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How to fairly reduce the number of Sydney sides

Roar Guru
23rd June, 2015
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What about getting rid of all the Sydney sides for four super clubs? (AAP Image/ Action Photographics, Robb Cox)
Roar Guru
23rd June, 2015
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2720 Reads

The NRL has experienced some considerable gains over the past few years. Crowds continue to be inconsistent, but TV ratings are up year on year.

Origin manages to build itself bigger and bigger every year and even international rugby league Tests between Australia and New Zealand are regularly out-rating their once lauded union counterparts.

But for all this success, the NRL remains somewhat handicapped in its quest to expand by the heavy geographical anchoring of so many teams in Sydney. The competition has only sixteen teams, but nine in Sydney alone.

At a stretch you might argue it’s really eight and a half, given that St George Illawarra plays half its games in Wollongong, but even then that’s over half the teams in the NRL all in one city.

We need new teams in Perth, Brisbane, New Zealand and at some stage Adelaide, but the depth isn’t there to add these teams on top of the already heavily Sydney-centric and talent-stretched NRL.

But how do you approach ‘fixing’ Sydney?

Most solutions involve simply providing weak Sydney clubs with an incentive to move, with teams like the Sharks being often touted as a good candidate for places like Perth. The problem with this of course is that it creates a “haves versus have-nots” dichotomy among the fans on the losing end in Sydney, which ultimately leads to alienation and the loss many fans from the moved clubs from the game.

Now, the loss of some of these fans in the short term is probably unavoidable, but what if all of Sydney had to take a collective hit for the good of the game?

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What if all of Sydney lost its old NSWRL era sides at the same time?

Now, before people start plotting a Game of Thrones style punishment for such heresy, just hear me out for a minute.

Every year during rep round we have the increasingly irrelevant City versus Country match, which has long been positioned as a sort of Blues Origin trial.

It might still be partially effective as a sort of battle of the rest, but people just don’t identify as being a fan of either team.

Rather, people in Sydney identify much more with being from the west, east, north and south, than they do with simply being from Sydney itself.

With that in mind it only makes sense that that is the way Sydney ought to be divided.

So perhaps we could start a process of having a short form Sydney City ‘Origin’ tournament in the pre-season between sides made up of players from each of these areas.

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The way you’d draw the map for such boundaries wouldn’t be purely geographical slices based on space, but would take into account population density, the distribution of juniors and where certain NRL clubs were situated.

Now, this would mean some rival sides like Souths and Easts or St George and Cronulla would be represented by the same teams, but since they’d be entirely new entities with clearly delineated boundaries, on a fundamental level it wouldn’t be any different to watching the Blues take on Queensland with your cross-town rivals.

The concept would require significant buy in at all levels – the sort of buy in that a $2bn TV deal with a lot of incentives for existing clubs might be able to achieve – and the colours for these teams and the logos they’d be represented by would have to be well thought out to be and feel truly representative of their regions.

I’m not going to try mock up potential designs here, because I frankly don’t know all the juniors and the regions well enough, and so would only undermine them by just making stuff up on the spot. These details should be decided based on historical associations with the regions, consultations with the member clubs and input from fans in the area.

No mean feat to be sure, but get it right and these teams could then develop their own rivalries that were just as passionate and hard hitting as the existing ones.

In a certain sense we’ve already seen this in the A-League with the Wanderers – a team with no history that just came out of the blue which formed a huge rivalry based on the strong identities.

After this, we would have six sides in NSW: Newcastle, the four Sydney teams, the central coast and potentially Illawarra – who would ideally just revive the Steelers.

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Illawarra having its own full time team makes sense. It’s a similar case to the CC in that it’s a traditionally strong rugby league area – up until a couple years ago their crowd averages were strong and the Illawarra is home to half a million people.

That would effectively leave spots for three new teams in the NRL without undermining the talent pool.

Personally, I’d like to see a side based out of Christchurch. Wellington gets mooted a lot, but Christchurch has its own rugby league competition with eight senior teams, which is just as many as exist in both Wellington and the Illawarra competitions.

What’s more, Christchurch will soon have a side in the NSW Cup. Christchurch’s ‘rugby league park’ has been done up as a temp home for the Crusaders and with a capacity of 18,000 and is perfectly suited for a new team.

The region would need more work, but Christchurch and Canterbury have been growing at a faster pace than ever since the rebuilding after the earthquake.

Given this plan is a five to six year proposition I think they’d be well placed within that time to be ready to launch their own team.

But for all that to happen, Sydney needs fixing first.

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