SIMON GREENWOOD-HAIGH is the head of emerging brands for Associated British Foods and he has worked in sales and marketing in fast-moving consumer goods for 15 years at companies such as Kellogg’s, Aldi and the 2 Sisters Food Group.
He has been a Wakefield fan all his life, despite now living in St Helens, and in his younger days he played amateur rugby for Stanley Rangers, Hunslet Hawks, Wakefield Trinity Academy, Sheffield Eagles Academy and captained Scotland Students RL and Loughborough University.
He is a level 2 qualified coach but all his Rugby League is now enjoyed from an armchair or a stand.
Here he writes about the state of Rugby League marketing as he sees it.
HERE’S an unpopular opinion: Rugby League doesn’t need to focus on expansion to be successful!
Now, before you react to that and accuse me of being an exclusionist and wanting to restrict the game to the geographies where gravy and brews are made properly, let me caveat my statement: Rugby League doesn’t need to focus on expansion yet to be successful.
I’m writing this after having watched the 2023 Grand Final between Catalans and Wigan. I love the Grand Final because it’s always such a spectacle. The Rugby League community comes together en masse to celebrate the pinnacle of club rugby in our country.
This sport is awesome. It’s fast-paced, highly skilled, organised chaos played out by exceptional athletes. The fact that Catalans reached another final also demonstrates the fact that our product can travel. So, if we know our product is awesome, what is it that’s letting us down?
Unfortunately, the numbers speak for themselves; folk simply aren’t choosing to leave the comfort of their homes (or the pub) to get down to stadiums to watch this wonderful sport any more. This year’s Grand Final saw the lowest attendance (58,137) in ten years, not including 2021 as an obvious anomaly, and an echo-y Old Trafford is the last thing this sport needs televising.
The sport’s back garden is full of partially filled stadiums every week, with fewer than half of last season’s Super League sides managing to break the 10k barrier in average attendance. It’s impossible to ignore the impact of Covid-19 on gates, but other sports have recovered quickly and are passing pre-Covid levels. So why isn’t Rugby League?
I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures and heard the folklore about what the sport used to be like, but we are so far from the heady days of 100k+ fans witnessing giants doing battle; we are also so far from the same context that the sport had to compete in during the pre-Super League era.
TV has made the sport more accessible, but has it translated into long-term growth?
It’s true that there is also far more competition for punters’ time when it comes to entertainment. We need to be grown up about the fact that Joe Public views our product as entertainment and not just a sport.
Unfortunately, for me, the most recent domestic World Cup was a painful example of where the sport is in this country. As a fan-base and a community we’re letting down the on-field performances with mediocre crowds and events.
I grew up witnessing the early days of Super League with clubs like Bradford Bulls leading the way in creating a family experience rather than just 80 minutes of superb sport. Now, obviously, there was a flaw in the Bulls’ model with the advantage of hindsight but the circus was always in town and other clubs looked to Odsal for the way forward.
It’s true that there are some green shoots in the modern era with Leigh proving a lot of folk wrong by creating a brand out of thin air that the fans really bought into, but I urge you to name the last time any club did something truly memorable like this.
It’s hard not to ask why Rugby League isn’t more popular when we see huge growth in previously marginalised sports like darts? Who or what is our Eddie Hearn?
From a business point of view, the marketing theory tells us that it’s ten times more expensive to attract a new customer than it is to sell more to an existing customer. And the best way to attract new punters is social proof, i.e., recommendation or word of mouth.
So, the ideal scenario is for us not to focus all our efforts on expanding the sport beyond the M62, but instead make our product so enviable that anyone from outside of the heartland is looking over our shoulder wondering what all the fuss is about.
To do that, we must make the product better in our own region and own up to the fact that we’ve probably not done enough to fill our stadiums and to create profitable businesses. If we can shore up our heartland, then we can then look to expand with a tried and tested model.
We’re entering a new era of Super League with a new model that should help to focus the minds of boards across the competitions. But my request to the bigwigs is simple – focus on getting bums on seats above all else.
We know the product is entertaining, so it’s then a case of making the stadium experience unmissable compared to what can be seen on television.
Then we can focus on selling more to more for more, whether we are talking about punters or sponsorship.
