1) Anzac day should never be commersialised. Somethings need to be kept sacred. NRL can do this by creating respectful jerseys, and create a strong respect for it by having players covet it as much as a rep jersey.
Too late it already is, either jump on the boat now or miss out.
And frankly I don't think that any of the NRL clubs ANZAC jerseys have been disrespectful (except that pink and brown Manly one lol, but that wasn't disrespectful to the ANZACs' so much as it was disrespectful to my eyes), and that is totally subjective anyway.
2) WiL is a useless concept, let's celebrate women's contribution to the game by wearing a pink jersey, because every female loves the colour. Want to celebrate WiL? Support the women's teams.
Agreed.
3) NRL gets alot of things wrong, and I mean alot. But what we do so effortlessly is incorporate indigenous culture into our game. When the AFL was going off their head about a celebration war dance, the NRL would have used that to promote the game. As much as the AFL will deny it, we are truly and indigenous game.
4) I don't care about missing out on sales, having a locked in long term indigenous jersey and identity would be great for the game, even better if it was used more than once a year if it was needed for a clash.
I don't really want to go into what would be a huge philosophical post right now on my opinions on such things, so I'll just link to an old related post and let you extrapolate my opinion from there.
Here-
http://forums.leagueunlimited.com/posts/12824768/
5) I agree I went a bit overboard with the heritage idea. It shouldn't be every year, but at least every 3 years. And you can't say some of the younger teams don't have the tradition to draw on. It's not like these areas only started playing rugby league last week. Titans would look great in a Seagulls jersey.
Or we could just let the clubs have a heritage jersey when they want to instead of in a mandated predetermined round for it, that way if the Titans want a heritage jersey they can have one if not then no.
On a side note, with a handful of exceptions none of the clubs can use traditional stuff from before their time, they don't own the trademarks or the copyright, so no the Titans probably couldn't do a Seagulls jerseys (unless it only very vaguely looked like one and wasn't really a reproduction of an old jersey) if they did the Tweed Heads Seagulls (owners of the GC Seagulls branding, and rather ironically owned by Norths Leagues clubs IIRC) would be pissed and would sue them.
6) I just want clearer restrictions, but still celebrate occasions, and above all have some really solid brand recognition.
There're already clear restrictions, the NRL just isn't very good at enforcing them (they aren't good at enforcing anything so why you'd be surprised about that IDK), and the whole point of one off jerseys and the such is for cross promotion, in other words the whole point is to slightly warp the brand for a short time to attract interest from people that wouldn't normally be interested and to hopefully make a buck doing it, that is an incredibly good thing for both the sport and the clubs to be participating in especially when they are doing with well know and popular brands and concepts (the best example being Marvel, those jerseys being featured on Marvels social media and websites exposed more people to the NRL in one go then all the other promotions that the NRL has done in the last ten years put together, that is an incredibly powerful and valuable thing).
So basically on a base level you fundamentally misunderstand the whole purpose of the jerseys, and if the changes you suggest were to be made it'd make their whole existence totally redundant...
So I would have
- home jersey (used as much as possible)
- away jersey (used when dictated, or when the club requests)
- Anzac (home or away jersey with a tasteful recognition- not to be sold to public) (optional)
- Indigenous (also can be used as clash)
- wildcard ( to be used at the clubs discretion, charity, Marvel, promotion, milestones) (optional)
- heritage (every 3 years) (optional)
- 3rd jersey ( only for teams that have locked in a long term main jersey design ie- Dragons, Roosters) (optional)
So the most jerseys a team can have is 7, the minimum is 3
Or you could simplify the rules immensely and make them much more flexible and simply have 5 jerseys a season (ignoring stuff from outside the NRL season, so Nines and the like), home and away plus three others of the clubs choosing and basically get the same results without restricting the clubs ability to react to their market and to develop their brands as they wish.
So in other words-
-Home jersey (mandatory).
-Away jersey (must contrast with the home jersey and mandatory).
-Whatever the club wants.
-Whatever the club wants.
-Whatever the club wants.
Now you could add some reasonable stipulations into that, like apart from home and away jerseys the others can only be used once unless the club is given express permission from the NRL to wear them more than once, or that one of the extra jerseys must be for a charitable cause of the clubs choosing, you could even have it that the charitable cause must be for an independent third party (in other words for a charity not owned or operated by the club or any of it's owners or employees), but ignoring little things like that the bare bones of the rules should always be like the above, and they basically are, though that is changing.
