How do we reignite the NRL? Expansion

Haven't read all the suggestions for new teams but a new team in NZ so that a weekly game can be telecast into the eastern Australian time zone of noon to pm every week would be desirable. Playing games in Australia, particularly Queensland (when it's too hot for most of the year) is an inconvenience & not crowd or player friendly. In NZ it is still daylight. Night games from over there just aren't spectator friendly either.

That of course Axle is assuming the new ARLC will just sit still and do nothing with the $50m surplus they are accumulating eg last year. Might I further suggest the NRL may do a little cross country migration into others' backyards,in the not too distant future.Don't underestimate Smith,Doyle & Greenberg.

The Suns were getting barely 20,000 on FTA TV at the end of last season. This is the lowest TV audience for any professional men's sport in the history of south-east Queensland TV history. I would think the GWS figures in Sydney would be similar. The AFL is increasingly looking stupid & tacky with these so called publicity stunts.

Jack, I actually think your 3 conferences there make a lot of sense considering the 2 teams you've included. It's also worth noting, these 2 teams should and probably will be the next 2 cabs off the rank. As I said above, I wouldn't worry about Wellington any time soon. For mine there are plenty of other expansion areas with a lower ticket number than them. Having said all of that, if the travel burden for Auckland and Perth under my proposal is as big a deal as the blokes above would have you believe, I'd be blowing up if I were a Manly or Newcastle fan under your proposal. For mine though, it's a non-issue for either of our ideas so nice work on the concept!

RE conference systems, what about: Northern conference: Broncos, Titans, Cowboys, Brisbane/Ipswich, Knights, Sea Eagles. Southern Conference: Warriors, Storm, Sharks, Dragons, Rabbitohs, Roosters. Western Conference: Panthers, Eels, Tigers, Bulldogs, Raiders, Perth Pirates. I think it may provide impetus for Dragons to become fully based in Wollongong to be more 'southern-based'. If they wanted to bring in the Wellington team, they could collapse a Sydney team or relocate and still maintain 18 teams, and even move the wellington team to a different conference. I think my system would be pretty fair regarding travel

While they're at it they should bring back the original Newcastle team that played in 1908. Then relocate the Knights to Norfolk Island.

I would split the teams into a Western Division(Perth, Parra, Dogs, Souths, Roosters, Penrith, Canberra, Wests, Melbourne) and Eastern (Manly, Brisbane, Brisbane 2, GC, NQ, NZ, Newcastle, St George, Cronulla). Top 5 from each conference play in the finals until the last 4 nationwide teams play in the preliminaries. The All Stars game could also be replaced by Conference All Stars, East v West

You can forget about Adelaide they hardly talk about the world came down here and we play that here

Dont forget university

Conference 1, 2 and 3 may go OK, but your 4th conference may do more harm than good. You've got 2 new teams. One in Perth, which is not guaranteed to do well, one in Wellington, which has less than 1/3 the population of Auckland and nowhere near the Polynesian numbers. Then you have one of the lower crowd pullers in Canberra and Melbourne who may struggle if they aren't doing well and playing the big teams. If you want to get the people down and give new teams the best possible start, you want them to be playing against teams with the best support. It would be like having an AFL conference with GWS, the Suns, Western Bulldogs and two new expansion teams in it. This is before you take in the travel costs, time travelling and freshness of the players.

It may be wishful thinking, but if the NRL was serious about getting something like this off the ground, it could be up and running by the 2017 season which I think is the season that has been earmarked for the next potential expansion side(s). May be with 4 new spots being created it might take until 2020 till they’re all online but I think the 4 expansion areas I’ve identified wouldn’t take too long to get up and running. In any event, 2020 for mine is still too soon for W-ton in the NRL. As for your Sharks/Steelers idea.... sorry but I think it stinks. As a mad Sharks fan I may be presenting with a bit of bias, but I still don’t think it’s a good fit. The Shire is a part of Sydney and identifies itself as such. The gong on the other hand is a regional city that has its own separate identity. That’s why I don’t think the Dragons/Steelers merger made much sense in the first place. Yes, Sutherland is on the south side of Sydney and in the direction of Wollongong, but it’s still a 45 minute + scoot down the Princess to the gong. Not exactly convenient for home games. That said, I think geographically based mergers do make sense. I actually wrote an article about it a while back. But I think we’ve moved passed that point now and if we were going to do it properly it would involve a lot of upheaval. As much as it pains me to say it, if a merger were to come out of the 3 teams in question, it probably should be (should have been) a Dragons/Sharks joint venture (but yuck!).

