The Bears

[siv]

If we're going to stick with nine teams in Sydney then their salary cap should be 30% lower than the Knights, Raiders, Warriors, Storm, Cowboys, Titans, Broncos, Dolphins, Pirates, Firehawks and NZ2. The competition is rigged to give the Sydney clubs easier access to players on the market, by virtue of not having to fly on a plane evry week. The only way to make things fairer for the non-Sydney clubs is to give them more money to spend so that the Rorters can no longer buy premierships.

Sorry

Salary Cap should always remain the same for all clubs. And in fact should include a requirement to field a RG and NRLW team.

Cheaper rates of living and availability of 3rd Party arrangements offset any Sydney v Regional cost arguments

But what you can have is a "travel allowance" based on the number of greater than 2h by bus travels

You already have a relocation allowance in place

 

[The Great Dane]

Always on point @Colk but I think it is a bit of a redundant argument to have. You’re arguing with a dying perspective, one where Rugby League in Australia is exclusively structured for the Sydney comp, and all other clubs are there at the grace of the former NSWRL. No matter what facts or rationales raised in a solid argument, it won’t matter as it doesn’t serve the worldview in question.

It’s a worldview that surprises me that it still exists, as it is outdated by over 30 years. I was flabbergasted in an early argument you had with someone else that Cronulla is a legitimate or solid club compared to Canberra, despite only starting 15 years before the Raiders.

Sydney is definitely critical to RL and must be looked after, but it’s well overdue for the rest of Australia to be prioritised in orders of magnitude greater for the game to exist and grow in the future.

That dying perspective still controls the game to this day, with PVL doubling and tripling down on the suburban and Sydney first attitude since he gained control of the ARLC.

All the focus for the last few years has been on investing in suburban grounds over centralisation stadia, on multiple grades on game day despite that not benefiting anybody but Sydney, expanding by adding another waste of space suburban club, the NRLW, and women's footy in general, being structured in the archaic way that it is, etc, etc. All of these decisions are being made because the Sydney old boys club, with their suburban and our clubs first attitudes, controls the seats of power.

So yeah, I'm not sure how you can say it's a dying perspective when it literally runs the game, and aside from a couple of short periods in the late 90s and early 2010s, always has.

 

[Perth Red]

Just another reason we neEd to keep adding clubs from outside nsw. Eventually the power of numbers will sit outside nswrl. Not to mention most agree that Sydney folk are weird and don’t get off their arses to support their teams, swans aside, so more clubs outside Sydney hopefully the more we will see crowds grow Leaving the small minded suburban teams with little choice of they want to keep up.

 

[Santino Patane]

That dying perspective still controls the game to this day, with PVL doubling and tripling down on the suburban and Sydney first attitude since he gained control of the ARLC.

All the focus for the last few years has been on investing in suburban grounds over centralisation stadia, on multiple grades on game day despite that not benefiting anybody but Sydney, expanding by adding another waste of space suburban club, the NRLW, and women's footy in general, being structured in the archaic way that it is, etc, etc. All of these decisions are being made because the Sydney old boys club, with their suburban and our clubs first attitudes, controls the seats of power.

So yeah, I'm not sure how you can say it's a dying perspective when it literally runs the game, and aside from a couple of short periods in the late 90s and early 2010s, always has.

Fair point and you’re 100% correct. It will lead to the demise of the game though. But there are bigger fish out there directing these things the way they want them to go unfortunately.

 

[The Great Dane]

Just another reason we neEd to keep adding clubs from outside nsw. Eventually the power of numbers will sit outside nswrl. Not to mention most agree that Sydney folk are weird and don’t get off their arses to support their teams, swans aside, so more clubs outside Sydney hopefully the more we will see crowds grow Leaving the small minded suburban teams with little choice of they want to keep up.

If there's anything to be learned from Redcliffe winning the 17th license it's that the Old Boys in Sydney, along with News/Broncos, will only accept new teams that share their world view and/or can be controlled and aren't threating to their interests. In other words only teams that submit to the status quo will be granted a license in the first place, which means that at least in the short-mid term adding more teams from outside of Sydney is unlikely to seriously effect the power base of the club moguls in Sydney.

Nor do I have any faith that the NRL will push any significant growth outside of RL "heartlands", broadly speaking, in the foreseeable future (next 20 years give or take) anyway.

 

[Pippen94]

1. That’s patently false. Not every regional club is Newcastle and Gold Coast circa five years ago. Canberra and North Qld are better off financially than a lot of Sydney clubs. There’s also been five clubs from Sydney that have died over the past 40 years, mostly due to financial insolvency; whilst a few others have been bailed out.

