Fair point. I’m not a TV executive but I’m tipping you’re not either, so we don’t know.

5 years ago, would you have thought that a national competition of 17 to 19 year olds would have got a broadcasting deal, if I pitched you the idea? There’s plenty of content that gets played on pay TV that’s not necessarily at the elite level, like the New Zealand provincial rugby competition for example.

Interesting comments about the Superleague. You’re right that SL has removed automatic promotion and relegation, but they have stated that it isn’t a closed shop forever – they want to keep some kind of pathway open for strong clubs to come up from the lower divisions. I don’t think automatic annual P&R would necessarily be a good idea for the NRL it went to 2 divisons in any case.

Crosscoder, your logic is a bit strange. You say we don’t have the population to support 24 teams arranged in 2 divisions, but we do have the population if they’re arranged in 2 conferences? Please explain? ; )

Actually I don’t mind your idea of two conferences and I think it should also be an option for consideration.

There are definitely some advantages to a conference system, but there are also a number of drawbacks, with the main one being that you dilute the quality of the competition by expanding like this. All the top players would be spread over 24 teams in your structure, rather than concentrated in the top 12 in mine.

I think conferences are the wrong idea, for many reasons, but in general because it seems to be trying to put a square peg into a round hole.

Just because something works for the NFL doesn’t mean it will work here, the situations are completely different.

The NRL is fare more centralised than the NFL. Any split of the Sydney teams will be difficult as will the decision of where to put the non-Sydney teams. How is NZ a local rival of North Queensland, but St George is not a local rival of Canterbury? It doesn’t make sense. In truth, there are no natural conferences, so anything you create will be artificial and lack any real meaning. What is the point?

I agree with a couple of posts above, in that a 2-division setup would be far superior to a huge single-division competition.

There are at least half a dozen or more locations in the region that could easily suport a professional NRL football club, so getting to 20 or 22 teams is feasible in the fairly near future.

But the problem with having so many teams is that the top talent is spread too thinly. I would much rather see a 12 or 14 team first division and an 8 to 10 team second division.

With some kind of method to allow well supported and welll performing 2nd div teams to aspire to gain promotion to 1st division, this could be a success and better structure than just going to a huge 20 or 22 team single league.

You would definitely need another game on the weekend, and in reality the only other possibility is New Zealand V Combined Pacific Islands. Even then, there would be a big concern about how competitive the PI side would be, and whether the game would generate enough interest. But I reckon it would be worth giving it a try.

I’ve been to a few club games around Origin time in the last few years and the crowds are always pretty bad, and the quality is sometimes low as well, so it’s hard to argue that we would be giving up all that much. You could even say that playing these low quality games devalues the club games to a degree, and could actually be damaging to the NRL.

I’m glad you mention the world outside of sport. Yes, of course there is great variation in salaries across all professions. But, if your hypothetical suburban firm wanted to pay their employees more, would the rest of the firms in town step in and say “you can’t do that, you can’t afford it”? Would the law society? The government? No.

Why do so many people accept regulation of sports players wages when no-one accepts it in the rest of society. I could certainly make the case that we should cap the salaries of lawyers or doctors or bankers because it might be “in the best interests of society” to reduce the cost of these services and industries. It may well be, providing we ignore the interests of those lawyers, doctors and bankers.

Would you be happy getting paid half as much as someone else to do the same job?

It’s not greed, it’s just human nature, you can’t fight it.

Neither you or I or any mug punter knows how much the clubs can afford to spend.

The cap is set too low. It’s main purpose is to limit player salaries. And the method it uses to do this pulls all clubs down to the level of the least-supported and most poorly managed. It needs to be raised or abolished.

Players already get paid to play Origin…..so what’s your point?

Sorry to have to say it, but that’s a terrible idea.

This would lead to fewer tries because teams would now always kick for goal rather than go for the try when awarded a penalty near the line.

If you think about it mate, the problem is not the amount of penalties, it’s the amount of penalties that result in a kick for goal, which is often an anti-climax.

A better solution would be to REDUCE the value of a penalty goal, and introduce different penalties for repeated or deliberate infringements such as the sin-bin or send-off. Therefore we’d see less kicking for goal, but also less negative play.

Sheek, if Brothers are one of only 2 clubs in the country generating any sort of tribal support, then you just destroyed your own argument, because Brothers aren’t a district club. They started out as a Christian Brothers schools old boys club.

And also, I went to the grand final last year (as a neutral), and the crowd was split pretty evely between Randwick and Uni supporters.

So when you talk about a merger between the Power and the Magpies…which is the original club ?

Ora, how many club games would a Super 14 or All Black player turn out for each year?

Ora, there are probably 70 or 80 rugby clubs in Sydney, and only 12 of those play in the premier competition which is the Shute Shield.

