I agree, unless they could find a different structure that will bring in more money. One issue is the fans directly bring in a high proportion of money to our game here, and so many fans want promotion / relegation back because they don't really understands it's problems and pitfalls - like the gap in finances you've mentioned and massive cap differences, and that it actually brings very few new players into the league anyway because relegated players are just recycled and any quality talent will find its way without promotion.DaveO wrote:Fiddling with the league structure is missing the point anyway.
It won't bring in any more money. Until they stop messing about with altering the play off structure or league format or whatever and instead start to look at the commercial side of things nothing will change much for the better.
It's all about money and so any gathering of SL bosses and the RFL should have one thing alone on the agenda - how to get more money into the game.
It's not so much the structure of the competition that is the problem as much as the way its all dealt with commercially. A salary cap is good for competition but without greater commercial/financial interdepedence between clubs it'll never really change things enough and we'll see the problem we have of the league stagnating and the best players being attracted to other leagues/sports where there is more money. My answer, as I've said before, would be to cut championship clubs adrift and force mergers between clubs that aren't strong enough alone.
We need to find a way to get a bigger slice of the Aussie RL dollar to SL clubs without it just meaning we sell our players to them. I don't know how its going to happen, an expanded World Club Challenge could help, but I doubt how much demand there is for that in Aus if Leneghan is saying that basically its only viable to play a Syndey club in a WCC over there.