Sports tourism generates a lot of money.
If only a few dozen fans per match travel over, they will spend 10s of thousands on travel and accommodation.
If they can get either 100s or 1000s of fans travelling for one off games, the numbers are staggering.
The problem is how to get money from the tourism industry into funding the sport. Once you find a way to do that, the numbers add up.

The Catalans team generates huge amounts of tourism dollars for their region, as do Auckland Warriors and Melbourne Storm to mention a few.

In a practical sense, it shouldn't be hard to get a tourism authority or even an airline or hotel chain - or a combination of all three - to fund teams to travel and stay at these remote locations, because it's easy to show how they can make money in return.

The ultimate example in the southern hemisphere rugby union comp - which now has teams from all over Australia, NZ, South Africa and is expanding into Japan and Argentina. As travel gets cheaper and people get richer, we will see more and more of this. I'll be very surprized if we don't see teams from Italy, Serbia and maybe even Russia and USA playing in the English League comps soon.