imwakefieldtillidie wrote:
Agree 100%, but I’d like to see London thrown into the mix as well. It looked like they’d started to crack it from a development point of view but going part time has probably put an end to that.
We all want expansion to work, but throwing a team 5,000 miles away into a part time league was always going to end this way.
The problem with London is that it’s London. Anyone whose ever lived there will tell you that it’s not one city but a massive collection of small cities. There is no unity so if you have a team based in say Hounslow the rest of London will barely know it exists. North London and South London are effectively as far apart as Leeds and Manchester even though it’s just a river that separates them.
People have this idea that you can set up a team in London, call it London and it will represent the whole city. London’s is way to big, to sophisticated and to diverse for that. It’s way beyond a city in the way Leeds is, it’s almost a nation in its own right.
It’s also incredibly expensive as a base for anything. The money needed to make it work is simply astronomical, certainly for RL. Even the NFL struggles, a super rich sport from the worlds richest nation.
It would be nice and maybe one day but for now it’s way beyond our reach imho. Best do it root and branch, start from the core and build outwards one step at a time. It’s great to be ambitious but if you haven’t got the cash to splash then Sheffield and not London is where you need to be.
Finally the media profile thing is an utter myth imho, I saw no evidence during the Broncos era of RL’s profile being any higher, none whatsoever.
We are a regional game and we need to accept that. The key for me is to gradually make that region bigger. Truth is at the moment we aren’t really even a northern sport as we don’t yet cover all of what I and certainly most Londoners would call the north.