In 1997 the Australian Super League competition needed something different. They bought the rights to half the game in Australia and all of the game in Great Britain. They had it all – so what did they do with it?

They decided to go all out. They would run a gigantic World Club Challenge.

It featured Australian Super League (ASL) teams playing European Super League teams (ESL). It would be played mid season. It featured home and away games, no one would be disadvantaged.

This was going to be the future for the game. A lot of money was spent to make this, the perfect scenario, a reality.

It was a disaster on every single level.

Despite only having half the players in Australia to draw upon, the talent gulf between ASL teams and ESL teams was immense. Keep in mind that at least two ASL teams were conjured up out of thin air during the previous off season and they were never to be seen again after that one single Australian Super League season in 1997.

ASL teams dominated to the point where the competition structure had to be change while it was being played. Originally the final was supposed to include an ASL team playing an ESL team, however the prospect of unbeaten ASL teams not getting a look in while a struggling ESL team made the final just couldn’t happen.

ESL teams ran into a buzz-saw when they faced ASL teams in mid-season form. Most games were not even a contest.

The Europeans won just eight games, and example scorelines ran into huge for and away margins for the Australians. The Adelaide Rams defeated the Leeds Rhinos 34-8. The Auckland Warriors defeated the Warrington Wolves 56-28 – and so on.

The 1997 World Club Challenge lost millions of dollars and in Australia and New Zealand its profile was so low, nobody cared. The attendance for the final was listed at a rounded 12,000, and this was at a time when both the Australian Super League and the Australian rugby league would in many cases doubling or tripling their crowd figures for PR points against one another!

That was the World Club Challenge run on Super League’s ideal model. It wasn’t even that long ago. International results since suggest that, if anything, the gulf in talent between the Australian and English player bases is even wider now.

Let’s skip forward to 2012 and the Manly Sea Eagles were beaten in the World Club Challenge by Leeds.

After a severely disrupted off season, the Sea Eagles have just £25,000 in the bank for their troubles. Well, they will eventually. The RFL is very slow on paying visiting teams money (the Australian rugby league has yet to be paid their prize money for winning last year’s Four Nations).

Was it worth it for Manly? I’d love to know what price Geoff Toovey would have put on having a smooth pre season, at home, without the hassle of having to do a hit-and-run visit to Leeds. I’m sure it would be a lot more than £25,000.

Now we have the UK’s Rugby Football League, once again, pushing for an expanded World Club Challenge competition. I can’t blame them really, the RFL needs to try and tap into the behemoth that has become the NRL.

Even if they can get a tiny percent of the $1 billion dollars the NRL will soon have, it would dwarf many of their other commercial deals, some of which are embarrassingly low.

Yet,the Super League season basically starts in early February and ends in early October. The NRL season starts in mid March and ends in early October.

The NRL season structure will not decrease. There’s a $1billion reason why.

There is scope to change the Super League season a little, but cash strapped clubs can not afford to miss out on gate takings with a shorter Super League season. On top of that, there is the Challenge Cup to consider. Super League teams play a ridiculous amount games over the course of the year. Does anyone really want to add to that?

The forgotten issue is the effect on Test football. As it stands right now, at best, we get six weeks in the entire year to play Test football. Does anyone want to cut back on that?

If ever the decision is made to scrap a Test season in exchange for a small club competition of any kind, we will never see Test football again. As it stands right now, plenty of clubs would happily scrap Test football. You can make a very easy and simple case to do that too.

Those that cherish Test football know you can’t let the idea of club above country even get a foot in the door, because if you do, it is all over.

That leaves the off season. Players need an off season. Rugby league is too brutal of a sport at its highest level to have players playing 12 months of the year. If we tried doing that, injuries would increase, careers would be shortened and what we see on the field would be degraded.

With all of the above in mind, we are actually left with no alternatives for an expanded World Club Challenge.

Forget the issue that English teams (even the Test side) are completely unmarketable in Australia and New Zealand, and most fans in those countries haven’t heard of any clubs not called Wigan or St Helens.

The current World Club Challenge is a farce, but what are the alternatives? I’ve seen suggestions that it should be played two weeks after the NRL grand final. We tried that, it didn’t work.

While British sport is based on everyone getting a chance to win 57 different trophies over the course of every year, in Australia there has only every really been one great prize, and outside of that, nothing else matters.

When a team wins the grand final, they party. They party hard.

You can write off at least a week for any NRL teams celebration of winning the grand final. When the Australian Squads are named on the Monday following the grand final, those within the Australian camp know to leave the grand finalists alone; eventually their players will get in touch a week later.

