wrencat1873 wrote:
Whilst it is the responsibility of all clubs to properly market their home games and maximise all of their revenue streams, particularly on match day.
12 years ago, I dont think that ANY club would have foreseen the possibility of 3 overseas clubs and London in RL's second tier and the drop in revenue that comes with it.
When you factor in some of the additional cost of travel etc plus the need for any part time players to take time off, this becomes a real test and the major thing is that there is nothing extra in contribution form the RFL to off set these increases in cost and considering the shoestring that many clubs live upon, there could be some serious ramifications.
Of course 2 of the 4 will be wanting to escape the Championship at the end of next season but, this may not happen.
We still get back to the fact that the "expansion" clubs have to bring something to the party and not merely dilute the domestic game and I say this as a person who does see the need for the game to grow.
It's imperative that The RFL do their bit to increase the TV deal.
If not, we are sacrificing the domestic game for the good of The French and North Americans.
In the long term this may be a price worth paying.
However no other business model would take on substantial extra cost and deliberately reduce their income, without some reasonable prospect of medium/long term gain.
RL is gambling like hell on a brighter future, without any certainty of success and you wonder what the drivers of this are or, whether the games management are sitting in a quiet room with their fingers crossed.
I agree with a lot of that, and this is where there is a real lack of joined up thinking from all sides, and where we have the clubs and RFL seemingly pulling in different directions. I suppose that's understandable - a lot of clubs are in self-preservation mode because they see expansion as a threat rather than an opportunity - but without leadership, we let the tail wag the dog. We let clubs vote to give real-terms pay cuts to our talent, to flog out talent with more and more fixtures, and vote to cut reserve and academy teams.
I've said before that we can't simply expect to get more from Sky simply because we ask for it. We have to look at what value we're actually offering Sky and, if I was sat on Sky's side of the negotiating table, I'd see a sport with falling crowds, a competition with a receeding geographic spread and played in only two of the major media markets in the UK (there's a reason Leeds United are the most televised Football League team on Sky Sports), a competition that is losing or struggling to keep what little "box office" talent it has, a sport watched by audience demographics that have limited appeal to advertisers and a sport with a diminishing profile. Am I going to pay more for that?
And that, to me, is where the clubs AND the RFL both need to sort themselves out. I actually don't think the consumer side of the RFL's marketing is
that bad - far from perfect - but the real problems are in the commercial marketing side.
However, the RFL can only "sell" the audience that the clubs are providing and on this front, its where the clubs are failing. They're talking to the same audiences that they always were, saturating the same markets, and we're losing supporters along the way. The RFL really needs to be setting its marketing goals, and then insisting that the clubs deploy or follow an focused strategy to support that.
I see clubs failing to use the tools that they have available to them effectively - I spoke to one SL club that was spending 60% of its social media advertising budget on advertising to fans who were already buying the product - I've spoken to two other clubs that don't even have a social media advertising budget - those are real missed opportunities to build their audience and drive sales that have just gone begging. You can't blame the RFL for that.
