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: Wed Mar 25, 2009 7:00 pm

Hull Kingston Bronco wrote:

Erm, yeah

Union is focusing on growing participation, and diversifying the player base. Feel free to stick your head in the sand and write them off as posh frat boys, maybe they were but they won't be eventually - because they have a plan to change, and the resources to do it. I can't stand the game personally, but if you think that's a worse long term strategy than having a few clubs on the East coast for a few years and then pretending a pro league wil just spring out of nowhere like magic in 2010, then good luck to you mate. I loved that Kevin Costner movie too, but I reckon in the real world they won't just come if you build it - you need a step-by-step, organic approach. Step one? Get amateurs playing the game for fun. The obsession with professionalism and illusory business opportunity is stupid - first things first, get people to enjoy the game through participation. That then becomes the platform for later pro growth. If the US guys had spent more time since 1994 focused on that, and less on grandiose schemes and bizarre press releases, who knows we might have a bridgehead now to kick on from. As it is, we've got vapourware. A great job indeed!

I haven't seen or heard any 'grandiose schemes', and the article you plucked out from 1997 was from the same time that we had the 'World Club Challenge', PSG in Super League, clubs being encouraged to merge, two competitions in Australia and a heck of a lot of other backwards ideas - it's not relevant at all, and you could easily have picked out an old article and derided the efforts of Super League or the NRL in a similar way. The AMNRL competition has been running for 12 years, and has expanded in that time. I'm not suggesting that a pro comp will be an automatic success, or that it will even happen, but Americans are far more open-minded than the British and there is nowhere near the same level of upper class corruption in the media. America also has roughly 240,000,000 more people than the UK, so there is a lot more room for other sports and there are also a lot more wealthy businessmen looking to get involved in pro sport. There are 4 new professional American Football leagues set to start in the next 2 years. An insignificant, by American standards, RL comp could be massive in comparison with the rest of the RL world. Even if it wasn't in the big cities, there are thousands of towns bigger than Castleford with no sport at all and 84 cities in California alone that are bigger than Wigan. An RL comp could be set up for relatively peanuts and still be bigger than the Super League.