DOW, I disagree the gong is 30-40 years away from a fulltime NRL presence. Let’s take a look at it. The region is a RL heartland and home to a significant population of juniors that continue to produce some very talented individuals. Wollongong is the countries ninth largest city with a population now exceeding 300,000. The Illawarra/South Coast area is home to twice that number and the entire region is booming as more and more Sydneysiders chase a cheaper and traffic-free lifestyle by the sea. As well as the future looking bright on the South Coast, there’s a brilliant recently developed boutique stadium that’s crying out for a full schedule and its own team. There’s some significant port infrastructure and mining activity in the region that will always have the potential to draw sponsorship dollars and the economy is continuing to diversify itself. Yea the old Steelers struggled for coin but how many Sydney clubs weren’t in a similarly precarious position in the late 90’s? Both RL and Illawarra are very different beasts since the days of the Steelers.

David, no matter what you come up with, the makeup of the competition is always going to favour the Sydney teams. I would structure the draw so every team outside this Southern Conference would make one ‘long haul’ trip to either Auckland or Perth each season to try and keep things as fair as possible. But for me, the big benefit and the whole purpose of a conference system is making use of the tribalism and club rivalries that are particularly strong in Sydney, where half of the competition is based. I’m open to other models (although naturally, we always think our own is the best), but I find it illogical to shoot down suggestions based on some teams having to spend a few more hours in the air (and the reality is, that’s all it is) over the duration of an entire season.

Given how the two players went, that isn't what they showed. The one who played as a youth did okayish, the one who didn't accomplished very little and left for rugby union where he became a Wallaby (!). Edit: That said, clearly it was one of the more idiotic moves ot ever originate at AFL House that produced very little and cost far too much.

Not sure why i cant reply to your response Rob but anyway... My main beef is lumnping Canberra & Meloburne with the regional teams. Under the system proposed in the orignal post canberra is a guranted an away trip to NZ, Perth & Meloburne every year, something the Sydney teams are not guranted. Sydney teams have just as much chance to play Perth at home in that system. This is a huge advantage for Sydney, espically when you consider that Sydney teams play the vast majority of away games in Sydney already. Like Crosscoder proposed if you want a conference system, break it into 3. Have 4 sydney teams in one conference, 5 in the other and split the regional teams amongst them.

Bad conference alignment is breaking up neatly placed east and west based Sydney conferences with Perth and Auckland teams for the sake of 3 to 4 hours of travel over the duration of a season (considerable??? please!!!). As I said in my original comment, the Sydney suburban structure isn’t ideal. But it’s this tribalism that’s the game’s greatest asset under this model. There’s no tribalism to be leveraged in a game between (eg.) the Sharks and the West Coast Pirates.

David, that is completly different to buying established stars from a different code. The AFL paid overs for a couple of league players hoping it would help promote the AFL and all its done is show how anybody can play AFL if they are fit enough and got them some cheap headlines, but mad no difference to converting anybody.

Hi David, no I’m not kidding. Here’s a few rough but simple calculations for you: East coast to Auckland- 3 hours, to Perth- 4 hours. Auckland to Perth- 7 hours. Considering almost all of Auckland and Perth’s away games will be on the east coast: I repeat, for Auckland and Perth having to play each other twice represents an extra 3 or 4 hours of travel over the duration of a season. Obviously not 3 or 4 hours more than everyone else, but 3 or 4 more hours on what they’d otherwise do. As NSW and QLD are the heartlands of Australian RL, Auckland and Perth are always going to be in the unfortunate position of having a significantly longer travel schedule than the rest of the comp. But I don’t believe for a second that an extra 3 or 4 hours in business class is going to break their seasons. And can we wrap our heads around the fact that the conferences in question mean that teams only play 3 different games to the teams from outside of their conference. 3 games in a 22 game season. There’s arguably more variability in the current season structure from team to team compared to this model. As we’ve established, for Perth and Auckland this represents an extra 3 or 4 hours on a plane than what they’d otherwise have. As I pointed out to Axle above, considering the other 16 teams outside this Southern Conference would have to play one of these long haul away games in their season, for Canberra and Melbourne it simply represents a second ‘long haul’ trip. So considering they’re roughly an hour away from the Sydney basin, it means an extra 2 or 3 hours in business class over the duration of a season than they’d otherwise get. Again, hardly a disadvantage and certainly nowhere near enough to suggest it would have a seriously detrimental effect on a season.

I just can't accept that is an objectively valid position to hold, but I doubt there's any point to debating an issue so unrelated to the article :P

Another look at theroar.com.au, ANOTHER article about expansion in the NRL. PLEASE roar, can we please please PLEASE not have any more articles on expansion!