The surprisingly simple fix to the domestic rugby malaise

I took my regions from the Tri-city plan for Sydney, with Greater Western Sydney, Central Sydney and Eastern Sydney, but made mistake!!! Eventually adding a South Sydney and a North Sydney team. Start with Western Rams Sydney City Fleet Eastern Sydney??? Add Newcastle Eagles Brisbane City Gold Coast Aces Perth Canberra Melbourne Fiji Drua 10 teams 2 groups of 5, 8 games in group, 5 v other group and 1 more game v other team. 14 match season.

The ARC was a zero effort, 'throw money at it and everyone will be excited to watch' idea. Nothing has changed since 2003. ARU had zero plans for rugby post RWC and ended up wasting it because they did not understand how to keep building the game. The scary thing is nothing has changed. RA is sitting on its hands waiting for 2025 and 2027, expecting all the supporters to roll up, irrespective of airfare costs and global uncertainties, geo-political and financial. They have no idea how to build the game locally to make sure there is maximum local attendance. In my view a loss must be a possible outcome, yet we are promoting a $100m profit as a certainty that community rugby can hang its hat on. Even then, it is to be put in a trust fund so it won't be "wasted". There is no difference in wasting 2003 RWC profits by madly spending instead of investing wisely and wasting 2027 RWC profits by not spending money because you don't know how to invest it wisely in the game. Twenty years later and we still have clueless administrators running the game.

I want to like that three times Andy :thumbup:

Or make it better value. The broadcaster should be streaming every game available. I was gobsmacked at the video quality provided by clubs for Cluch TV. I didn't care about commentary either, the open mic at the ground was perfect, almost like being there. I could watch my mates sons playing in Colts or lower grades. The more people you can get to a game the better, there is a a ladder you have to climb. Rugby only benefits when supporters watch more games and attend more games. Rugby cannot afford FTA for as many games as people would like. Frankly it costs a lot of money to put games on, even at your local ground, and why should every Tom, Dick and Harry get it for free? Having said that I am just amazed that Stan and Fox do not provide more content FTA. How do you get more subscribers if you do not let them experience your product? Nine/Stan should be in a perfect position to manage that well. Look at the EOYT. It promised a lot and probably under delivered a little. I don't see why they didn't show the games on significant delay, even a couple of days. Many rugby fans would have been keen to see the game even after they knew the result. That is Stan's lowest hanging fruit to sign up as subscribers in 2023, yet they actually annoy them by not showing the games. There is a negative effect on recruitment of new supporters and players without FTA. Non-paying and disinterested supporters are not a big loss but exposure of the game to potential players is important. I would say though that RA makes zero effort in promoting the game. Massive under resourcing of on the ground development and just hoping for some magical silver bullet to show up, blanket FTA while selling broadcast rights for top dollar.

The ARC was monumentally stupid. My club had players in three Sydney sides, who do you go and watch, or support? The NRC had local players scattered across the country, and all after the club season has ended. If a young up and coming player in Sydney sees an opportunity in Perth for the NRC, then he needs to relocate at the start of the season in my view. Attracting those players also has to be good for the local competition. Therefore a Sydney NRC team is drawn from the SS clubs who play on Saturdays. I think you would get a reasonable crowd on a Sunday if you worked hard at pre-selling discounted tickets at club games, probably with the home ground club getting a clip of the ticket, or even split between the two clubs whose supporters have bought the tickets. I am not close enough to it but I would think it is just hard work to organise your mates to go to a NRC game in a couple of weeks time. The logistics is done if you buy the tickets with your rugby mates on the spot.

This is what I mean about being brave in that something new has to be tried. NRC and the version before that didn’t work due to getting very little support as how do you get passionate about made up teams like the Rams? That model has proven to be a dead duck. After 25hrs of decline, what’s the point of continuing to do the same thing over and again? I’m not sure the change suggested will wreck the club comp but I get it’ll certainly change it. No more than a few of the best from each comp should move up as foundation clubs while the bulk stay back to continue in their Shute, Hospital, Dent etc to feed players up to Gordon, Randwick, Wests, Brothers, Vikings etc. Who wouldn’t want a version of the AFL/NRL for our game? It’s a sacrifice for the greater good imo.

That only wrecks the club competition. The SS has been battling this for as long as I can remember. The NRC club has to be representative of the respective club competition and be run in the most compatible manner. Therefore in Sydney you would be playing on Sundays during the regular season.

