Thoughts? An awful, awful idea. I’m not sure why forcing Super League clubs to part fund a Rugby League team in places that have little to no history of Rugby League and show no desire of wanting Rugby League would ever be deemed successful. It smacks of the whole NFL Europe thing in the 90’s, once people realised they were watching fourth rate nobodies who were never close to making the NFL, interest dropped and it eventually died off completely.
When reserves were announced, I thought about it and come up with a radical idea that kind of “killed two birds with one stone”. League One has become quite contentious. It’s lost it’s way. The RFL wanted it to be a development league for a while. It was trimmed down and Hemel, Oxford and All Golds we’re admitted. Then within about three years, that all changed and the development clubs were left on their own and bowed out, one by one.
I think League One needs to go back to being a development league and there needs to be some form of Reserve league, so why not combine the two? That way, it’s a development league for new clubs and a development league for players of Super League clubs.
There’s twelve Super League clubs, two are expansion sides, one (Catalans) have a Reserve side that plays domestically in France and Toronto aren’t even out of nappies yet. That leaves ten sides and eleven League One sides.
Split those twenty-one into seven conferences of three teams, with at least one Reserve side in each conference. You play the two teams from your conference home and away and then the other eighteen teams once, either home or away, totalling twenty-two regular season games.
Top seven Conference winners progress to the play-off’s, of which I’m yet to decide how it’s sorted. Maybe throw in one wildcard team to even it all up.
