On the one hand Perth Red says the Force are no threat to a Perth-based NRL team because rugby league is the more popular sport. On the other hand he says the only reason rugby union has three times as many players as rugby league in Perth is due to the city not having an NRL team.
How does he explain Melbourne?
There's 12k rugby union players versus 5k rugby league players in Melbourne. The Storm were around for a dozen years before the Rebels were created.
This number is similar to Perth, which has 12k rugby union players versus 4k for rugby league.
If the game was as popular as he claims then Western Australians would be playing rugby league in larger numbers. The excuses he makes for rugby league's impotency in Perth don't add up.
RU is a bigger participation sport than RL in Canberra as well. There're numerous cultural and historical reasons why, but aside from a short period in the 90s RU has always had been a bigger participation sport here. Aussie Rules has generally had larger participation numbers here as well.
Are you gonna argue that the Brumbies are more successful commercially than the Raiders now?
Local participation numbers has got less than f**k all to do with the success of professional sides, and you're simply disconnected from how the modern sport's industry functions if you think otherwise.
In this day and age you can literally have multiple regions with highly successful pro teams that don't produce any local talent at all.
The NHL would probably be the best example, where Canadian players still make up a majority of the talent pool despite a minority of the teams being based in Canada, and where the Tampa Bay Lighting and Las Vegas Golden Knights have won the Stanley Cup 3 of the last 4 seasons, and it genuinely wouldn't surprise me if there isn't a single player in the NHL from either city.