Yes.
Maybe. But the vast majority of sports would kill for NRL crowds. That's even more true when you look at the turn out relative to population size.
we have an incompetent administration
Which sport doesn't? :lol:
15 of 16 teams are running at a loss
So? What do you expect, Rugby League is a tiny sport. Plenty of admired competitions, at the height of domestic sport, have ample teams running at a loss.
There is very little parochialism among clubs and that is only just starting to increase.
Again, completely natural.
We are yet to be recognised as a national competition
So?
do not have a national presence
So?
have ex players running clubs into the ground.
Debatable.
Our players are massively underpaid and only for the Crowes, Politis' and Tinklers bailing out destitute clubs, we'd have to rely on pokie revenue to make ends meet.
So?
The current premiers play out of a cow paddock as we set no minimum criteria for the quality of grounds our players use.
All the best grounds in the NRL are small "cow paddocks". Nothing more embarrassing than teams who play in massive empty stadiums because deluded nuffies like you think an extra thousand through the gate is more important than the image of the game.
If you think the NRL is a world class competition, then you are easily pleased.
The NRL is the most competitive professional team sporting competition on the face of the Earth. But I didn't say it was a "world class competition", what I said is that most sports would love to be in our position, and the NRL is not a sporting backwater that is 100 years behind the rest of the world.
The only thing world class about our game is Origin. The rest is horse shit wrapped up as chocolates!
You're riding on the coat tails of f**king lunacy!
Name me 5 competitions in the world that aren't soccer, exist in a country with a population similar to Australia and embarrass the NRL. Name me 5.
Can you? No.
What you find is that the only competitions that make NRL look bad are either soccer(the biggest sport on earth) or competitions in countries with huge populations.
The AFL is the only sport to legitimately make the NRL look poorly run. But the AFL is an exception and punches ferociously above it's weight.
Now you can quite rightly say that if the AFL can do it then so can we. Everyone knows the NRL has potential beyond the position it's in now. You can give a long f**king list of things in the NRL that could be changed for the better, and you've already hit the tip of the iceberg. What you can't say though is that the NRL is 100 years behind the rest of the sporting world because you're ignoring the vast majority of sporting competitions, the vast majority of the sporting world, that would kill to be in the position of the NRL! There's thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of sporting competitions in the world and the NRL is comfortably in the top 50, potentially higher depending on which criteria you choose to look at. If you look at the attendance criteria the NRL does very well compared to the vast f**king majority of the sporting world, extraordinary well considering the population size of Australia.
Rugby League is a tiny sport and the NRL exists in a tiny country. Relative to sports of similar size in similar small nations, the NRL is extremely successful and very progressive. If you want to see backwards sporting competitions living in the past you only have to look at any number of soccer or rugby competitions in the world.
The problem is you seem to think competitions like the NFL and AFL are normal, the reality is they're exceptional in the sporting world. There might be a big f**king gap between the top sporting competitions in the world and the NRL, but there's an even bigger gap between the NRL and most of the sporting world.
