It would be folly to expend much resource trying to 'crack' the American market. FIFA pissed hundreds of millions of dollars into US soccer and even held a World Cup their only to be able to carve out a niche market.
Here's an interesting article on expansion.
(I'll copy and paste the whole thing because periodically the URL leads to an archive page.)
Stephen Morris: League bosses must tackle the world
October 01, 2004
ON Sunday, two 17-man teams of modern gladiators - the Sydney Roosters and the Canterbury Bulldogs - will enter Sydney's Telstra Stadium to the roar of 82,000 excited and devoted fans. The teams will be attempting to win the title of national champions in a sport that requires the most rigorous combination of athleticism, courage, conditioning and team discipline demanded by any human enterprise other than war.
The NRL grand final will be a spectacle that deserves an audience of hundreds of millions. Yet this event will be seen by an international audience of only a few million - perhaps half of whom are Melanesian tribesmen only recently emerged from a jungle existence.
Despite the televised fanfare and excitement, the condition of rugby league is not as wonderful as it appears. Once upon a time, rugby league held unchallenged sway over the winter sports attention of half of Australia. Today, rugby league is seriously challenged in its heartland by rugby union and Australian Rules football. Yet despite the still greater popularity of league over rugby union -- as measured in player participation, turnstile attendance and, especially, television viewers -- the truth is that rugby union is prospering and rugby league remains economically viable only from poker machine profits and TV contracts.
The reason is that the game's managers lack entrepreneurial audacity and long-term strategic vision. Their recent failure to expand the NRL is one small example. More importantly, they have allowed the game's best source of financial profitability and expansion -- international competition -- to decline and be overtaken by more imaginative and entrepreneurial rivals in the formerly amateur rugby union. Yet it was not always so.
Fifty-three years ago, on two Saturday afternoons, 60,160 and 67,009 Australians packed the Sydney Cricket Ground to see a touring French rugby league team defeat the best players Australia could muster. And four years later crowds of 67,748 in Sydney, 45,745 in Brisbane and then 62,458 in Sydney saw France defeat Australia in the second French tour of this country. Unbelievable? Such was the flair of these Gallic rugby league arrivistes that their red, white and navy blue jersey design and their nickname (Tricouleurs) were appropriated by local admirers -- the very same Eastern Suburbs rugby league team, now renamed the Sydney Roosters, that plays this Sunday.
Yet that era seems like a dream today. For although France was able to maintain its competitiveness for another decade, with incompetent management it careered into sharp decline.
In 1992, 87,000 people packed into Wembley Stadium for a World Cup rugby league final that saw Australia narrowly defeat Great Britain. In 1995, 66,540 made the trip to Wembley to see Australia play England in the World Cup Final. Yet when Wembley closed for reconstruction, dim-witted British officials refused to take Tests anywhere else in London.
Australian rugby league officials today are reluctant to stage international Tests or even the World Club Championships in Australia. They, like many British officials, cannot grasp that there is a secondary special audience for international sport that is fickle, often affluent, and massive. Many people will attend a competitive international match to barrack for their national team but would never dream of attending a local club game.
Such people are usually middle class, and not necessarily enthusiasts of any particular sport. In 2002, more than 60,000 affluent Englishmen paid big money to watch their national rugby union team thrash pathetic Romania 134-0. Rugby union has found such people and prospers on them. Rugby league once had them but has abandoned them. This internationalist audience has helped lure rugby league stars to union.
League officials will point to the belated inauguration of the Tri Nations competition. Yet most games are being played in small English venues with crowd capacities not much more than that of Penrith Stadium. And having axed the Sydney World Sevens, this is all that rugby league has in its kitbag. Rugby union, by contrast, has Tri Nations in the southern hemisphere, Six Nations in the north, international sevens and a real World Cup to boot. If rugby league is to get off its life-support system and become a prosperous business and entertainment it must become truly competitive in the international arena.
Yet when I formally proposed to the International Rugby League meeting in 2001 that it added a combined Pacific nations team (New Guinea, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga) to the Tri Nations concept, the idea was not even considered. Not by rugby league, that is. But rugby union likes imaginative ideas, stole this one and is laughing at the IRL all the way to the bank.
Some league expansionists would look to the US as the place to conquer first. In fact, the US, with its massively saturated sports market of gridiron, baseball, basketball and ice hockey, not to mention soccer, has no real opening for rugby league yet. The US is a successful exporter of its own sports but rarely an importer of other people's. The difficult entry of the most international and well-funded team sport, soccer, into fifth place in the US sporting consciousness, should give pause to anyone trying to teach the Yankee exceptionalists a new game.
Certainly rugby league will not make a mark on the US by means of a massive mismatch between the world's finest team, the Kangaroos, and the US's part-time amateurs, planned for a cold December Wednesday night in New York City. Even with enormous advertising expenditure few Americans, and fewer of their school-age children, will attend a mid-week game that most Americans have never seen nor understand.
But those who want to see rugby league take its place as a sport loved by many millions more than now must recognise that the biggest bang for their buck will come from promoting the game in the former Soviet bloc. Each dollar spent on an American boy could attract more than 10 times as many bored and impoverished Russian and Ukrainian youth, whose sporting preferences are not as preordained as Americans, and whose loyalties could be retained for the long term.
A serious rugby league youth development program, if intelligently conceived and initiated by outsiders and sustained by local businessmen over a decade, would certainly help Russia -- and perhaps also the Ukraine and Poland -- to become the new global rugby league powers needed to challenge Australia's boring hegemony.
At that point, storming the fortified US sports barricades would make more sense. And the great contest that we'll enjoy on Sunday will have been transformed from the culmination of rugby league's sporting year to the prelude to even more magnificent international contests.
Stephen Morris, an Australian citizen, is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10932079^7583,00.html