No, I couldn't live much further away.

Hi KP - clearly there's quite an art (or science) to it. But these names mean nothing to me. I acknowledge the "unclutch it from my cold dead hands" aspects, of course. Monkey grip has a death grip on many organisations.

Hi KP, the 'only for fools and horses' line was a gag / reference to 'DelBoy'; which was the name of the star of the long running English TV show of the same name (ie 'only fools and horses'). David Jason played DelBoy ! I am pretty certain Sam 3 Can meant no offence. cheers ojp44

“ Getting the comp/s on free to air is a definite I think. I’m just not sure how that get’s monetised though.” Is one side of our Catch 22 in a nutshell.

The administration needs to be brave and try something new to develop that level below SR on a national basis. Some of the rugby clubs from Bris, Syd, Melb, Adel and Perth are 100-150yrs old so tap into those rusted on generational supporters. Creating new clubs/teams just doesn’t have that passion & support.

Don't live in Sydney do ya?

As someone from Southern Sydney, why in the world would you give Southern Sydney a team but ignore a stronghold in the Eastern Suburbs? South-East Sydney, as it is in a lot of underage rep teams across multiple sports, seems like a far more logical geographic area for a team

That is an interesting way of framing it...ARC was a 'SR' way of approaching a domestic comp, and failed. Taking the 'club' approach has oh so many obvious issues, ranging from destructive tribalism, through financial suicide, right through to destroying the very grassroot competitions that created them. Which is why I lean towards the old state/Union based system that seems to have been completely sidelined at senior level by SR, but continues successfully at the age level. It was historically always the pinnacle of the amateur game, drifting into semi/pseudo professionalism but heavily rooted in the underlying competition and place - and what are we looking for out of an NRC, if not that? Yet as you say, they keep persisting with the franchise+amateurs approach and seemingly imagining that if tweaking what is already failing can't solve the problem, ignoring it and/or just repeating the same thing over might.

There is no doubt the current governance structure is a shambles, and the ongoing rugby and financial results seem to support that. The first operational and governance split has to address the different needs of elite professional and community grassroots rugby.

ARC was a shambles, back when ARU thought you could just pay players and people would turn up. No thought was given to how the NRC might attract local support. Check out this irrational thinking. Allow Sydney club players to contract anywhere in Australia, the entire Sydney competition (all grades and colts) truncate their season so it won't interfere with the NRC, and then run the NRC after the local competition has packed up and gone home to watch the Wallabies on TV. Then they get frustrated because Fox wouldn't pay for it, because there was insufficient interest in it apart from SR scouts, and nobody was watching it at the ground. Someone from Perth will probably butt in and say there were good crowds and a lot of interest. I would like to know if that was because most of the players were local and the season started before the Perth club season ended.

Furious agreement, brilliant, love it. :) I'm all for whatever works to improve the state of Aussie rugby, really. I tend to think that the original NRL model of taking one club comp and building on it to make it national (or at least East Coastal) is the way to go, but I also acknowledge that politics will make that extremely difficult. It'd be Brisbane v Sydney, and probably result in a schism that would take a long time to mend. The NSWRL were clearly the dominant competition prior to the ARL, and then the NRL, so the QRL really couldn't mount an argument to form the core of the new comp. It's difficult, because I completely agree with many other comments that have been made lately; it needs to happen, it needs to be successful immediately for financial reasons, it needs strong fan support and 'tribalism' to be successful, and it needs media buy-in. The failure of the ARC was related to a lack of identification with the teams, as well as terrible coverage and promotion. That's why I think an existing club comp needs to be the basis, because it's a 'known' quantity with existing good will. Problem is, as noted above, there's so much rivalry and antipathy between the 2 dominant rugby states I don't know if we'll ever get there. Perhaps McLennan's view is the only viable one; just keep building on Super Rugby and basically turn it into a defacto club comp involving NZ and Oz teams.

Interesting points, but perhaps putting us in furious agreement. My point was precisely that combining clubs won't work, and NRC teams should be the end result of an integrated development journey from juniors on up. In effect, unrelated to whatever club team they might be playing for, a players NRC team would be the same rep team more or less that they would have been aligned with since they were 13 and progressed up in through the age groups. So in the case of country kids, they might eventually move to Sydney and play club rugby there, but still be aligned with their original rep team when it comes to the multiple sides NSW put out into the national U16/U18/U20 competitions. And then on into the corresponding senior NRC team.