RoyBoy29 wrote:
Manchester United
Manchester City
Liverpool
Everton
This is why, Manchester andMerseyside are predomintly football supported areas, little interest in rugby league.
In Manchester there is far more going on than just footy and there is still room for a SL team who could attract a decent crowd. Manchester Rangers were simply unfortunate in being stopped from being promoted as the title challengers were given the points instead after a frozen pitch stopped a game and they went up instead. But there’s still the backing there for at least the Championship long term and I think that’s where they’ll end up fairly soon. They already get crowds as big as clubs four and five divisions above.
But other than that RU is big in Manchester. Believe it or not Manchester was a rugby city up until the time City won the city’s first ever football trophy in 1904 (there’s a book by Gary James coming out about that soon). For decades before then Manchester RUFC was the city’s biggest sporting club. There are countless amateur RU clubs, could be upwards of twelve, dotted all around Manchester and Trafford. In six years there has been enough investment from the RFU to get teams at a number of junior age groups at Wythenshwe RUFC when there weren’t even any links to RU in Wythenshawe before then.
The city has more than enough people to count as a huge player pool but Mancunians RL and Manchester Rangers aren’t big enough names and probably don’t employ enough staff to reach across the conurbation yet. Outside a few postcodes in Salford you wouldn’t know Salford Red Devil’s existed across this conurbation (they may well be a city in their own right but they are part of the Manchester Metropolis and share a city centre with Manchester and Trafford). The RFL aren’t getting into schools like the RFU are neither. Swinton play in Sale now and do get into the Messenger and MEN newspapers but I’m not sure they get into the schools or amateur clubs in Manchester and Trafford.
I don’t know about how big RU is in Liverpool but I bet they have a similar situation has here.
The RFL are missing out big time on these two cities. It’s not that their efforts at Magic Weekends, Grand Finals and a Four Nations Final wasn’t attended by locals. Many of us went to Magic at the Etihad each year it was there and many of us attend the GF at Old Trafford every year. But it’s the grassroots where it is most important to entice and develop new players, not the highest echelons of the game (even though the citizens of both cities enjoy and attend those big games).
