Every lower division club in every comp is a training ground for higher level comps. That's the nature of sport. And if anyone is going to be bothered about that situation in RL it won't be new fans in a new country, as proven by the fact the Wolfpack have just played in division 3 against clubs that can't muster 500 crowds and they've averaged 7000.
On the premise of a very rapid assent to the top they have had those crowds.
Just seen this on Facebook
Wolfpack cynics recall days rugby's great split
History often repeats itself, sometimes in surprising ways.
The current reaction to Toronto’s rise by certain sections of the rugby league fanbase in many ways recalls the days of rugby’s Great Split, back in the 1890s.
Professor Tony Collins, in his excellent book 'Rugby's Great Split: Class, Culture and the Origins of Rugby League Football', outlined many of the reasons for the Northern Union, which later became the Rugby Football League, splitting from the Rugby Football Union.
While money was one of a tapestry of issues which drove the situation, there was also resentment.
Resentment from southern toffs that northern working men were playing ‘their’ game better than them, and fear that the northern administrators were taking control of the game away from the privately educated, upper class types who had controlled the game previously.
The split was, in large part, a result of one section of the game fearing that it was having something that belonged to it exclusively stripped away.
So petty jealousy led to a split which prevented rugby as one game from taking on soccer, which was on the rise on the late 19th century, but a long way from being the dominant code it would later become.
There is similarly petty jealousy directed at the Toronto Wolfpack project, by a coterie of diehards who cannot bear to see ‘their’ game being enjoyed across the Atlantic.
There is the same anger at someone else coming in and ‘taking away’ something of the game they love.
The spurious arguments about amateurism which the southern establishment used to beat the northern insurgents in 1895 are replaced here by sneers about a lack of Canadian players, or a paucity of travelling fans.
Those things will come with time. Crowds of almost 8000 every week indicate rich soil in which the game can grow.
The game has reached a point in Europe where it needs to adapt or die.
New money is needed, and the player pool needs expanding massively.
North American influence can provide both of those things, as well as, crucially, sports administration expertise.
It can provide a tide on which the whole game can rise.
A positive attitude that believes it can achieve things doesn’t hamper the project either.
The rugby union diehards who forced the split back in 1895 ended up hurting their own game for the sake of retaining control of it.
The split allowed soccer to become king, not a unified rugby code.
It would be a shame if diehards desperate to retain control stymied another chance for growth 122 years later.
Follow the writer: Zack Wilson
Source: Everything Rugby League