2. Not all Sydney clubs have great followings. Souths, Parra, Dragons, Tigers and Dogs have good followings. The rest don’t - the Roosters have a shockingly low supporter base considering they have essentially stayed at the top of the ladder for twenty odd years. Moreover none of these teams have as much interest or following as the Broncos and Storm and clubs like the Warriors and Cowboys have similar followings to most Sydney clubs. Even clubs like the Raiders and the Knights are likely to have similar numbers to or more supporters than the less popular Sydney clubs like the Sharks, Manly and Penrith

3. Depends on where and who you are. If you’re based in Sydney and are of that vintage then of course you’ll remember the Jets. If you’re under 40 or you’re not from Sydney (say you’re a league fan from Qld, WA or NZ for example) then you’re not going to care about Newtown. Take me for example, the Western Reds, Adelaide Rams or the South Qld Crushers are more prominent to me because they were in the top league whilst I have been alive

Jets are still going strong & are the prominent local brand in one of the city's trendiest suburbs

 

[Pippen94]

Fans of Sydney clubs aren’t any more special or unique than fans of non-Sydney clubs. 10,000 at Shark Park for example are counted exactly the same as 10,000 at Newcastle or Canberra or wherever else. Sydney fans aren’t counted twice and if one were to play devils advocate then you could ask why so many Sydney sides have died and why they are not getting more supporters through the gate.

This whole fans outside of Sydney can never understand Sydney is insulting and counterproductive. If you want to grow the game then you have to move outside of Sydney or your traditional areas.

It all doesn’t matter anyway because the Sydney clubs will stay where they are, so hopefully they grow

Wrong. Bigger market equals more eyeballs for broadcast deals, sponsorship, potential growth. If getting 10k to game was important a Sydney team would've moved to gosford years ago..

 

[Pippen94]

Yet, whether you intend it or not, you're effectively asserting that Cronulla is...

You're saying that because of things that we agree aren't unique that Cronulla would react in a unique way, when they simply wouldn't. That's just wishful thinking on your part.

There's nothing particularly special about Cronulla or it's people.

Generational change is inevitable, and no matter where you are from there's no stopping it. So you can throw as many barbs and talk all the delusional power of the people BS as you like, but if the Sharks went they'd become irrelevant within a generation or two.

It's really no different to music styles, fashion trends, etc, etc.

Pfft they didn't fight their way back in, they got lucky and were saved by a very dodgy court ruling that was instantly overturned and the utter weakness of the NRL in being too scared to kick them straight back out.

It was pretty typical of RL actually, everybody is full of hard talk of letting failed clubs die, then when push comes to shove they all back down. I mean how many times have the Sharks been bailed out when the league supposedly had a "survival of fittest" model? Half a dozen times, maybe more?!

You simply don't know what weakness is if you think that being capable of carrying on after tragedy is weak...

There're literally hundreds of examples from across the world of how markets react after a beloved sports team folds. There're many examples from RL it's self, roughly half a dozen (depending on how you want to measure it) from the NSWRL/ARL/SL/NRL, and all of those fanbases and markets reacted to losing their teams in roughly the same way.

So if anybody is playing in hypotheticals it's you with your emotional driven BS.

Yeah, the north shore lost a team & fans went to other sports. Adelaide & Perth lost teams & now only draw ratings of 6k for nrl matches. Let's bugger off paying & dedicated nrl fans who are the basis for the games biggest source of income or maybe we try to integrate them with expansion?!

 

[The Great Dane]

Yeah, the north shore lost a team & fans went to other sports.

Citation needed.

Seriously, I'm a Bears fan, I experienced the attempted relocation, the merger, and them dropping out of the NRL first hand, and I don't know of/can't find any hard evidence that Bears fans whom had no prior interest in competitor sports jumped to other sports en-masse.

Every time you ask for evidence all you get are baseless anecdotes about some old work colleague, a bloke from the pub they knew, or pleas to read The Convert by Peter Lewis. You know that terribly argued book that was tacitly endorsed by the AFL, and written by a supposedly massive Bears fan whom abandoned the Bears for the Swans, and was written in 1996 and released in 1997, i.e. before SL had even really come to a head, before the Bears relocation to the Central Coast had been finalised, before 1999 and the merger, and long before the Northern Eagles collapsed and the Bears officially dropped out of the NRL.

