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.

Did you type that with your feet?

Correct you didnt say it, but you meant it, thats how you think, you want SL clubs or nothing, I want RL clubs with fans that are willing to pay to watch them, and players who want to get paid to play for them, how far up the RL ladder those clubs then want to rise is up to them, nowhere have I suggested a limit to their ambition



Although I think it more likely that like people, they learn to crawl, then walk before they enter the 100 metres at the Olympics

I didnt say only council stadiums, just that IMO there is more potential if they are



So you expect new clubs to instantly achieve attendances higher than most of our current SL clubs? ,maybe you could provide the RFL with this magic formula



Maybe you are right, while all these football clubs havent been up to Red Hall all asking if they can have a SL licence, god only knows, then again a couple of years ago I attended a match at Bramhall Lane, they could have just opened the dugouts to accomadate the home fans, surely a ' model ' that works



Easy to address the reason why it hasnt happened, about 10 times as much extra investement as I am suggesting, so which is more likely?

No, you just suggested a clear and obvious barrier to their ambition



There is a reason why sport England will fund the young sprinters with the most potential for the Olympics, and far less for those without the potential

Well we have had over a hundred years of creeping expansion, it hasn't got us very far.



How many SL matches have been staged at bramall lane? Your asking why a football stadium wouldn't sell out for a semi-pro RL side with next to no marketing budget? Either way it's irrelevant because it would be almost the opposite of what I suggested

I'd be generous if I said we've had over a hundred years of half-assed expansionism attempts. 'Creeping expansionists' haven't been supported in their efforts, and much time, money and momentum has been wasted on big projects for clubs that clearly weren't / aren't even close to being ready for the big time.



Rugby League has been poor at consistently targeting it's resources and keeping a longterm plan in place.

So if we somehow find our relatively new RL club regularily filling its say 6,000 capacity stadium, they arent allowed to move to a bigger one, or make plans to get their existing one enlarged?



But we arent talking about our best, we are discussing our newest, I doubt youll find many 3 year olds being funded by sport England

So you are suggesting dropping new clubs straight into SL again ?

Far more time and money has been spent on small clubs in the areas surrounding where we are strong and have been for the last 100 and odd years, we have attempted 4 times in the past 100 years to move even slightly from our heartlands, only once was it done with some kind of long term investment, plan and preparation. Its no coincidence that it was an unmitigated success. We have now put the gains made by that at risk of ‘catastrophe’.



nobody would disagree with that.

Are you suggesting the ‘organic growth’ that hasn’t happened in over 100years of Rugby League? That a club will grow through the levels to the top, even though over a century of history tells us it doesn’t happen?