Do they? Funny I’m a football fan and I have missed anything on the scale of this farce in the last 15 years.
Probably because FIFA runs the game not national governing bodies as is the case in rugby league. Trying to say this is what happens in any sport with an international presence is a joke.
There's one enormous difference between FIFA and the RLIF- FIFA can afford to run soccer (or in other words it's more beneficial for the majority of the national federations to be aligned with them then with any individual federation for their survival) and cause of that have the power and leverage to overrule any individual groups in the sport trying to take control away from them, the RLIF on the other hand couldn't afford the running costs of nations like France, PNG, or NZ, let alone either the NRL or RFL, so realistically even if they do threaten to take the sort of action necessary to wrestle control away from the NRL (or RFL as the case may be) they don't have the power and/or resources to back it up.
Until a point where RL as a sport becomes big enough worldwide so that the RLIF can muster enough power to pull the federations into line it will always effectively be dictated to by one of the federations acting as a hegemonic power, at the moment that hegemonic power happens to be the NRL and from that position as hedegmon they've basically pulled all of the pacific under their sphere of influence.
Once you realise that and look at the problem that way it becomes much easier to solve, namely the only way that you are going to get more support for internationals would be to convince the global hegemon that it's A. in their interest and B. hopefully is financially beneficial for them as well.
Unfortunately with the way that the Denver test has been handled from the start it's done the exact opposite necessary to get what it wants, it's displayed that it's not in the NRLs' interest and as the NRL clubs see it it's directly attacked their bottom line, and those two mistakes will make the NRL worry more about future endeavours similar to this which will mean that in the future they'll be even more likely to meddle in the organisation of such events, which is a very, very bad thing if you want more focus on international RL.
Frankly as I've been saying for quite a while now the whole way that the Denver test has been handled from the start has been a farce and has done more to harm international growth then to support it, and it was all completely avoidable with a couple of minor changes, but I can't be bothered going into that.
