moment is that it needs to grow commercially in order to fund the investment required to grow that market. The London Broncos situation is a challenging one. You can see by their current grading score just how much the sport needs to do to cut through in the London market at the professional level.
“That’s what we want: if you’re going to expand into a new market it needs to have full central support, including the funding.”
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