the game can afford it.......the clubs wont stand for it and as a result, the game will continue to blossom along the M62 but will wither as a national entity.

Wigan shut the North Stand for some games. Presumably we're doomed to fail as a club also.

So do Hull KR. Although the stand we close isn't actually in the same postcode...

Actually if the Rhinos were only getting crowds like London are I would, because out of the four sides at Headingley, the southstand should be the last to close.

Errr, were Crusaders NOT that very club, they collapsed in a tenth of the time London have taken.



Besides, I repeat this information AGAIN.



At the birth of SL, there were TWO clubs in the SE.



There are now 33, plus over 200 schools teams (60 girls teams too), AND 8 University sides as I keep saying, it's not ALL doom and gloom down here, it just looks it from up there!!



Now if we were REALLY serious about expansion, we would gradually expand out from the heartlands. North Derbys, North Notts and North Lincs all already have strong amateur sides, then theres CUMBRIA, Cheshire etc. This should have begun in about 1895 or there abouts!

Right there are the cold, hard facts that a lot of Rugby League fans (particularly from up North) seem to overlook. They'd rather take one look at the London Broncos attendances and come to the quick conclusion that RL in London has failed.

We weren't and still aren't ready for Super League, that much is clear, it was pretty clear to most of us back when they "gifted" us a SLE berth, but we were silenced and have had to endure a ridiculously slow-motion train crash!



What upsets me most is the London Crusaders were competing at the top of the second tier and doing well and then..........................



Maybe if we had a better marketing and strategy team it may have been different, but we didn't and it isn't, BUT we will survive, always have and always will, there IS a small, but HARDCORE fanbase down here!

I accept that this discussion is about London (whatever that means .. city, area, SE as a whole) but I cannot fathom this quote:

"Best bet would be to look at a merger between Rochdale & Oldham, brand up as 'Manchester' and take the East half of the city, with Salford taking the West."

Why would Rochdale and Oldham merge? (I live in one and used to work and coach RL in the other: they do not get on at all.)

Why would a team called "Manchester" take the east half of Salford: Broughton and Pendleton would not be interested?barton is in the west of the Salford.

You realise that there are two cities in Greater Manchester (and probabbly three when Bolton's dreams come true!)

You cannot parachute RL into Manchester. You could get a successful club there but with the local impact of what has been achieved at Sheffield Eagles (and no discredit to them at all).



Personally I felt there were real prospects at Wrexham.



On the main thread, although I am an outsider looking at London, in my many years of following RL, I cannot grasp London Broncos/Fulham/etc as a concept. It feels like a rich man's toy and about as intrinsic to the game as a poodle in a fox hunt. Skolars look the real deal. Even if I lives in London, I could not support them as I do not know what I was supporting. I know what Fax, Salford, Rovers mean. They have the impact of the top shelf in a working class pub: you need it, you use it occasionally but it does not feature in why you go there.

P.S Apologies for the typos

and I am aware of the history of poodle dogs: a chosen example.

Well Hillbilly, what Skolars are now is about what the London Crusaders were (only we were the larger club, about twice as big as Skolars are now) then Brisbane Broncos took over, and SLE "gave" us a SLE place and well the credibility went clean out of the window.



It was then taken over by Branson, who quickly decided the bubble had burst and since then it's been a series of rich blokes bailing the club season after season whilst watching the crowds dwindle back to pretty much what they were when Brisbane took over.



That just about sums it up.

I'd be looking at a ' creeping ' expansion , look at traveling distance, say 50/60 miles, a council owned lower/non league football stadium ,an RFL appointed general manager ( ex player looking at admin side of sport ) and coach ( again ex SL player ) , extra £ 250 K per season, extra DR and loan options



Look at local RU converts and using players as development officers, extra marketing finances , in Championship 1 and stay there until they can stand without the extra cash

I suspect a lot of us oop North don't get what London is all about. I don't mean we are all hillbillies but we seem to want to make the futile comparison between the demographics of a geographical area called London with our own home town and cities.



taking skolars as an example. I am wholly ignorant. I have literally no idea where they play. Is it near Tower Bridge or somewhere near Watford? And more to the point what business model do they have that means they are sticking around year on year on modest crowds?



so I essence I know Jack shi... About rl in London so I personally try not to pontificate on their existence. Instead I just scratch my head and let them be.

As long as David Hughes owns the club it will never flourish. He hasn't a clue.......and rather than take advice from those that do have a clue he'd rather flush his money down the crapper.....the most upsetting thing is that it all was avoidable.

Spot on Starbug, spot on!

Yep, your right, I really can't see his angle, surely he'd want it to be a success after what...£12 Million is it? He seems to show extreme loyalty to a CEO who is at worst clearly a liability or at best not up to the job, I admire loyalty but......surely in business it's a trait that can't be afforded!

There are plenty of people with plenty of ideas on how to rescue London, I've heard some crackers and some well worth trying, London have done none of them, they just seem to think people will show up.

it really isn't rocket surgery.....David Hughes is an arrogant w@nker. I'm an arrogant w@nker too.....it's part of being a salesman, but if I need my car needs fixing, I don't give it to a failed African cricket administrator to deal with......I take it to the garage.

