The Case for Adelaide.....

[Perth Red]

Was it a lack of pokies on qlnd, or a proliferation of pokies in Sydney?

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Was it a lack of pokies on qlnd, or a proliferation of pokies in Sydney?

Both.

I just want a Perth team to have a chance of being a massive success. If that means legalising pokies in WA then I couldn't give a stuff about the idiots who bankrupt themselves playing the things. If they're fumbleball and onionball fans then all the better.

 

[mongoose]

one benefit of pokies is that beer and pub food tend to be much cheaper on the east coast than the west. You can still get a schooner for $5-6 in QLD, how much do you pay in Perth, $9-10?

 

[The Great Dane]

Its been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that easy access, social acceptability and convenience are major factors to people making bad choices more often. Put pokies in every pub and sports club and you get a shed load more problem gamblers. Check the stats between WA and NSW if you dont believe me. Your argument is like suggesting that banning smoking indoors or gun control has no impact on incidence.
I had a walk through the casino last week as we had a coupe of nights at the Towers hotel. It was incredibly sad to see these poor saps looking totally miserable feeding money into these machines, most of them looked like they had grown roots they had been there so long.

You probably shouldn't assume what my argument is before you've heard it...

My argument is simple; freedom means the freedom to make mistakes, and that infringing on those is freedoms should never be done lightly.

If you give people to power to ban anything that is "bad for you" they will take it and they will ban anything they don't understand. It's a slippery slope and it's slowly creeping forward all the time.
All the arguments to justify banning things such as tobacco and gambling can be, and are being, made for a bunch of stuff, which leads to massive infringements on peoples rights and freedoms.

So you may be okay with controlling gambling, but you should be careful throwing stones because it won't stop there. What starts with drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc, quickly becomes sugar, video games, hentai (FFS), and in time contact sports and basically anything else that people enjoy.

Also you can put all the 'controls' you like on gambling, go so far as to ban it outright if you like, it won't stop people whom are inclined to gamble, all it will do is push it further underground and make it more dangerous the further you go to control it.

As long as you're not hurting anybody else without their consent (in the literal sense not an amorphous sense that can be used to justify anything) and you understand the risks (which everybody does in this day and age) it's nobodies business but yours how you spend your spare time and/or money.

The less opportunity we give people to pss away their money and lives the better imo.

Spoken like a true authoritarian.

When you look at how much of the pokie revenue in LC's is actually going back to support local grassroots sport its an absolute pittance.

Which is still a way better set of circumstances than the alternatives of it all going into the back pockets of rich casino owners (like in WA BTW) or organised crime.

 

[Travitoh]

That's where other sports that have a draft can be very accommodating towards expansion teams - basically by giving them a good batch of draft spots.

Since the NRL doesn't have a draft, it's a little bit tougher to engineer expansion teams to be competitive.

Introducing a form of an expansion draft could help there. Maybe allow the new teams to negotiate with all players (let clubs 'protect' 5 or so players perhaps) as they build their squad.

Just a thought.

 

[flippikat]

Introducing a form of an expansion draft could help there. Maybe allow the new teams to negotiate with all players (let clubs 'protect' 5 or so players perhaps) as they build their squad.

Just a thought.

Well, while it may not be a draft in the traditional sense (not necessarily just the "youth" players), it is an idea to try an engineer competitive expansion teams.

The problem with the NRL is that anything like a draft loses effectiveness when the players have other options outside NRL.

Your typical young AFL player has to "wear" the draft, because there's no other AFL competition that's as lucrative. Similar for NFL, NBA, NHL & MLB leagues in the USA.

But NRL players have skills that can transfer to Superleague & Rugby Union.. so if they don't like the prospect of being drafted they have other good-earning options.

 

[titoelcolombiano]

The fact that the Dolphins (and Bears back in the day) are seriously being considered contenders at all shows you that "the best option" isn't being determined by any objective standard, but rather by people's emotional response to the bids.

