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The Gold Coast Titans are the NRL’s newest club, having been introduced with high hopes in the 2007 season. But should they remain in the competition?
Queensland is an odd market in terms of sport.
Where New South Wales is a predominantly rugby league state and Victoria and South Australia are dominated by AFL, Queensland has struggled with its sporting identity for a while.
It is home to two sides in the AFL and three in the NRL. Being such a huge state with such a large sporting fan-base, Queensland should be an ideal breeding ground for sporting teams.
But for some reason, the Gold Coast Titans have failed to take hold.
There’s no doubt the Broncos rule the roost, but the Gold Coast is a big town and one that harbours a mountain of talent and sporting potential.
Yet there has been one telling point that has been keeping the Titans down – memberships.
People read into membership numbers in a thousand different ways, but it’s probably the best reading you can get on a team’s popularity.
No one expects a brand new team to explode to the top of the league instantly, and that was something taken into account by the NRL when the club was picked a decade ago. There needs to be time for a fan-base to grow and for the team to get a foothold among a large competition.
But how long should that take?
The Titans rose up and sat nicely in the middle of the table in terms of membership numbers in 2010, just their fourth season, but they plummeted back down the list in the early to mid-2010s, having the lowest member count on more than one occasion.
The theory goes that the number of fans should be increasing, growing as each year passes and more are introduced to the side. Yet, for some reason, people have come like they were supposed to, then left.
This will be the 11th season for the Titans, and much like memberships, no one can expect a side to rock up and win everything, but they’ve made the finals just three times, being pushed out each time without too much fuss.
Eleven years has been more than enough for other sides in recent history.
The Melbourne Storm famously won the premiership in just their second year, while Canberra notched up two title wins in their first nine years. The Brisbane Broncos won five premierships in their first 13 seasons.
The Newcastle Knights even got one within their first ten seasons, as well as the Wests Tigers, winning in their sixth season after coming together as a joint venture.
All of this happened from the 1980s onward so it’s not some statistical anomaly from the early days. If anything, it’s easier for a side to succeed more and earlier in the professional era.
There were never world-beating expectations surrounding the Titans, but where, or when, is the point that continuously dwindling membership numbers and a lack of, not so much groundbreaking but just reasonable, results catch the eye of the NRL and become an issue?
Maybe it’s not the club. Maybe it’s the location.
The Gold Coast Suns were brought into the AFL not long after the arrival of the Titans and have similarly suffered from poor crowd numbers, unspectacular fan support and less than ideal results.
Rugby league has tried to grab on before on the glamour strip to no avail.
A team was packaged three times throughout the 1980s and ’90s in an attempt to take advantage of the bustling metropolis. First, it was the Giants, then the Seagulls, then Chargers.
The Titans look to be heading the same way. Could it just be a case of a tree that refuses to grow in infertile soil?
There’s constant talk of expansions and other clubs being brought in, so should the Titans be scrapped as another failed venture and make room for a club somewhere else?
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