No....it's not cheap, but they know what they are doing!

Why is being able to survive as a championship one side in a council owned/lower league football stadium and indication that a club could be anything other than that? Most non-league football stadiums dont have the capacity to house a club with ambitions of being anything more than a championship side.



Also where are these places within 60 miles of where we already are? From Leeds that goes as far north as Tyneside, where we have a club in a council owned stadium, down to nottingham which doesnt have a council owned or non-league stadium. To the east there is just countryside and Hull, to the west the lancashire heartlands. There is york i suppose but that doesnt seem like much of a plan.



Expansion shouldn’t be ‘creeping’, is it any wonder the game has a reputation for being small-time and parochial when not only will fans complain if they have to travel further than the next parish for a game, they are now suggesting that 5miles down the road is expansion. Expansion can only needs to be done wherever the opportunity presents itself. There a ridiculous amount of stadiums in this country and a huge number of opportunities for the game, if that’s in Sheffield, Nottingham, Newcastle, York, fine,



if its in Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, also fine.



Regardless, the RFL have given up on any kind of planned expansion of the game, and for the next 10 years at least it will be confined to its current parochial corridor due to P+R with the possible exception of adding Toulouse (and the possibility we will see further retrenchment by losing London and P+R destroying Les Catalans and never seeing Toulouse)

There is no visible signs of marketing, promotion or advertising in any shape or form that I have seen.

Rammo on twitter said the following to a question about how Gus is still in a job



He does what the owner asks. Crowds never really concerned them. No licensing & split Barnet/Broncos deal; less pressure now too.

If you want to give your opinion on how best the sport of RL ( the semi pro/fully pro part ) should look to expand geographically, feel free, if however you just want to attempt to drag other posters into endless pointless point scoring debates, dont bother



RL and the RFL have a brilliant record already in this field ,wouldnt you say?="Smoke'"

There was no point scoring it was a simple and obvious question about your proposal, where are the clubs stadiums you propose? Most none league stadiums are not capable of sustaining clubs higher than championship RL, that seems clearly a flawed place to start, it would deliberately store up a problem to limit success. Council owned stadiums are fairly rare and not really in the area you described. Show some examples of what you are suggesting.



The only way to successfully expand the game is to look at where we want to expand to, approach the people in a position to make that happen, and find out what is needed to make that happen, give additional funding, flood the place with development officers, get the right people in the right positions and make a long term commitment to growth.



There is a reason why someone like notts county don't see RL as a way of using Meadow lane during the summer find out what it is and address it. target places like Leicester who have two stadiums that need use, approach football clubs and RU clubs to put in place a structure to help them create pro RL clubs.



And no the RFL and rl has been uniformly awful at it because the lack the commitment and ambition for it. Nobody with the funds and facilities to create a pro RL club for us is going to spend thousands creating a C1 club

So your idea's are very similar to mine other than you are suggesting I am advocating using smaller stadiums than you, which you see as a way of me limiting future growth because you only see worthwhile growth if it ends up in the top tier, whereas I just see growth



My reason for suggesting council stadia rather than club owned is to provide more chance of initial growth and trying to avoid situations where the landlord is just looking for an easy financial return, as we are now seeing at Barnet, but rather councils actually supporting and helping to establish clubs, also I feel overly large stadiums can reduce the atmosphere at matches



The distance issue wasnt for fan benifit, but more for ease of loan and DR players to get things up and running

Not really, because firstly as you say im not suggesting limiting the size of the clubs we look to. You try some pointscoring here by saying I only see growth as worthwhile if it reaches the top tier, yet that isn’t what I said, I simply asked why limit the potential for growth. Why do it. Whats the benefit to us of deliberately targeting places which would limit the potential for growth? There is a huge difference between saying a club is only worthwhile if it reaches the top tier and saying we shouldn’t deliberately aim for clubs which couldn’t reach the top tier.



i didnt say we shouldnt use council stadiums, i simply asked where they are? You said we should target council stadiums less than 60 miles from the heartlands, i simply asked which ones.



Overly large stadiums only reduce the atmosphere when you dont fill them. Our ambition should be to do so. Another difference you missed/ignored is where i said we should engage with the owners of stadiums used for RU/fooball and find out why they dont see RL as an option. The TV funding pretty much matches the SC now, so why, if you have a massive asset and potential income stream sat there, arent we an attractive proposition, Stadium:MK, Ashton Gate, Vale Park, Meadow Lane, Pride Park, Welford Road, Bramall Lane, all single use stadiums which sit empty for a quarter of the year, why wouldn’t they want to use it and make money from us? We need to find out why that is and address it.

Dr Khoukash just got permission from Swinton Council to build a ne stadium coupled with retail in central Swinton and now intends to buy the Swinton club so a second Manchester club could emerge.



Now if Oldham but find a crazy billionaire RL in Manchester could return to the glories of yesteryear.