I'm not suggesting that the "establishment" shouldn't support it, only that any women's comp shouldn't be connected to the men's comp, the NRL it's self should back it, but not as an extension of the NRL competition or clubs, they should start the women's comp with the intention that eventually it would be it's own self sustaining product that survives off it's own income and has it's own fans, has it's own TV rights and/or streaming deals, has it's own sponsors, etc, and doesn't need anything from the men's league to survive.
I also don't buy that the women's teams would need to be supported by the men's clubs in the beginning to be able to assemble the infrastructure necessary to be functioning clubs in a national competition, firstly there're are plenty of companies that'd be interested in sponsoring a women's competition/team that wouldn't traditionally be interested in supporting a men's competition/team, but more importantly with the extra grants that the NRL clubs will demand to run their women's teams you could start up a collection of modest new clubs in their own right, so why not cut out the middle man who's not really interested in growing or supporting the women's game apart from the good PR it provides them and give that money straight to a set of new women's clubs whos' only interested is in seeing the women's game grow and become as big as possible in it's own right, if it is really a concern that they won't be able to set themselves up to a reasonable degree with the money on offer then give them a couple of big grants to start with.
Another problem with the Women's comp being connected to the men's that hasn't really been discussed in any detail here, is that if the women's comp is connected to the men's clubs it inherently saddles the women's comp with all the problems that the men's comp has, but namely it completely unnecessarily saddles them with being restricted to the east coast of the country and over saturated in the Sydney market.
If we are starting a new national competition, then we should start it so that it has the best chance of being a success and that means starting out with teams representing the major capitals, not teams representing the suburbs of Sydney with some blow ins.
