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You have to give the RFL for trying to spread Rugby League, but the NRL won't even put another NRL team in Brisbane for fear of unsetting Wayne Bennett.
When the NRL says jump the ARL says how high.
The problems that Mascord was talking about are entirely down to the NRL. The other argument really has nothing to do with this topic. If you want to talk about the fact that RL in England is piss weak then yeah, it is. But there are reasons for that and TBH I don't think the greatest sports administrators in the world could do much if anything to improve things. If I was in charge of the RFL I probably wouldn't really be doing too much different to what they are doing, the situation in England as a whole is pretty hopeless due to a large number of factors such as geography, demographics, finance, public perception and whole load of other things that are frankly out of anyone's control.
The NFL is one of the biggest and most prestigious sports leagues in the world. Each individual NFL team probably has 10x the budget of the entirety of RL in the UK. And more importantly, the NFL has huge visibility and is culturally relevant. People have grown up watching American movies and TV shows and have heard of most of the NFL teams, they know the basics of American football even if they've never watched the sport. RL is not relevant. It's played almost exclusively in small industrial Northern towns where nobody really wants to be, and if you aren't from one of those places then you're unlikely to have ever even heard of the sport or know what it is because the media coverage of RL in the UK is and always has been absolutely non-existent. It's probably difficult to understand if you're from Australia but the sport really is 100% underground here. I live about an hour's drive from four Super League clubs and nobody where I live knows what RL is. They might have heard the name of the sport, but that's it. Virtually nobody would have ever seen a match or know the rules, most people don't even realize it's separate from RU. I'd say probably 95% of the population of England have either never heard of RL or have no clue what it is, and a large number of those people will just dismiss it straight away because of that. To be honest, for RL to succeed and raise its profile in the UK it probably needs to grow internationally and then come in that way. The only time cricket and RU get any real coverage or interest is during their international seasons, we don't have that because international RL is so weak so we get nothing.
All of those things. Eligibility, clubs not releasing players, prioritizing SOO and even CvC over international matches, Australia and NZ hoovering up other nations' talent, lack of any sort of strategy in terms of organizing regular fixtures or tournaments for SH nations, Australia regularly refusing to take part in international matches. Just general all-round disdain for the international game.
We already play internationals at the end of the season. Moving it just means we end up playing less matches and defeats the point in it being there. Another pathetic cop-out by the NRL. I know for sure that they wouldn't even consider moving SOO or City vs Country.
It's poorly organized because they don't care enough to organize it properly. There is plenty of time to play international matches after the season, that's a pathetic excuse. The rep round is a success, it has grown year on year, it would've continued to grow and it's being scrapped for literally no reason. So that they can do what they should've been doing all along, and because they're too f**king stupid and insular to get anything right.
