By STEVE MASCORD
IT’S 28 years – to the month if not the day – since British rugby league changed course dramatically by signing an £87 million TV deal with Sky.
Of course, it wasn’t just a TV deal. It committed the British game to News Corporation’s Super League movement, which was fighting a Pay TV-driven war with the Australian Rugby League.
In some respects there are similarities between that decision and today’s 86- percent-in-favour vote by the Rugby League Council to adopt IMG’s club gradings system.
At least the British game is deciding its own partners and its own destiny – even if IMG’s vice-president of sports management, Matt Dwyer, is a Wests Tigers-following Sydneysider.
But then again, in 1995 signing the British game up was a serious play in the Super League War Down Under – one that at the time was seen as a potential knockout blow by News.
In 2023, absolutely nothing that happens in UK rugby league would make Peter V’landys or Andrew Abdo even put down their morning coffees. The British game is an almost complete irrelevance.
The decline has been ugly.
So just as the clubs had no choice but to accept Rupe’s loot in 1995, they had little alternative but to accept the resource and expertise offered by a multinational in 2023.
That didn’t stop there being intrigue, of course.
Should the vote be taken in the open room in Huddersfield, or should it be a secret ballot? There would have to be a vote on THAT, if enough clubs wanted a vote on that, said RFL chair Simon Johnson.
Two Championship clubs who intended to vote against the proposal (those who did were Keighley, Featherstone, Batley and Barrow) said they would go the other way (ie: say ‘yes’) if it they could place on record the condition that category B clubs which won the right to be promoted over fellow category B clubs WOULD be promoted.
(Featherstone’s statements after the meeting would strongly suggest they were one of those clubs)
This would only be necessary if the overall vote was close, they were told.
And this, apparently, is how ‘sure things’ Salford ended up “abstaining” on whether they supported the club grading system. It also seems likely how London Skolars voted ‘no’ when they had intended to abstain.
Each thought they were voting on one of those other two procedural matters, not the main issue.
Before we proceed to the implications of all this, let this sink in: West Wales Raiders, a defunct club that couldn’t field a team in the third tier this year, had the right to vote today. Catalans Dragons, Challenge Cup winners, Super League grand finalists, did not.
How can we debate whether voting rights are unfairly weighted towards Super League clubs or whatever when two teams who have, over the past 18 months (the other is Toulouse) helped earn the sport some £19 million from Sky by providing content have NO SAY in a decision that directly affects their businesses?
Excluding teams from voting because they are French is tantamount to barring delegates because they are women, or gay. It’s backwards, at the very, very best.
One hopes that the Rugby League Council is seen less and less over the next 12 years. It’s perhaps the most antiquated body in the entire sport.
But when I said at the beginning that British rugby league signing with Super League all those Aprils ago meant the game “changed course dramatically” … I lied.
It was SUPPOSED to change course dramatically but rugby league returned to rote. Only four teams went on to win this new fangled thing called Super League. No Dublin, no Cardiff, no Paris, London yo-yoing.
So the proverbial deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic have been rearranged once more today. Elephant in the room, or iceberg in the water?
We can’t agree on what it is. But it’s still there.