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Expansion of the National Rugby League is not all about warming people’s hearts because a team they used to support no longer exists.
It’s all about numbers – the number of people watching on television and the number of people attending the games. The only way to increase the number of people attending the games and watching them on television is to expand the league into new territory.
Adding a second Brisbane team is not the right idea, as in reality all it will do is split the current Brisbane Broncos fan-base, which at the moment is only pulling an average of 30,480 people to games in 2013 season.
Adding a second team would decrease this figure, so this would of course hurt the team.
An extra Brisbane team would just be an excuse to air another Brisbane Friday night football game into Queensland, while there is another half of the country that is not even thought about.
To really make this a national sport, which at the moment it is not, there must be expansion into new territory. Many people may disagree but this is the only way to go.
Perth is ideal for an expansion team. Over the past three years, the attendance for the South Sydney Rabbitohs home games were 20,221, 15,599 and 15,371 respectively.
This shows that interest in league in the west is increasing and this is the ideal time to implement a new team.
These attendances are higher than some Sydney teams’ home attendances (i.e Penrith, Parramatta and Wests Tigers).
Lastly and most controversially I believe that a team in Adelaide would be viable. A respectable attendance to aim for would be around the 12,000 mark.
This could be achievable. When comparing to the last time an NRL game was played in Adelaide, which was in 2011 and 2010, the attendances were 9,963 and 10,350.
These were decent attendances to games which at the time had very little to no advertising or promotion, so what hope was there to have a larger attendance?
Perth and Adelaide must be the next go to points in NRL expansion.
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