That means that if a licence was put out to tender tomorrow, and a perfect Brisbane bid popped up out of nowhere (which is a distinct possibility BTW), that there's a good chance that the emotional favourite could still take the license simply because it "feels" right. I mean can you can you honestly say that you are certain that if the NRL expanded in 2012 that the Bears wouldn't have taken a license, because I sure can't.

The only way to avoid that is to build a strict set of criteria and the bid/s that best meet that criteria win the license/s, i.e. totally take emotion out of the decision by building an objective standard.
The only way you can do that is by considering each bid on it's merit, and that means that if Christchurch and Timbuktu have the best bids then Christchurch and Timbuktu have the best bids.

Out of interest, what do you think the criteria should be?

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Sport is emotional. We watch it in the rain and spend hours getting to a game in peak hour traffic because it appeals to our primal instinct of belonging to a tribe. When our tribe wins we feel pride. Losing makes us feel ashamed.

A soulless bid that ticks all the boxes from a corporate perspective might sound good, but it's not going to enthuse people to join the tribe.

Half the reason the Broncos haven't converted all RL fans in Brisbane is because they're a soulless entity owned by Murdoch. Their main selling point was they represented Brisbane in the Sydney competition and flew the flag for Queensland. People up here have grown past that mindset as Brisbane has morphed from a big country town into a genuine world city in a digitally connected world. Kids in Brisbane grow up watching and supporting sports and clubs from all over the world because those tribes are bigger than the ones in Sydney and, the Queensland vs NSW rivalry that attracted people to the Broncos is only strong enough to appeal to their emotions at SOO level. Seeing the Broncos, littered with players from all over the place, win or lose no longer feeds into the tribalism of Queensland vs NSW. If there were a few tribes in Brisbane then all of that would change as people would start hating their neighbours and want to get the better of them. That's something the EPL and Broncos cannot offer.

The Dolphins bid will be successful, in my opinion, because they're hated just as much as they're loved. People who hate their guts might finally get on the Broncos' bandwagon, at least temporarily, when the two clubs play. Add a third team and you've got tribalism pitting people against each other from the schoolyard to the office.

There is no perfect neutral branded bid that can capture the hearts and souls of SE Queenslanders and have a massive following from day one. If the team is successful like the Storm then it will attract yuppies and tryhards who wear designer clothes and associate with winners, but the odds of it doing that are a million to one.

Swans and Lions appeal to tryhards and yuppies, but only when they're winning, because these people don't view these teams as their tribe. It's just something to get behind to keep up with the Joneses.

 

[Perth Red]

Kind of ironic that the club you hate and call the soulless Brisbane club has more tribal members than any club that has a 100 plus year old history. West coast Eagles were set up as exactly what you hate and are now the biggest sports club in the country. clubs that rely on this fictitious notion of some inbred suburban tribalism are usually the smallest in our game. And I say that as a life long fan of such a club. The so called tribalism will come from having two clubs from the same city. If both of those are corporate entities is irrelevant as we have seen in Perth.

 

[MugaB]

Kind of ironic that the club you hate and call the soulless Brisbane club has more tribal members than any club that has a 100 plus year old history. West coast Eagles were set up as exactly what you hate and are now the biggest sports club in the country. clubs that rely on this fictitious notion of some inbred suburban tribalism are usually the smallest in our game. And I say that as a life long fan of such a club.

Always with the numbers! I cant see the pie getting split in Brisbane without another team in brisbane to challenge that,
Has anyone got the numbers for average supporters in sydneys 9 clubs, up against brisbane broncos one city team, and whats the ratio in population?
Brisbane 2.5 mil, Sydney 5mil?
Im not saying there's a right or wrong just what the perspective in population, and percentage

 

[mongoose]

Always with the numbers! I cant see the pie getting split in Brisbane without another team in brisbane to challenge that,
Has anyone go the numbers for average supporters in sydneys 9 clubs, up against brisbane broncos one city team, and whats the ratio in population?
Brisbane 2.5 mil, Sydney 5mil?
Im not saying there's a right or wrong just what the perspective in population, and percentage

Not all teams supporters live in their home city though. Everyone knows the Dragons have thousands of fans all over NSW and QLD, probably a few in other parts of the country as well.
What we know is the Broncos smash the other teams in terms of TV ratings, attendance and sponsorship dollars. They also have 650k followers on facebook which is the most of any club in any code (more than West coast or Collingwood) .