Mid-season may be a better option, with the NRL working in a bye week in say April for the previous seasons NRL champions and then having the previous seasons Super League champions fly over and play the World Club Challenge here.

NRL clubs would refuse to do it the other way around, the NRL season is too important on a football level and a commercial level for such a disruption.

That is heavily in the NRL teams favour though. I think it would actually be the most commercially successful option. You’d get a million people watch that game in Australia on a Friday night in April, and no doubt the crowd at the NRL champions stadium would turn out to see something different.

From a competition standpoint though, it would be a disaster. A lop sided scoreline would see the World Club Challenge killed off after just one year.

The last idea I have, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this put forward, is to accept the top two Super League teams after the regular season into the NRL finals series and expand the series from an 8, to a 10 team competition.

First things first, the expansion to ten teams. No NRL club is going to vote to have one less place available to them in the NRL Finals series. So you would have to expand the series to 10 teams just to get the green light.

The top two Super League clubs would need to give up the right to play for the Super League grand final. That is a big ask, and rationalizing it is very difficult. I don’t see Super League fans turning up on grand final day to see the “best of the rest” play off to decide who is the third best club in all of Super League!

However, if Super League clubs really could compete in the NRL, and there is a burning desire from some to have both competitions cross pollinate in some way, is there a better option than to just have a ten team NRL Finals series featuring the two best Super League clubs?

Everyone would be in peak form and ready for the finals series. The Super League clubs would be based in Australia for at least a couple of weeks, so jet lag would become less of a factor.

Commercially, I can’t see why I, as the fan of an NRL club, wouldn’t turn up to see my team facing off with a Super League club for the right to be one step closer to the NRL grand final. An opponent is an opponent at that time of the year!

I also can’t see an issue with a Super League club taking the NRL grand final trophy back to England. Commercially, would it really make that much of an impact on the NRL if it did happen?

You can’t get around the issue of the two best teams in Super League having to ditch their competition to take part in ours, but if there was some way to get around that, wouldn’t it be interesting to see how an NRL Finals series with two Super League clubs included would go?

The idea of a one off tournament of champions playing against each other doesn’t work in any sport. The closest you get to it is football’s Champions League. Even then, its a season long competition that includes more than just the champions of the season before in a sport where they play about a million games every season.

Football’s World Club Championship still gets little attention, carries little weight and doesn’t have anywhere near the prestige to any domestic competition winners.

The concept has not worked in basketball, where the NBA champions used to play the European champions. It hasn’t worked in Twenty/20 Cricket, where the T20 Champions League is a complete non event. Hell, even rugby union types don’t give a thought to a match-up between the “Super” Rugby champions playing the European Club champions (another competition that is full of the “meh” factor).

Regular sporting competitions get a lot of their impetus from rivalries. These rivalries are usually set along geographical lines, and that is something that is deeply embedded in the primitive part of our brains. Those…over there…we don’t like them. Must be better than them…

When you try to make a sporting competition without those natural, geographical rivalries, you’ve got to be bringing something very good to the table that people are willing to buy into.

Right now, the only way I could ever see a rugby league club competition that involved NRL and Super League clubs working is if Super League clubs take part in the NRL Finals series. That way, instead of your geographical rivalries, you just focusing purely on competition.

The NRL grand final is four wins away. You have to beat THIS team to get there.

When it comes down to it, ideas like this never get a footing because of ego.

The RFL like the current World Club Challenge format because it heavily favours their own clubs and lets all and sundry do a lot of chest beating with claims like “World Champions!” when a Super League team wins.

It is a marketing tool they use throughout the entire year, and considering their Test team as been a dismal failure for nearly 40 years, quite honestly, its probably something they need to hold onto any relevance.

From the NRL’s point of view, the Australian season has been run a certain way for over a hundred years now and it’s a formula that works very well. They also don’t want to kill the billion dollar baby. Would you make a single change to your lifestyle if you knew it earned you $250,000,000+ every year? Didn’t think so.

It is so much easier for the RFL to set next year’s World Club Challenge in stone early, therefore locking it in contractually, and making sure there is no chance it will be played anywhere else.

The NRL meanwhile don’t have to bother with promoting a stand alone fixture featuring a side that no-one in Australia has ever heard of and who, going on the history of touring English sides, is probably going to provide the same opposition as an Under 12’s side anyway.

So everyone just puts up with the status quo. The lesser of all evils. The quickest and easiest way to get a fixture out of the way that means a little bit in England, nothing at all in Australia and New Zealand, but one that does put £25,000 into both club’s pockets, win lose or draw.