You can’t say that for certain until we try it. They could start by putting nrl on the main Ch9 on a Sunday, there’s no risk to nine as no ones watching the sht they show on a Sunday afternoon anyway.
If the Storm only draw 25k in Melbourne metro on 9Gem and that's way more than watch when they're not playing, what makes you think they will get more than 20k for Bulldogs vs Wests?
Whatever Ch9 are showing on their main channel may not be rating its arse off, but it probably gets more than an RL game would. Maybe the bias I spoke about earlier from the big suits is at play. Who knows.
if Ch9 wanted it, and were willing pay for it the arlc would have brought a second Brisbane club in 2013, or 2018, why wouldn’t they?
What if the ARLC were worried that Bris 2 would kill the Melbourne Storm?
Only 25k people from Melbourne tune in to watch them play on Ch9, compared to 150k in Brisbane. The average audience in Brisbane when Cowboys or Titans are playing is 157k. That would indicate Brisbane has adopted Melbourne as Queensland's 4th team. Add Brisbane 2 and at least some, if not all, of those people in Brisbane calling themselves Storm fans will jump across to the new team. Cronk, Inglis, Slater and Folau are no longer at the Storm and Smith is nearing the end. No reason to support them anymore when they're an ordinary team with no stars from Queensland and Brisbane 2 to support.
Maybe the NRL are confident the Storm can survive on their own two feet now they get 18k to their games. They weren't getting that when Gyngell made that comment about Bris 2.
News Ltd still owned Storm back then, didn't they?
I can see News Ltd, the owners of Broncos and Storm, not wanting Bris 2 to come along and make life difficult for them.
Maybe V'Landys is going to cut the umbilical cord between the Storm and NRL, which News Ltd forced upon the game when they got 50% control of it in 1998, because he has integrity.
well they’ve gone from zero people going to RL games to 19k people going to games. Zero people watching nrl to 400k tuning in to a grand final. What would you call that?
The VRL existed back in the 1980s, so people were playing the game. There's only 3,500 players in 2020. That's not exponential growth.
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 etc is exponential. They've gone from a few hundred to 3,500 in 22 years.
The Storm didn't go from 0 to 19,000 overnight. First it was 11,000, then it dropped to 9,000 and slowly crept up as the team finished in the top 4 each year because the refs allow them to gain an illegal advantage in the ruck (Smith), kick and elbow players every game (Slater), sprint off their defensive line before the ball has cleared the ruck.
When Smith got it in the nuts at Kogorah he was grinding his elbow into the back of Latimore's neck to prevent him from getting to his feet. Karma got the little shit because Latimore couldn't see what he was doing as Smith was forcing his head towards the ground, so Jeremy put arm out to push Smith away and got him right in the nuts. It should have been a penalty to St George, but the ref allowed Melbourne to do what they always do in every ruck. This time it came back to bite the Storm in the arse, as Smith keeled over like "man getting hit by football" in The Simpsons, and the dummy half ran through the vacant marker position to score the funniest try in RL history. The rest of the Storm players stood there pointing at Smith with looked at the ref because their little stunt didn't work. Stiff shit.