If we are going to work in the realm of such anecdotes then I can assure you that even ignoring my own experiences, I know/knew as many Bears fans as the next person, frankly I almost certainly personally know/knew more than most of the people participating in this discussion, and it's simply not my experience that a significant number of them suddenly developed an interest in a competitor code after the Bears dropped out of the NRL.

Adelaide & Perth lost teams & now only draw ratings of 6k for nrl matches. Let's bugger off paying & dedicated nrl fans who are the basis for the games biggest source of income or maybe we try to integrate them with expansion?!

And Adelaide and Perth will only ever draw low ratings until the NRL place pro-teams in said markets to drive interest.

Here is a hard truth that many don't won't want to hear; the expansion teams are significantly bigger and more successful than the traditional teams that made way for them ever were, and that is undeniably a positive outcome for the NRL and the sport as a whole.

 

[Colk]

Jets are still going strong & are the prominent local brand in one of the city's trendiest suburbs

Yes they’re popular within a suburb or a few suburbs in Sydney. Not many people outside of Sydney care which is what I said

 

[Colk]

Wrong. Bigger market equals more eyeballs for broadcast deals, sponsorship, potential growth. If getting 10k to game was important a Sydney team would've moved to gosford years ago..

There is a concept called market oversaturation. Just because Sydney is the biggest market in Australia, doesn’t in turn mean you need to put a mountain of sides in one place or market and neglect all others. It is the same reason why you don’t have 10 teams out of LA or New York in an American sporting competition for example and neglecting to put a side in say Dallas or Philadelphia, which are cities that are not as big as the former two but are still sizeable enough to a have a sporting team (hint Perth and Adelaide are Dallas and Philadelphia in this example)

Second of all not all Sydney teams are the same in terms of viewing audience and supporter numbers. Some are well supported and some are not well supported. The idea that all Sydney teams are more important than all teams outside of Sydney makes no sense looking at the past 30 years.

Also there is an inverted logic in your potential growth and bigger broadcasting deal argument. If you have a presence in only one or two markets your potential growth is less than if you have a presence in more markets. Pretty simple supply and demand argument

 

[Colk]

Yeah, the north shore lost a team & fans went to other sports. Adelaide & Perth lost teams & now only draw ratings of 6k for nrl matches. Let's bugger off paying & dedicated nrl fans who are the basis for the games biggest source of income or maybe we try to integrate them with expansion?!

How do you know what your market is or could potentially become if you don’t have a presence in them? Also where are you getting the 6k from? Whenever an NRL game has been played in those cities, the attendances have been well in excess of that figure

There is also a significant and key difference between the north shore of Sydney and Adelaide and Perth

People in the North Shore of Sydney can choose any one of nine teams to support or can still attend any number of games in Sydney at any given weekend. They are also subject to fairly significant coverage of the game like the rest of NSW. Ergo, anybody who wants to be a supporter of the game in that area can actively support it. Now it is sad that North Sydney were punted but the simple fact is the business ran out of money - that happens regularly to hundreds of businesses across Australia every day and besides, anybody under 30 hasn’t really been affected by their demise.

On the other hand, people in Adelaide or in Perth who like the game or more importantly, could like the game can’t actively support the game as it currently stands - you can’t go to a game and the only way you could watch any game would be through a Foxtel subscription. You have very little accessibility to the product and because there’s no local team, the local media aren’t going to promote the game (quite rightly so to be honest). In order to grow consumption of a product and have new consumers, you need to give people greater accessibility to the product so that it can be consumed.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

How do you know what your market is or could potentially become if you don’t have a presence in them? Also where are you getting the 6k from? Whenever an NRL game has been played in those cities, the attendances have been well in excess of that figure

There is also a significant and key difference between the north shore of Sydney and Adelaide and Perth

People in the North Shore of Sydney can choose any one of nine teams to support or can still attend any number of games in Sydney at any given weekend. They are also subject to fairly significant coverage of the game like the rest of NSW. Ergo, anybody who wants to be a supporter of the game in that area can actively support it. Now it is sad that North Sydney were punted but the simple fact is the business ran out of money - that happens regularly to hundreds of businesses across Australia every day and besides, anybody under 30 hasn’t really been affected by their demise.

On the other hand, people in Adelaide or in Perth who like the game or more importantly, could like the game can’t actively support the game as it currently stands - you can’t go to a game and the only way you could watch any game would be through a Foxtel subscription. You have very little accessibility to the product and because there’s no local team, the local media aren’t going to promote the game (quite rightly so to be honest). In order to grow consumption of a product and have new consumers, you need to give people greater accessibility to the product so that it can be consumed.

