Lets be honest with ourselves in a perfect world Illawarra wouldn't be in the NRL, they're basically what the Central Coast is to the north of Sydney but to the south of Sydney in NRL terms, wedged in between two bigger more centralised markets and within an hour or two from live NRL if they really want to see it. Also Calling them Illawarra is really a misnomer because even when the Steelers where around they only really represented Wollongong.
Don't get me wrong it'd be nice from a nostalgia point of view to see the Steelers back in the NRL, but it isn't whats really in the best interests of the NRL or the game as a whole to invest so many resources into a relatively small area that is so close to so many other teams already in the competition.
And the AFL applauds that program.Suggesting SL couldn't have done it better.Great entrees to Sydney's West and South.
They are ,but they won't be if we do the rationalisation as suggested above.Who will all the fans of the clubs flicked or relocated follow?Seriously champ, it's fair to say fans have more allegiance to their traditional clubs than the game as a whole.
You know people are constantly asserting that if a club is removed from an area that all that clubs fans and the region as a whole will suddenly become AFL fans, but never once have I seen any evidence to even suggest that there's any significant bleed off from RL to AFL or whatever other sport after a club is lost, and what bleed off there is I think most likely can be attributed to people who already were interested in the AFL/whatever to some degree anyway.
And even when they give examples like after SL they can only show correlation and not causation and ignore plenty of other contributing factors, and even on top of that they can't show that the up swing in support is from ex RL fans jumping on board.
In my opinion it's basically just an idea that somebody chucked out there some time ago (probably a journo in some old opinion peace) that a bunch off people have latched onto because on the surface of it sounds like it could be true, that has been repeated over and over until it's just become accepted as fact in some circles (generally in circles that find it convenient to believe) without any proper study or even just thought being put into it.