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From P.E. Teacher and part-time kit man in Huddersfield to New York entrepreneur organizing million pound flight deals??? I think I’d keep my distance from this guy.
They're only four wins off a top five berth as well. I reckon enough clubs above them will be stumbling and by the end of the season Widnes can challenge for a spot in the playoffs. Their differential is already impressive and they have a game in hand on most other clubs as well.
Sheffield eagles are the surprise package for me so far. If only they could get the people of that great huge city behind them.
That top 4 is an expansionists and big city clubs wet dream including York with I believe has a population of just over 200,000.
How big is Sheffield?
According to Wikipedia the city itself has a population of 577,800 with a metropolitan of 1,569,000.
Plus it’s the only professional/semi-professional RL club in North Yorkshire which although is mostly rural with a large number of market sized towns gives them an even bigger catchment area.
But how many of those market towns have any RL history or presence currently? Very few. I've talked about this with a lad at work and we came to the conclusion that there are certain middle class towns and cities that don't support sport well. York is one of them IMO. Harrogate is another.
If your talking about York and North Yorkshire in particular I think it’s a case of getting RL people/volunteers on the ground to set up junior teams from say u8’s right through to u18’s and girls teams.
I think RU is strong in a lot of these market towns in North Yorkshire.
No, if you're talking about North Yorkshire then there aren't really any major settlements aside from York, it's an extremely large rural and segregated area and the population of the county as a whole is lower than the city of Sheffield. There would also be pretty severe demographic issues given the nature of most of those small towns and villages. It's not really worth it or desirable and nor would it really work. As for York itself, the RL club is pretty well run and gets relatively good crowds already given their status, if they ever made it to SL I don't see any reason they couldn't be as well supported as the likes of Huddersfield/Wakefield or similar.
Compared to each other? In theory Sheffield, it's a far bigger population and one of the best sporting cities in the country. The issues are firstly that the club doesn't have a proper stadium, the ground that they used in the early days of SL was demolished a few years ago and they're currently playing on what is basically a training field, which is supposedly going to have an actual stadium built on it at some point but the project has stalled over and over again and I don't know what the current status is. Secondly and more importantly RL has a ridiculously low profile in Sheffield, I'd say that probably 90-95% of the population would have either not heard of RL or not know anything about it or be able to differentiate it from RU, which seems crazy when you consider it's only about 30 minutes drive from places like Featherstone but that's the way it is in the UK. It's the same with other big Northern cities like Liverpool and Manchester. There have been one or two decent junior clubs in Sheffield which have produced pro players and people have worked hard there for a lot of years, but there really is just no RL culture at all.
The capacity of york’s New stadium will be just over 8,000 which would be more than enough considering teams like Huddersfield, London, Wakefield and Salford average crowds are well below that and teams like castleford, hull kr and Catalan are around or just over 8,000. Plus I’m sure there’s scope for expanding the capacity by a few thousand.
York is in a better position to do so compared to Sheffield in terms of having a better stadium, bigger crowds and more amateur/junior RL clubs within the city.
