LAST week, as everyone now knows, the twelve Super League club owners met at Headingley and decided that they would like to expand their competition to 14 clubs from next year.
I hope they made the right decision, but I’m not filled with confidence.
Like most observers, I don’t like the loop fixtures in Super League.
So for that reason I would much rather see Super League move to a 22-game season if it were to remain a twelve-team competition.
But the clubs claim that they can only operate with a minimum of 13 home fixtures, which is a dubious claim in my view.
Nonetheless, having 14 clubs will certainly reduce the need for loop fixtures and I am therefore more supportive of the move in principle than I am dubious about it.
The problem is that the timescale suggests that it will be extremely difficult to add two new clubs to Super League that will be genuinely competitive, while there is a considerable degree of ambiguity about how the clubs will be chosen and how much money they will receive from the central distribution.
These are hardly small items and although I’m sure the RFL will seek to clarify these issues in the near future, I’m still uncertain about the process.
I would have much preferred the change to happen in 2027, which also is the position of the two Hull clubs.
The problem is that the system for making this decision doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me.
The fact that twelve club owners have the power to make a decision about the number of clubs in Super League, but can then walk away from that decision without any accountability for what follows it and whether it turns out to be successful or not, demonstrates the weakness once again of the Super League governance model and that of Rugby League more generally.
To give people decision-making powers in any organisation without any consequences for getting it wrong inevitably raises the danger of disaster.
In any sensible scenario, the clubs wanting to join Super League would have been assessed and their cases presented before the decision to expand beyond twelve.
We should only expand when we can be confident of what we will be adding to the competition.
In fact there is no guarantee that Super League will expand, if the applicants are all adjudged to be financially weak by the panel headed by Lord Jonathan Caine.
If 2025 has taught us anything, it is that financial liquidity is vital and that any club that can’t demonstrate an ability to pay its way for the entire season shouldn’t be in Super League.
That has been demonstrated by the Salford Red Devils dilemma, and compared to that issue, all the other factors in the gradings system are incidental.
So what if the panel chaired by Lord Caine decides that none of the applicants can demonstrate the financial resources to compete or even survive in Super League?
Will he be prepared to recommend that none of them is elevated to Super League?
And how foolish would the game then look?
Nigel Wood, as the incoming Chairman of the RFL, faces a gargantuan task to sort all this out in such a restricted timescale.
I wish him the very best of luck but he has been served up with the hottest of hot potatoes.
What about the Championship?
THE Championship and League One clubs will meet this Wednesday afternoon in Oldham to discuss what the future holds for their competitions.
It seems that they will almost certainly choose to merge their competitions into one league of 21 clubs next season.
The question then remains, how will they create a sensible fixture list for that number of clubs?
If every club were to play every other club, that would create 40 fixtures, which is far too many.
And it would result in some dreadfully lopsided scorelines as the top teams from the Championship faced the lower teams from League One.
What I hope they will go for is a graded fixture list, whereby the strength of the club’s fixture list is determined by its position in the hierarchy of clubs.
This is the method used with great success in major American sports.
It’s interesting to note that the average winning margin in the six Championship games at the weekend was twelve points.
The average winning margin in League One, leaving out the Newcastle-Dewsbury scoreline, was six points.
If the two competitions merge, we need a fixture structure that retains margins of that order.
Throwing good money after bad
I’M constantly amazed by the ability of the other code to draw in major investment.
The latest example is the news that Red Bull has acquired the virtually bankrupt Newcastle Falcons rugby union club.
Red Bull has previously acquired and developed sports organisations through a combination of branding, infrastructure investment and athlete development.
In motorsport, it has owned Red Bull Racing since 2004 and has won multiple Formula 1 world championships.
In football, RB Leipzig progressed from the fifth tier of German football to the Bundesliga within six years and qualified for the Champions League in their first top-flight season.
So why do organisations like that pour money down the drain in rugby union and how can we persuade them to invest in our sport?
That is a question that no doubt will be exercising Nigel Wood.
The NRL’s marketing nous
A LOT of English Rugby League fans seem to believe that the NRL is far better at marketing their competition than we are at marketing the game over here.
After the weekend just gone, that claim looks a little weak to me.
Sydney had roughly 40,000 English rugby supporters invading the city to watch the British and Irish Lions play the Wallabies on Saturday.
What a great opportunity it should have been to persuade some of them to watch an NRL game on one of the other days they were in the city.
But the NRL appears to have done nothing.
The Thursday night game between Parramatta and Melbourne, which would have been an obvious target, had an attendance of less than 10,000.
So let’s not eulogise the NRL and think that it could transform Rugby League in Europe if only it would buy out Super League.