Keep sticking French clubs in SL? Nope.



So let's shove in Toulouse and - I dunno, Pia? - and consequently wave goodbye to - I dunno, Wakefield? Salford? Widnes? Who would you suggest chucking out of the top level, and then who would you select to chuck out of the Championship and League 1 with the knock-on effect?



We want to improve international RL, we're not going to do that by removing top-level UK teams and decreasing our pool of elite players. One of the reasons we all cite for Australian dominance is their huge player pool, yet some people want to 'improve' things by removing clubs? Odd. And don't trot out the argument that it would concentrate our best players, increase intensity, etc - it wouldn't. A smaller pool means just that - fewer players. RL cannot afford to go down that road. Bonkers.



Then the fans. So you chuck a few teams out of SL, you can wave goodbye to a significant percentage of their fans, many of whom are lost to the sport forever. That's not just a few thousand existing fans, it's their families, kids, the following generations. RL is simply not strong enough to be turning fans away at any level whatsoever. Bonkers.



In addition you then have 3 teams bringing no more than perhaps a dozen fans to away games, and considerable additional cost for UK fans to travel to France 3 times. Of course this has been discussed before and a lot of fans think this isn't important - because our clubs can afford any scale of decrease in revenues from ticket, hospitality and refreshments sales of course, and a poorer atmosphere at games with no visiting fans is healthy for the game. Bonkers.



Wellsy13 says "gradual, sustained growth" - yes, absolutely, but not as he describes. Growth needs to be from the bottom up - grassroots, kids, schools, etc. Not a pot of money, a squad of Antipodeans and into SL you go - no, grow strong roots organically and work your way up. If you must aim for SL then start in League 1 and earn your spot, build solid foundations and a fan base along the way. I'd sooner the French developed their own league but if we're going to let them into SL, let's do it right. We've had too many failures and need to learn from them.



We all want French RL to grow but for me they need to do it on their own turf. A strong TV deal is vital, investment is key, yes the RFL and SL can help but not at the expense of existing clubs. I don't have the solution but more French teams in SL at the expense of British teams isn't the answer.

We can sit and twiddle our thumbs waiting for TV stations to pump millions into a league they're clearly not interested in, or we can build clubs and competitions they may want to buy into. No brainer to me.



More players does not mean better talent. If we want to compete why the Aussies, we need as strong a competition as possible to build better players. There needs to be a balance.



I think 12 English clubs is the most we could ever handle. I'd argue 10 would be ideal. I'd prefer to see the league increase if we were to include more clubs, but money dictates.

Is there scope for French soccer clubs to be encouraged to partner with RL sides?



Even if it's not in terms of direct cash support, I would imagine the expertise and promotional clout afforded by the likes of Monaco, Mille etc could be of good use to some of the French RL clubs struggling to generate media and spectator interest.

It seems to me that this thread contains a lot of examples of people talking about how they want the world to be, rather than how the world is.



We are struggling to attract sufficient funding in this country to maintain a single full-time division of RL, yet we are vastly better resourced than the French, with a much higher domestic profile (even if that profile is woeful). The idea that there can be a full-time pro French league is laughable. It's not going to happen, short of some French billionaire suddenly deciding that what he really wants to blow his wealth on is Rugby a XIII.



So anyone who says that the future is a French league, or that Catalans can somehow be the kernel of a full-time French competition, is just indulging fantasies.



So the question is simply this : do you want there to be any professional full-time rugby league in France ? If you do, then the only league where that is even remotely possible is the super league, and the only way of realistically making that happen is to simply place the French clubs in SL, because the semi-pro leagues are not so much a gateway to SL for overseas clubs as a portcullis, moat and murder holes preventing their entry.



If you don't care about French RL, and are happy for it to continue to wither and die, then the best thing to do is to say that you really care about it, but there's no place for French teams in Super League. Super League is the only northern hemisphere possibility for full-time pro rugby league. Anything else is hot air, wishful thinking, or - if I was being cynical - short-sighted self-interest on the part of small-town northern clubs who'd rather the game died everywhere outside the M62 than reduced their chances of scrabbling an occasional season in the top-flight living vicariously and parasitically off the bigger clubs they have no chance of ever challenging.



If you want French full-time pro RL to survive, then it has to involve French clubs in SL. That is the ONLY real option.

Give this guy a medal for talking sense.



People want us to have a bigger and better international game yet many wouldn't want French and Welsh teams in SL. If the likes of those countries are going to get bigger and better then they need a serious and strong presence in the club game.

Absolutely. Losing one of the best supported clubs, home and away, miraculously has no effect.



On your "logic" ([size=85my apologies to Logic, I know it's a stretch but[/size...) nobody would be bothered apart from a few Wigan, Saints, Wire, Hull, KR etc fans if all those teams were replaced by French teams to "widen" SL. Yes, I can see that.

A SL comprising (say) Wigan plus eleven French sides would really sell the game, raise playing standards, and make it rich!







You know I have missed the regular drip of moronic Bradford-haters who think dredging up that now banal metaphor makes them sound intelligent, so thanks for the laugh, but it's not a pop-at-Bradford thread, it's a French Teams In SL thread so stick to topic, there's a good boy.

Exactly right. The demotion of Bradford (and allowing London to die on its feet) were two examples of incredible short-sightedness by RL management, other clubs, and many fans.



