It’s undeniable that the playing talent isn’t currently sufficient to support a 14 team top flight league, but it’s the absolute minimum that the RFL should be striving for in my opinion. The tried & tested systems for RL have failed miserably & it’s time to think radically or the game is done.
Ive said this before, but still feel it’s the only solution - remove all of the junior/academy aspect of RL from individual clubs. The RFL should run regionalised academies with each set up having the same state of the art facilities. Every employee should work for, & be paid by, the RFL with scope to change/move people around on secondments to prevent any one area falling drastically behind in the aim of producing future professional RL players.
The next phase would be a draft type system to ensure an equal distribution, as is possible, of the emerging talent.
Obviously this would require some clubs to give up their self interest, but as we’ve seen with the IMG proposals this is possible. This isn’t a guaranteed fix for all RL’s problems, but it would do away with a lot of what so many people think is wrong with the game. The only real problem I see is that I wouldn’t trust the current people at the RFL to not make a complete hash of it!