 

[MugaB]

Not all teams supporters live in their home city though. Everyone knows the Dragons have thousands of fans all over NSW and QLD, probably a few in other parts of the country as well.
What we know is the Broncos smash the other teams in terms of TV ratings, attendance and sponsorship dollars. They also have 650k followers on facebook which is the most of any club in any code (more than West coast or Collingwood) .

True, but no one has the numbers for average supporters for any given team, for without accurate figures, there's no way to guarantee any findings that a Redcliffe based Dophins brand with be effective/ineffective until they commence... or any bid for that matter.

I don't have a point, but I'm happy to point out, that using only stats cannot be the only identifier to a successful expansion.. for all we know the Titans could go on a 3 peat, and the past 15 years of its existence could be very well worth it, to building towards a stable club, one that started as the cellar dweller, like nearly every other club that entered into the NRL/NswRL history. Canberra and Nth Qld were prime examples of teams that took time to become successful, Penrith too, until 1990 we never really made a dent till then, thats roughly 25 years of mediocrity

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Kind of ironic that the club you hate and call the soulless Brisbane club has more tribal members than any club that has a 100 plus year old history. West coast Eagles were set up as exactly what you hate and are now the biggest sports club in the country. clubs that rely on this fictitious notion of some inbred suburban tribalism are usually the smallest in our game. And I say that as a life long fan of such a club. The so called tribalism will come from having two clubs from the same city. If both of those are corporate entities is irrelevant as we have seen in Perth.

I've compared the Broncos and West Coast Eagles in another thread. Eagles were slightly ahead until Broncos moved to Nathan in 1993. Broncos were drawing larger crowds from that point until the Super League War went full circle in 1996. Around 56,000 people supported the Broncos and Crushers in 1995. Crowds nose-dived down below 20,000 and didn't recover fully until the mid-2000s, despite being the sole club in SEQ until 2007. If there was never a Super League War then who knows how many people would actively support Brisbane Broncos, the Crushers and Chargers.

Perth never had a Super League War decimate its AwFuL clubs and hasn't had much competition from either code of rugby.

How tribal were Broncos' fans this year?

IBM went missing, TV ratings nose-dived and fans chucked wooden spoons onto Lang Park at the game against the Cowboys.

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Always with the numbers! I cant see the pie getting split in Brisbane without another team in brisbane to challenge that,
Has anyone got the numbers for average supporters in sydneys 9 clubs, up against brisbane broncos one city team, and whats the ratio in population?
Brisbane 2.5 mil, Sydney 5mil?
Im not saying there's a right or wrong just what the perspective in population, and percentage

Roughly 555,000 people per team in Sydney, vs 2.4M for the Broncos.

2.4M in Brisbane divided by 3 is 800k. That number is set to increase to almost 5M by 2050.

3 teams in Brisbane averaging 20k each would be better than 1 team averaging 30k. Having 60k people paying to watch RL is twice as much money as 30k.

True, but no one has the numbers for average supporters for any given team, for without accurate figures, there's no way to guarantee any findings that a Redcliffe based Dophins brand with be effective/ineffective until they commence... or any bid for that matter.

I don't have a point, but I'm happy to point out, that using only stats cannot be the only identifier to a successful expansion.. for all we know the Titans could go on a 3 peat, and the past 15 years of its existence could be very well worth it, to building towards a stable club, one that started as the cellar dweller, like nearly every other club that entered into the NRL/NswRL history. Canberra and Nth Qld were prime examples of teams that took time to become successful, Penrith too, until 1990 we never really made a dent till then, thats roughly 25 years of mediocrity

We also don't know how loyal Melbourne's supporter base is because they've never had a rough trot. When they have a few shit seasons at the foot of the ladder then we'll know how many rusted on fans support them. It's great that they're getting 15k or 16k while they never lose, but how many will stick around when they only win 5 or 8 games a year over a 5 year period?

