THE first rule of Super League expansion is you don’t talk about Super League expansion. At least not as far as Mike Eccles is concerned.
Eccles and his London Broncos team find themselves in the somewhat surreal situation of seemingly being destined for the Super Eights which will decide relegation and promotion between the Betfred Championship and League One this year, while at the same time potentially being added to an expanded 14-team top tier for 2026.
Added into that is the rumour the second and third tiers could be merged back into one division for the first time since 2002, which would make the entire Super Eights completely redundant anyway.
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The ridiculousness of the situation, which will surely be discussed at Tuesday’s RFL Council meeting, is not lost on Eccles, although the Broncos director of rugby and performance’s biggest concern is ensuring his squad stay focused on the job in hand.
“I’m not fussed, to be honest with you,” Eccles told rugbyleaguehub.com following Saturday’s 38-18 defeat to Doncaster. “I’ve heard [the Championship and League One could merge] myself, but I really don’t know how it would look.
“We’ve just got to stay really single-minded on the job at hand at the moment. You know my opinion on London and Super League, but talking about London in Super League while we’re in the bottom four is the wrong message to be sending out.
“What happens in the game happens within the game, but it affects my changing room when people start thinking about Super League and bigger and better.
“We’re in a dogfight at the bottom of the Championship and we’ve got to get out of that.”
Although the full outcome of the club-led review being overseen by RFL executive director (and definitely not interim chairman) Nigel Wood is now not expected to be known until December, the professional structure for next year could well be voted on at this week’s meeting.
That could see the Broncos bumped back up to an expanded Super League after being relegated on IMG gradings in 2024 along with fellow Championship sides Bradford Bulls and York Valkyrie, with financially-troubled Salford Red Devils making way to accomodate the trio in a 14-team competition.
The capital club are now under the stewardship of Gary Hetherington, the Leeds Rhinos CEO who played a significant role in former RFL chief executive Wood’s return to the governing body earlier this year and has been seeking Australian investment in the club along with conducting work around a possible rebrand.
Whatever the talk on the outside though, Eccles is determined to keep his squad acting as if nothing is going to change in terms of the relegation battle, with London sitting six points behind ninth-placed Widnes Vikings in the Championship standings.
“It doesn’t affect us one bit, one iota,” Eccles said. “The issue we’ve got is looking at the table, it’s aboslutely irrelevant and we’re that far behind that we will be in the bottom four.
“If we can put some performances together and get some results, who knows?
“You could get yourself out of the bottom four, which would be great, but the mentality has to be there so we have to just ignore the table.”