There rest play in the sub-district competition. Some clubs have 5 or 6 grades plus colts teams.

The Taranaki club competition is not the equivalent of the Shute Shield. If anything it’s probably closer to the level of the sub-district comp.

Sorry, I was replying to Ora. I think your idea is a good one, and I totally agree with you.

I think rugby needs to look at what has worked in other sports in this country, not what has worked for rugby in other countries.

Personally I would eventuallly like to see a comp with perhaps 6 Sydney clubs, 3 South-East Qld clubs, Perth, Melbourne, and Canberra.

The provincial sides are part of rugby union history in NZ and SA, but have no history here. We had clubs and state rep teams.

You’re right that the level below Super rugby needs to be strengthened and improved, but imposing a completely new setup just because it works in other countries is the wrong solution.

Also, the many of the clubs in Sydney originally grew from the idea of “district” sides. Some of those districts would have larger populations than many of the provincial areas in NZ.

How many more teams can we possibly sustain in a single division? With 16 it’s already stretched, personally I think 18 or 20 is too many.

If the overall quality of the competition declines and it there is less money to keep the best players in the league, then it’s not a good idea IMO.

Doesn’t it make more sense to move toward a second division? I think the the English rugby union competition has the right idea. They have a 12 teams in the Guiness Premiership, and then 12 teams in the next level down. They are moving the second division to a full time professional league.

Great idea – a genuine Qld V NSW match would be sensational.

Thanks Redb. I think in some ways the Sydney NRL clubs are really only starting to do now what the Melbourne AFL clubs were doing in the 80s and 90s.

Some clubs have really woken up to it, and will become the powerhouse Sydney footy clubs over the next 10 years.

Unfortunately administrators at some other clubs are still sticking to the old mindset of telling the supporters what they should want, rather than listening to what they want.

For example, there was a bit of talk in Sydney last year about the Sydney Roosters going back to their traditional name of Eastern Suburbs. The majority of Roosters supporters wanted it, but what did the club do?

They came out with a hair-brained suggestion to rename the club as the “Bondi Roosters” to cash in on the supposedly glamourous image of Bondi Beach.

“The only stat which points in favour of the IAS is the scoreboard.”

That’s the only stat that matters!

Redb,

What is the background and history to the huge membership numbers for the AFL clubs? I remember someone on here once mentioning that most clubs really started pushing memberships in the 80s. Is that right? How long did it take to build up to those sort of numbers?

I think the author has a reasonable point. It’s all well and good for clubs to say “we’re developing a memebership culture like the AFL” and then just sit back and wait for it to happen. They need to look at what the AFL clubs have done to actually foster and develop it over the years.

One thing that bothers me with with my club (the Roosters) is that they refuse to include voting rights / football club membership with the season ticket “membership” packages.

This might be unimportant to some people, but I think that it sends a pretty negative message to supporters.

“Yes, we want your support and money, we want you to feel like you’re part of the club, but actually….we don’t really want you to be part of the club. We’ll reserve football club membership for a select few”.

Adrian,

Most people have just taken this game for what it is at face value – a worthwhile celebration and recognition of indigenous footballers and their contribution to the sport.

You have taken a more critical view, which is fine, but I think you’ve fallen well short of any sort of meaningful criticism.

Firstly, I would suggest you haven’t really understood what the game is about.

The central idea of the game was not to pit indigenous players against non-indigenous players, nor was it to segregate along the lines of race or skin colour, as you have suggested.

One team was selected along the lines of cultural heritage (the indigenous team). This does not equate to skin colour (a number of players were white) or race (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are considered to belong to different racial groups).

The other team was selected under the requirement that one player from each NRL club was included, plus the captains and vice-captains of the Kangaroos and Kiwis. This resulted in a mixture of players of different colours, races and nationalities – but the defining idea was not that it was a team of the best non-indigenous players, the defining idea was that each NRL club had a representative in the side.

Secondly, there is no problem with selecting a sporting team using criteria that would not be considered acceptable to use in determining other things in life. For example, if you were an employer who refused to hire someone because they had grown up in a particular state you would no doubt be in trouble. And yet the idea of selecting teams along a state of origin criteria is accepted as a great idea in sport.

Discrimination in itself is not always a bad thing. It’s only when people are unfairly discriminated against, that it becomes a problem.

Selecting an indigenous side is not unfairly discriminating against any other players – or do you perhaps know of some non-indigenous players who felt aggrieved that they were not elligible to play for the indigenous side?

Alan I agree. It seems like a strange gamble to play Carney at fullback. I would rather see Pearce trialled at hooker, with Carney and Anasta in the halves.

But the real concern for Easts is in the centres.

Australia was never a colony.

You have a distinctly middlebrow stench about you, cheese.