 

[Perth Red]

Always with the numbers! I cant see the pie getting split in Brisbane without another team in brisbane to challenge that,
Has anyone got the numbers for average supporters in sydneys 9 clubs, up against brisbane broncos one city team, and whats the ratio in population?
Brisbane 2.5 mil, Sydney 5mil?
Im not saying there's a right or wrong just what the perspective in population, and percentage

it's irrelevant from a business point of view. No one cares how it’s split per head of population, what matters is what’s the biggest club, strongest business, biggest revenue etc. if tribalism was in fact THE major driver of support for a club surely having nine clubs in one city, each with a population split of around 600k,, would be killing it in members and attendance compared to a one city team who has no tribalism at play?

 

[Perth Red]

GROD, you claim that another corporate based club in Brisbane will be a failure yet all the evidence is the opposite. Eagles and dockers are modern corporate clubs and are massive. Storm and broncos are corporate clubs and are massive. If PERTH and Adelaide ever got in nrl they would be corporate entities and have a good chance of being two of the biggest clubs in nrl if done right. Cronulla. Manly penrith all more recent additions “grass roots” clubs to be brought Into nrl and are some of the smallest clubs. It’s hard to see much argument to replicate this in Redcliffe. Anyway this an Adelaide thread lol

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

GROD, you claim that another corporate based club in Brisbane will be a failure yet all the evidence is the opposite. Eagles and dockers are modern corporate clubs and are massive. Storm and broncos are corporate clubs and are massive. If PERTH and Adelaide ever got in nrl they would be corporate entities and have a good chance of being two of the biggest clubs in nrl if done right. Cronulla. Manly penrith all more recent additions “grass roots” clubs to be brought Into nrl and are some of the smallest clubs. It’s hard to see much argument to replicate this in Redcliffe. Anyway this an Adelaide thread lol

Adelaide and Perth would need corporations to bankroll them as RL is only a minority sport in one and a niche sport in the other.

Brisbane is the world's 2nd largest RL city with over 110 years of history and tradition, split into rivalries.

If the Bombers were to enter tomorrow then what reason would I have to support them?

They would be a carbon copy of the team I hate. I would hate the Bombers just as much as the Broncos.

RL is a working-class man's game. I don't want people who look down on us to control the team I support. Nor do I want to make these arseholes rich at my expense, with me paying money to sit in the rain on a cold windy night while they take my money and sit in an air conditioned box with a gold plated shithouse that probably has a seat warmer. It's patronising and fake. AwFuL can get away with it as they don't have a class divide.

 

[Perth Red]

Adelaide thread, plenty of Brisbane threads already

 

[Get Rid of The Donkeys]

Adelaide thread, plenty of Brisbane threads already

Is there a bid from an Adelaide consortium?

Crowds at Adelaide Oval's recent NRL games have been very good.

I cannot see them getting a team of their own within the next 20 years.

 

[Bring back John Fifita]

Is there a bid from an Adelaide consortium?

Crowds at Adelaide Oval's recent NRL games have been very good.

I cannot see them getting a team of their own within the next 20 years.

On bids/consortiums etc..., I’m loathed to compare league and AFL but did any of the AFL teams currently in NSW n QLD originally have a consortium and/or bid for a team to the AFL?

My thought, without being an expert or in any way completely informed.. was that all 4 were instigated by the AFL (or VFL in case of the Swans). All 4 are part of a strategic expansion plan - especially the Giants and Suns. Into “Rugby league states”.

And irrespective of the perceived success of these teams.. it’s very apparent the organisation who put them there is committed to them for the long haul.

I honestly believe Adelaide (the Rams) would work, absolutely no doubt. Indeed a huge drawback is no-one is pushing that barrow to the NRL. But I think it’s the NRL who has to take the bull by the horns if it’s going to seriously get out of its “comfort zone” and make the NRL truly National.