Can Wollongong support a professional RL team playing 12 games at its venue?
The Illawarra Steelers were a basket case and drew horrendous crowds.
Why should the ARLC take a team out of Sydney and place it in a regional area of NSW that has a metropolitan population of only 302k, when there are cities in SEQ that have more people?
Wollongong - Wikipedia
The City of Wollongong only has 203k people.
City of Wollongong - Wikipedia
How can you justify Wollongong having a team of its own when Logan has 326k and is growing rapidly, with NRL teams in Brisbane and the Gold Coast to create local rivalries that will draw big crowds?
Logan City - Wikipedia
Logan also produces more RL players than Wollongong and is a dyed in a wool RL city. Wollongong has a fairly large soccer fanbase and fumbleball is growing. This is NSW-centric thinking on your behalf and it's holding back expansion in under-represented areas and cities that have no representation at all.
Roosters finished last in 2009, winning just 2 more games than the Broncos in a 24 round season.
Rugby League Tables / Season 2009 (afltables.com)
Their attendances for 2009 were 13,211, which put them above Parramatta, Melbourne, Cronulla and Canberra.
Rugby League Tables / Attendances 2009 (afltables.com)
If they get good crowds on the Central Coast then wouldn't that suggest they have the potential to develop a fanbase from Bondi through the North Shore up to Gosford?
Removing Manly from the picture would make the Roosters the nearest club and one that's associated with affluence. It would make them a good competitor to the Swans and Waratahs and help grow the game from the bottom up.
South Sydney can play at SFS alongside Sydney Roosters. That would ensure a game is played at the SFS every week. Surely that'll hurt AwFuL and Onionball more than having just the one RL club playing there, yeah?
The NSW Gov wouldn't be happy losing a major tenant to Adelaide after speeding millions of dollars rebuilding their stadium. How would the ARLC be able to convince the NSW Gov to spend money on other stadiums if we were to move clubs that just had one rebuilt for them?
Giving the Tigers' licence to West Coast Pirates or relocating them to Perth won't have much of an effect, as they play at small suburban grounds most of the time. If you were to merge Magpies with Bulldogs you could take the games that were previously played at Belmore, Leichhardt and Campbelltown and play them at West Sydney Stadium and Stadium Australia. That would actually be beneficial to the NSW Gov.
Sending Dragons to Adelaide won't hurt as Kogarah is not fit for NRL games and a rebranded South Coast Sharks can take 4 or 6 games to Wollongong.
The Broncos are the only top flight team in the Brisbane metropolitan area, with the 9 BRL clubs from 1987 serving as feeder clubs. It hasn't prevented the Broncos from becoming the largest, richest and most profitable team in the league. The only problem is there isn't enough content in the city to meet the demand of its RL mad fanbase.
The problem with Sydney is it has neglected the grassroots and focused on propping up small Sydney clubs that weren't designed to survive in a fully professional era. The NSWRL Premiership was great as a Sydney semi-professional competition, but those days are over. If we want the game to survive and thrive in its biggest city then we need to reduce the amount of clubs to something sustainable. 3 in the west and 3 in the east of Sydney is a good mix for a city that has 5 million people. It'll provide more commercial opportunities for them as there will be 3 less teams to compete with for sponsors and media attention.
The NSW Cup can become an important competition in its own right, but it never will if there's 9 NRL clubs in Sydney. It's insulting to people from Queensland to say we should just have 2 teams in the world's second largest RL city, which has 2.4 million people, whereas Sydney has 9, with you wanting it to have at least 8, even though it's population is only twice the size of Brisbane. There's nothing unique about Sydney that means its suburban teams need to be treated better than the ones from the Brisbane Rugby League, Newcastle Rugby league, Canberra Rugby League, Gold Coast Rugby League and Wollongong Rugby League.
