How are the Sunwolves performing, SANZAAR?

U+1F602

It is all about the cash. Provided that they are selling seats in the stands and getting eyes on the TV's their performance has little or no relevance to their continued presence in the competition. They could well be subsidizing the 4th Australian franchise.

Along with the Own the Force campaign where the Rugby Community not just in WA were willing to commit 5 million dollars in shares.

Scotland and Wales have cut teams and/or merged regions. They have not taken competition games to those areas that have lost their community based sides. Glasgow for example a couple of seasons back couldn't host games at Scotstoun due to an unplayable pitch instead of taking games to Aberdeen or Perth who were part of the Caledonian Reds who have just recently reformed at a grassroots level in their district region they took them down the road to Kilmarnock. Going through the Glasgow squad they have a lot of players from Caledonia.

'Nothing to do with Super Rugby then.' It is. More than just politics. Jurie Roux openly said the costs were just too much have six sides in an expensive comp like Super Rugby. The Kings were lobbed upon them mainly due to solving transformation targets. They are a producer of immense talent however they made the Rebels look competently run in comparison. Officials have been charged with fraud and they were broke before they took the field in 2016. SARU have taken over and most of them are either loaned or on short term deals.

Australia absolutely has the market to pay players. Around 2005/06 Wallaby players were up there with the highest paid in the game. Sponsors were topping up contracts and the RA had far more centrally contracted. However like now it was heavily skewed towards backs. The best forward George Smith was grossly underpaid compared to his backline counterparts.

It is important to remember that Scotland has cut teams and Wales into through a very painful process to setup regions. Rugby is a complicated sport that is expensive to run and fairly hard to play from a game understanding stand point. It's gonna have it's ups and downs. Everywhere. Best of luck. I want Aus to be successful.

Pulver,and Clyne surely are now.the worst administrators in the history of rugby!

Nonsense Mark, the year the Force was created WA junior registrations increased by more than 25% and a year after they were axed junior registration dropped by 30%. The Force is critical to any strategy to grow the game beyond NSW and QLD and make rugby a sport that is played across Australia. When the Force existed WA rugby grew and reached a point where we had the third largest player base in the country despite getting raw deal after raw deal,fron an enept ARU.

Nonsense AM Bokke, the Force were the only franchise that were financially secured for the 2018-2020 seasons as they have the financial backing of a billionaire that promised to cover any losses.

SARU is mostly useless however they outperformed Rugby Australia in 2017. SARU looks like strategic geniuses compared to Rugby Australia.

The Force record is far better than the record of the Sunwolves... All 5 teams in the Australian conference lost this weekend and it would not be the last weekend this year this will happen. The mismanagement at Rugby Australia is like a cancer spreading to every part of the game...

The MLS is another poor example if you are trying to understand how Australian rugby works (or at least should). The MLS has 20 US teams feeding players to one national team that isn’t very prominent. Of course the national game isn’t going to provide much of a subsidy. In contrast Australia had five Super Rugby teams that develop players and which the national game should expect to partially subside. Dropping the Force means that places for player development have dropped by 20%, as well as alienating an entire state that constitutes 10% of Australia’s population. That is proportionately bigger than dropping Texas out of a US sporting league and trying to call it a national competition. Get it? And if Australiam rugby fans sound irritated to you, it is because this is just one in a 20 year series of managerial farces by the ARU/RA that has seen the code go from being cashed up to almost broke and test match attendances drop from over 100 thousand people in Sydney to just over 50 thousand now. Like I said, watch and learn before you lecture, because you don’t know the landscape of Aussie Rugby.

Spot on.In front of a pathetic and apathetic crowd of a few thousand.There is absolutely no promotion of the game in general or indeed this game in particular by the Waratahs organisation.You don't have to be Einstein to look next door to the SCG and the Swans to see how to stage an event. It is indeed a sad day when you don't even have to queue for a beer at a rugby match!!!!!

Buy out.

The Force were more financially stable than all the other aust franchises. The Reds were bailed a couple of million, without having to repay, the tags were bailed twice for a few milliion, likewise no need to repay the ARU. The crumbs ere the only ones who haven't been bailed out since the Force came to the comp. As for the money squandered on the rebels, 10's of millions. What did the Force get? They had to sell their IP for 800k. A fraction of the "rescue money" spent on the other bailed out franchises. In addition to that, The Force had a backer who garrenteed that they would buy back their IP and be financially independent of the ARU, PLUS he'd contribute ~$50million to the ARU. So before you start claiming the Force were a financial burden to the ARU, you need to get you facts straight. NSW 2000, $5 million http://www.espn.com.au/rugby/story/_/id/15346960/aru-bail-nswru NSW 2014, more assistance, NSW 2017, something like $300k more for their Shute shield TV deal. Reds 2010, Several millions, https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/rescue-plan-for-near-broke-reds/news-story/9fff47a8c35dfccccec0991623ed55fd?sv=b89ea672114bb172c748220129f72a7d Brumbs nearly needed a bailout in 2011. Bail out of Force. $800k.

Joe, they still had somewhere for their two axed teams to go, speaks of greater planning and forethought than what went through the minds of the ARU.

CS, don't waste your breath. There are a lot of people on this site that spout nothing but negativity. Yet a few examples below show whats happening to Rugby Union in Western Australia and around the world. . *Rugby has just gone professional again in North America with 'Major League Rugby'. *South America is setting up a pro comp for 2019/2020. *The former Warsaw Pact (Soviet) countries of Europe believe they will be ready to start a new pro comp by 2020. *There is talk of including more European nations in Pro14. South Africa could also be heading north. *Andrew Forrest is getting 'WSR' ready to take pro rugby into mainland Asia next year. The game is going gang busters internationally, yet in Eastern Australia it is on the nose. But Andrew Forrest's, WSR could be the new comp that sees AU and NZ move away from the current Super Rugby format to a new Asia/Pacific one. Aren't there even rumours that Forrest may have a FTA TV deal, as well as other billionaires onboard. Iook, i'm a Kiwi rugby diehard, and even I know international Rugby Union is changing quickly, and that New Zealand may not dominate the Test Match scene in the coming decades.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. Thanks Paulo

De Clyne and Davis won't resign as their respective boards are too gutless to take them to account and get rid of them.