The "Sydney first" rhetoric I get from some Sydney RL fans makes me embarrassed to be an RL supporter. Their ignorance and delusions of grandeur are reminiscent of low brow hicks from rural Arkansas who live in a shack and can't read and write, but think they're superior to everyone else. It doesn't matter how many facts you throw at them, they just dismiss it and claim it's all a conspiracy or it doesn't count. When that doesn't work they tell lies.

 

[The Great Dane]

The "Sydney first" rhetoric I get from some Sydney RL fans makes me embarrassed to be an RL supporter. Their ignorance and delusions of grandeur are reminiscent of low brow hicks from rural Arkansas who live in a shack and can't read and write, but think they're superior to everyone else. It doesn't matter how many facts you throw at them, they just dismiss it and claim it's all a conspiracy or it doesn't count. When that doesn't work they tell lies.

If I was you I'd be careful when throwing those stones.

Queensland and Brisbane RL fans have a similar vain of "Queensland first" running through them.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

If I was you I'd be careful when throwing those stones.

Queensland and Brisbane RL fans have a similar vain of "Queensland first" running through them.

The difference is we don't run the game and just want recognition for our rich history in the sport, which NSWRL and its fans have denied and ridiculed for decades. I see idiots from NSW claiming Wally Lewis only played 30 games of first grade, which shows they don't have a clue.

I don't like the American brand names given to Queensland's NRL clubs.

Sometimes I wish the non-Sydney clubs grew a backbone and rebelled against the ARLC to form their own breakaway competition and bring back the Western Reds, Adelaide Rams, Illawarra Steelers and add a couple more teams to NZ. Invite the North Sydney Bears and Newtown to play as the Sydney Jets. It would give us a true indication of how many Bears fans are still around. I'd even throw out an invite to strong Sydney clubs like Parramatta, Western Suburbs and South Sydney.

 

[AdelaideSharky]

They'd be better off going to Adelaide, as Perth could very well get themselves a license of their own, in around another 5-10 years, Adelaide is where the Bears could own without a rival bid or RL presence would upset the applecart, also having a link to sydney would help SANRL even more, to me its a no brainer, they can still have their 4 NSO games, the rest in Adelaide... but even 4 seems too much

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

As someone who now lives in Adelaide, I nor anyone else down here would accept a relocated team from Sydney or anywhere.

Adelaide Bears? What are they going to use Wang Wang & Funi as the club mascots or something?

A team down here would only work if it was an expansion club.

 

[Perth Red]

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

As someone who now lives in Adelaide, I nor anyone else down here would accept a relocated team from Sydney or anywhere.

Adelaide Bears? What are they going to use Wang Wang & Funi as the club mascots or something?

A team down here would only work if it was an expansion club.

Bring back the Adelaide Pandas brand concept!

 

[MugaB]

Bring back the Adelaide Pandas brand concept!

Same colors? Bear mascot, i see no difference here... having a Sydney based junior presence would help tremendously for Adelaide, its not like the current rams are setting the world on fire, the Bears just need a viable locality, and being interstate will automatically give them that, @AdelaideSharky is kidding himself if he isn't going to watch the Bears vs Storm (or whoever) in Adelaide, and besides its not a relocation if realistically they don't even have a 1st grade license...

 

[Perth Red]

Same colors? Bear mascot, i see no difference here... having a Sydney based junior presence would help tremendously for Adelaide, its not like the current rams are setting the world on fire, the Bears just need a viable locality, and being interstate will automatically give them that, @AdelaideSharky is kidding himself if he isn't going to watch the Bears vs Storm (or whoever) in Adelaide, and besides its not a relocation if realistically they don't even have a 1st grade license...

IF the nrl ever got serious about national footprint it would def be the easiest option for getting a club in Adelaide. If not it is decades of work just to get them To where perth is now.

 

[AdelaideSharky]

IF the nrl ever got serious about national footprint it would def be the easiest option for getting a club in Adelaide. If not it is decades of work just to get them To where perth is now.

Sorry to burst your bubble but I honestly can't see an NRL team working here, not now or ever.

AFL is deeply ingrained in the psyche of this city to the point of it being a near religion.

Plus unlike Perth we don't have the big expat population from the east or from Northern England.

Tbh our domestic rugby union competition dwarfs our RL comp.

16 clubs in union to league's 5.

If football and basketball which have been here for decades can't get much print time or air time in our media how do you think the NRL will go?

All the Rams had back in the 90's was that pissy small page in the back of the sports section of the Advertiser.