We do not have enough clubs capable of putting together 10,000 averages to fill even a 12-club super league. Bradford were one of those clubs. Yet we booted them out, and as you say, if they don't come straight back, then they'll probably never come back. Yet the bad news is that the same championship clubs which argued so vociferously for the rejection of licensing and the return of "promotion" seem to have been too dumb to notice that the tortuous system we have now put in place will effectively guarantee that there will be no promotion. The gulf between even the bottom SL clubs like Wakefield, Salford and Widnes, and the best the semi-pro championship can offer, is vast.



Yet we heard the same voices saying the same things when Bradford and London were killed off : "we really care about RL in those places". "They need to build from the bottom up". "They can earn their way back".



No. None of this will happen. Fantasy.

People seem to like over-stating how big a club Bulls are. If they'd had the same last 20 years as Hull FC for example their crowds would be averaging somewhere around 5-6k, not the 10-11k that Hull get. It's a big city but the Bulls are only a big club when they're winning grand finals and c cup finals....even then they never seemed to bring many fans down to London when compared to the likes of Wigan and Leeds.



Bulls were given a lot of support from the RFL, they can't afford to throw money at clubs like the NRL do at Gold Coast, there's no big pot of money put to one side to prop up failing clubs.

Right now they're in division two, have sold more season tickets than some SL teams (whilst charging more than they ever did when they were in SL - you know cutting their cloth and all that), have recorded one home attendance of nearly 5K against a Whitehaven team that brought 12 away supporters and have helped Leigh and Fev post massive attendances at their grounds. On all 3 occasions beating at least 2 Superleague games for attendance.



TBH if anything people seem to over state how important other clubs still in Superleague are to the league.



Not to mention clubs like Leigh, Featherstone, Halifax etc. that would be pretty peed off to not be allowed to see how the results of their hard work and continued support stacks up against the not so big boys in Superleague.



BTW over the last few years when Catalans have been one of the top teams the French national team has gone backwards. On Saturday you could count the number of French Nationals in the first 13 on one hand. So it's not working in develping international competition if you go by results and not romantic ideals.



As for this incorrect notion that the RFL propped up the Bulls financially it's total garbage. As was proved in the high court this week. Strange how RFL aren't available to comment now though.

I disagree on two counts :



1) Bulls were (and still could be) a very big club. They have a populous catchment area, a high-profile local recognition factor, and a proven track record of bringing in regular 5-figure crowds. Of course their crowds declined when they hit the skids. Saints and Wigan would equally see significant cuts in crowds if they were languishing uncompetitively at the foot of the table. The difference is that when the Bulls WERE competitive, they did bring in the numbers. There are several clubs in SL now who can't get a 5 figure crowd even though they ARE competitive.



2) The issue with the Bulls was not some Greek tragedy where nothing could be done and the decline was inevitable. What brought down the Bulls - as ever in our woefully-administered sport - was rank bad management at the club over several administrations, under the negligent eye of an RFL which watched as one of its prime assets was destroyed through incompetence and more than a hint of something worse. I'm sure some of the more clued-up Bulls fans would be able to give chapter and verse on some of the goings-on.



This didn't have to happen - it wasn't just an absence of cash. It happened because people at the club made it happen. But it also happened because people at the RFL (and of course in the other clubs) allowed it to happen. Some other clubs were even quite happy to see it happen because it removed a local rival for a place at the top table. The Bulls weren't just an asset to the Bulls fans - they were an asset to our sport, and the game's top flight is much the poorer for the absence of another genuinely-competitive "Big" club drawing 5-figure crowds.



Someone earlier in this thread said that the RFL doesn't ever appear to have a plan which runs further than the end of the next season. I tend to agree with that. It's simply a cop-out to say "there's no pot of money". There IS a pot of money - a sizable pot from SKY. They don't have a separate contract with each of the clubs - it goes to the game, and we could have been much more interventionist about how to distribute it. It is long overdue for our game to accept that we are far too small and weak to manage a winner-takes-all-devil-take-the-hindmost system. We need to identify our assets, protect them, and build from that strong base. Instead, we just stumble from one big idea to the next, hoping that each will be the magic wand which will suddenly turn Featherstone into another Wigan, or cause a SKY executive to have a stroke and double our cash settlement when there's no competition for our coverage, or magically drop a fully-functioning French professional league out of Nigel Wood's backside.



The only times I felt semi-confident that RL might have a chance of developing into anything more than a withering regional curiosity was when Neil Tunnicliffe produced "Framing the Future", which was actually an incredibly far-sighted document when read in hindsight, and in the early days of Richard Lewis's tenure when he was expending energy knocking heads together at clubs (and at BARLA) to try and get people to see that the game's interests were not the same as a hundred individual clubs' separate interests. Since Lewis lost interest, and Wood started running the show, I just feel that the game is not growing but shrinking, and the future looks less and less positive. They're much happier in the boardrooms of a limited number of championship clubs, mind you.

I wonder if the Aussie's are as introvert as some on here when it comes to the NZ Warriors?



Catalans are one of the top 4-6 clubs in the comp coming from absolutely nothing 10 years ago...many of these historic championship clubs have been trying and failing for decades. There is defiantly a hunger for SL in the south of France. Not big enough as yet for a full pro league but expand a few clubs into the SL and maybe over a couple of decades one may organically grow.



Do nothing and a French league is nothing but a fantasy.



If Toulouse are anywhere near as strong a club as Catalans the SL would be a much stronger league, with a top European city on its résumé.