Part1:
Across the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, rugby league binds communities together like almost nothing else.
The sport is more popular than football or cricket in many towns and smaller cities across the two counties and in places such as St. Helens, Wigan, Widnes and Warrington, rugby league is tantamount to religion.
These communities have been the bedrock of Super League’s fanbase since the competition was launched in 1996 alongside its long-time broadcast partner, Sky. It was a modern, made-for-TV league designed for contemporary tastes, introducing cheerleaders, fireworks, hardcore techno and state-of-the-art production.
Older fans, including my dad, didn’t care much for it at all.
Fast forward to 2024 and Super League finds itself in an eerily similar position as the dated, parochial Rugby Football League did in 1995. Super League’s on-pitch action is still good and the people that have always loved it, still love it. But everyone involved in the sport – fans, clubs and even the league itself – know that it is overdue for a refresh.
Enter IMG, the sports marketing agency tasked with making Super League Great Again.
Hired in 2022 by the league’s trading arm RL Commercial on a 12-year deal, IMG’s vision to ‘reimagine’ rugby league in England and beyond will start to be realised in 2025 when its controversial ‘grading’ system comes into play.
‘Grading’ will replace the traditional promotion and relegation system between the Rugby Football League’s three tiers, awarding Super League status to the 12 highest-graded clubs each year.
Each club governed by the Rugby Football League will receive a grade from A to C, awarded in accordance with their on-pitch performances, the size of their fanbase, the strength of their finances, the quality of their stadium and their commitment to serving the local community.
Many fans, including my dad, don’t care much for it at all.
“Grading was never going to please everybody, but the clubs voted in favour of it,” Rhodri Jones, managing director of RL Commercial, tells
SportBusiness. “Grading has hastened improvements in certain clubs that we have been wishing for over a number of years – new owners, new investment, new stadium upgrades and refurbishment.”
He continued: “Every club has had to do something with their facility, whether that be access areas, LED boards, big screens, or amenities, facilities has definitely been the busiest pillar in terms of visible improvements.”
Jones is keenly aware that Super League’s next generation of fans – and even some of those among its current congregation – may not want to spend every Saturday afternoon being drenched on a dilapidated, uncovered terrace.
There is a clear and present danger that the Generation Z of Castleford, Wakefield and Widnes could drift away to other more glamourous, polished, globally-relevant sports properties. It is a major concern that the sport’s fanbase in England has not meaningfully grown in almost 30 years – a key sticking point for its primary funder, Sky.
Sky has now reduced the fee it pays for Super League’s domestic TV rights in two consecutive deals, taking the league’s earnings from £40m per season in 2021 to £21.5m in 2024. In short, Super League has entered a recession.
Matt Dwyer, vice-president of sports management at IMG, was heavily involved in brokering Super League’s latest deal. He says that Sky’s concerns about Super League’s lack of growth were reflected in the latest result, which saw the league’s income reduced by a further 10 per cent until the end of 2026.
“Sky said to us: ‘Look, you’ve been very steady for a long period of time and you need to be growing the fanbase.’ We need that critical mass to start moving the needle, and that takes time. That’s why this is a 12-year deal.”
The funnel
Super League and IMG’s first major task is to build that critical mass beyond the faithful tens of thousands that attend matches every week.
It will be done in all the ways you might expect: social media account revamps; content creation plans and pushing its star players across timelines and feeds as much as possible.
“Our priority is growing audience, attendance, but a growing number of young people are following players as opposed to clubs,” Jones explains. “We need to know what is going to entice that seven-year-old to take an interest in rugby league. Is it Wigan Warriors, or is it going to be [Wigan Warriors star] Bevan French?”
Jones and Dwyer firmly believe it will be the latter. Super League has initially focused this strategy on a small group of players and coaches, bringing their stars to other Sky- and IMG-backed properties, such as the UFC, the DP World Tour and Wimbledon, for content creation purposes.
This content is being pushed out across central and club social media accounts, which Dwyer says have seen strong aggregate increases across follower count and engagements in 2024 compared to last year.
“The challenge for us is commercialising that,” Jones says. “Ultimately, it’s great having an engaged digital audience but we need to commercialise it. There has been a focus this year with those 12 Super League clubs, with grading in mind, to go through the same [social media development] process that we went through 18 months ago.”
Commercialising Super League is a different challenge for IMG, which must treat the property in a very different way to some of its other rights-holder partners.
The average fan of Wimbledon and The Open – IMG’s longest-standing rights-holder partnerships – tends to have far more disposable income than the average Super League fan. Rugby league is a predominantly working-class sport in England, with top teams based in some of the country’s poorest communities.
This is not lost on Dwyer or Jones, who know that Super League’s place in a family’s weekly budget is not to be taken for granted.
“We have an incredibly passionate fanbase and I think that as long as we give them the best possible product and the best sporting experience they can possibly have, they will prioritise rugby league as part of their weekly spend,” Dwyer says. “That was one of the ideas behind the concept of grading: ensuring that every club is offering fans a top-level experience that represents value for money on their hard-earned pounds and pence.”
Bringing back the magic
As Dwyer and his team focus on filling the funnel with new potential fans, Super League has plenty of work to do with its existing fanbase.
The 2024 edition of the much-loved Magic Weekend – a full round of fixtures played at a single, neutral venue – was unanimously panned by fans disappointed by the event being held in Leeds, one of the Super League’s heartland cities.
As the highlight of the regular season and a tentpole event in Sky’s Super League calendar, live pictures of a half-empty stadium did not give viewers a feeling that the competition was in a healthy place, as fans failed to engage with matches involving clubs other than their own.
A bad Magic Weekend compounded feelings among existing fans that Super League could be in decline – something that Jones acknowledges.
“There was a lot of disgruntlement from fans and I think when you look at the purpose of Magic Weekend, a lot of it was around that destination weekend away from the heartland. Clearly Leeds didn’t do that and I guess that was reflected in the ticket sales profile that we had this year.”
Any sign of decline among Super League’s existing fanbase – some of the most loyal sports fans in the world – is an alarm bell worth heeding.
“It needs work to build it back up and to create the weekend that perhaps it once was back in the early 2000s and 2010s. We need to enhance it, we need to make it better. We can only do that with the right destination venue in the first instance and then we’ll go from there.”
Super League will enter a new era in 2025, with a 'grading' system replacing promotion and relegation. The change won't be a panacea, but RL Commercial and IMG hope it will spark life into a…
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