It may have been in Perth ,it wasn't in Sydney or Brisbane not by a long shot .South Melbourne and Lions,moved as desperate acts.
The Swans nearly fell over 3 times, save twice by Willessee and the guy from Jeans West.They could have folded then.
They stuffed up on the NZ venture.
They have been paying out huge sums on GWS and the Suns.And it was Sheedy who was behind the GWS style push, not the AFL initially.They cannot continue to pay out large sums as their money chest has taken a huge hit.
And the increasing dramas in Vic,just adds to their pain, even though I don't wish that crap on anyone.
We were in front prior to the 95 SL war, so expansion clubs just invited in to the comp, who went over to SL ,have a lot to answer for .If they hadn't gone over,Rupert I doubt would have succeeded, and the code would more than likely have had a national footprint.Rupert only wanted about 4 Sydney clubs and not really the ones that he ended up with.
And the National footprint for the AFL is costing a damn side more under COVID, than they expected.
Whatever we are behind now ,will be somewhat easier to catch up, than it would have been without COVID. "No sign "to catch up, what do you expect under current circumstances? V'Landys finding a vaccine? Sheesh.How about the nRL actually surviving.
The Super League war was a gift, that kept on giving to the AFL for many years.And removal of Sydney clubs will have a similar impact.
This is a complete rewriting of history, just utter baseless nonsense.
Your assertion that RL was particularly dominant over Aussie Rules prior to the SL war is at best wishful thinking. They were so close that though you could make an argument for either one being larger than the other, you could never come to a satisfying conclusion of that argument.
Your assertion that RL would probably have a national competition now if it wasn't for SL also seems incredibly unclear considering that most of the expansion clubs (Newcastle, GC, SQ, Reds, Auckland) were set up to fail, and others that were having success were being cut off at the knees and cut out of the decision making structure as much as possible (Canberra and Brisbane).
There's no hard evidence that there was a mass exodus of RL fans spontaneously swapping to other sports as a result of the SL war, literally zero evidence, and despite all these lost fans the NRL now is bigger than it's ever been. . . But if you repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth right...
The AFL's grand plans of national domination had been in place for almost
two decades before the SL war, and the AFL were having, sometimes slow, but steady growth across board long before the SL war. Yes the Swans and Lions did have jumps in the late 90s/early 00s, but in that time both went into golden ages for their clubs (one that the Swans have only recently started to maybe come out of), so to suggest that their growth happened spontaneously as a result of happenings in RL is utterly ridiculous.
Yes AFL expansion clubs, particularly in the "northern states", have been costly ventures, some have even almost folded on occasion, but that is true of almost every new business that is trying to establish themselves and their product in a new market, and aside from GWS and the GC, whom haven't really be around long enough to have a real impact yet, all of them have payed dividends despite the massive investment by the AFL.
Finally, to suggest that the NRL hasn't had the resources to expand (pre-covid at least) is utterly f**king ridiculous. They've had multiple billion dollar contracts, and prior to recently the AFL achieved more on the expansion front than any other sport with way less resources behind them than that, and it costs about twice as much to run an AFL club as it does and NRL club.
The NRL, and it's predecessors, have almost always had the resources to expand, but because of infighting, certain interest groups having more say than they should, and RL's priorities almost always being arse backwards, they've almost universally chose to piss those resources up against a wall instead of investing them into anything that will build any value long term and/or expedite growth of the sport.
