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Manly fans wouldn't get behind a team called Sydney Sea Eagles?
The greatest player of all time stayed in the BRL until 1988. The BRL team he was in had 4 Australian internationals and was easily the strongest team in Australia. No team from Sydney had the talent to beat them.
Then they should be thrown out as they're useless to the game. There's not enough Manly fans to warrant them being the Manly Sea Eagles, so if they cannot gain new fans by dropping Manly and becoming Sydney or North Sydney then the best place for them is the NSW Cup. Manly being in the NRL is killing the sport.
For the same reason St George didn’t drop the name St George when becoming the club for a whole separate region, ‘Manly’ is just as much the brand as the Sea Eagle mascot.
It wont matter, this guys got some repeating rainman disorder, like a stutter, but it has to do with explaining the BRL's struggles, or how Broncos and NSWRL killed the game, or how Manly must die for the good of the comp, every post must have one or all of these, like a broken record.. and even if you try to explain a different point of view, the stutter starts up again, then theres nothing left but the ignore button
Balmain fans accepted the change to Wests Tigers, did they not? The only link to their old brand is "Tigers", as Magpies own 90% of the club and have phased most of the orange out of the jersey. Leichhardt Oval draws plenty of Balmain fans whereas Campbelltown struggles to get Magpies fans to get on board. Didn't a Magpies fan on here switch allegiances to Souths because he misses the mascot?
Okay. New topic. I think we need to open the game up to new audiences to grow its market share. It's short-sighted of Sydney RL fans to want 9 teams when RL fans in Adelaide and Perth have none.
Manly is still the ‘Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles’, just as the Bulldogs are still the ‘Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs’, which is why I’ve suggested Manly could drop Warringah from the club’s name to adopt a dual name/co-branding name like St George did when merging with Illawarra. ‘St George’ is a big part of the club’s identity and brand, that’s why it was kept and built upon.
Footscray became Western Bulldogs and are stronger than before. It can be done.
And as @LeagueXIII pointed out, the various London top tier soccer clubs have maintained their regional identities and history, rather than adopting more generic South London, West London etc style names. Other AFL clubs have retained their original names and have become extremely successful with large reaches without having to rebrand.
It shows that the problem isn’t the name. If it was evident that renaming clubs to carry more broad, generic names led to even bigger crowds, even more fans and even more sponsorship dollars, those soccer clubs would have done it a long time ago. Same goes for AFL clubs like Collingwood- how’s the Collingwood name working out for them vs the far more generically named North Melbourne or Melbourne?
