BY TONY COLLINS
IT’S no accident that England’s style of play in the Ashes series also looked like a metaphor for the state of the game off the pitch: unimaginative, out of date, and committed to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
The simple truth is that no-one in the leadership of the game has any answers. In fact, they aren’t even asking the right questions.
You can see this in last season’s debate about whether Super League should have 12 or 14 teams. The question is of how many teams should be in Super League is a minor one – throughout the history of the game the number of clubs in the top tier has actually changed two or three times every decade.
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The real issues confronting the sport revolve around historic structural problems that British rugby league has never addressed.
The first of those is how to attract spectators in the post-industrial north of England, which, whether we like it or not, is the heart too the game. The second is how to increase the number of players at all levels in a twenty-first century world of streaming, video games, shortened attention spans and the overwhelming juggernaut of soccer.
The heartland of rugby league is Northern England. Its population is 15.5 million people, larger than Scotland, Wales and the whole island of Ireland combined. If the North was an independent nation, it would be the tenth biggest economy in Europe. This is a significant market that has never been fully exploited by the game.
But of course this isn’t the whole picture. Much of the north has never recovered from the deindustrialisation of the late twentieth century, especially the loss of the mines, docks and factories which were the backbone of rugby league. Four of the poorest regions in Europe are in the North, and rugby league is disproportionately represented in them.
It’s a tough environment, but the strategy of the RFL and most of the clubs has simply been to squeeze more revenue out of its existing financially challenged supporters. Loop fixtures, Magic Weekend, and the 1895 Cup do not bring in new supporters nor attract new sponsors but simply add to the cost of being a fan.
Because there is no strategy to increase its revenue base, the game cannibalises itself. Perhaps the worst example of this is the fact that Catalans and Toulouse pay the travel costs of English clubs when they go to France. And the absurd debate about which teams bring the most away fans is another unedifying example of the idea that someone else – French clubs, Sky TV, away fans, you name it – will subsidise the clubs.
This attitude isn’t new. In the days before the TV revolution of the 1960s, clubs just expected supporters to roll up in their thousands – after all, what else was there to do on a Saturday afternoon? As with soccer, this led to a neglect of stadiums that almost bankrupted the game in the 1980s and 1990s.
Even in the 1970s, clubs were already relying on TV contract money from the BBC. The advent of satellite TV in the 1990s and the huge sums paid by broadcasters to televise the game became a life-support system that absolved clubs of their responsibility to grow their supporter bases.
So, in thirty years of Super League, average crowds have topped 10,000 spectators per match in only five seasons. Given that one of the promises of the Super League revolution was that it would bring new fans into the game, this has clearly not been a success.
But now, as the era of traditional TV broadcasting draws to a close and broadcasters are paying less for sports rights, we can see the crucial financial importance of a growing fan-base.
There are no easy answers to this problem, but the first step should be to set a minimum standard that a Super League club has to average at least 10,000 spectators per home match (or sells out every match if they’re in a smaller stadium). If you can’t get 10,000 people in your own town to watch their local club, you’re simply not doing your job properly.
The same goes for participation. There are approximately 65,000 men and women playing rugby league regularly in England. This figure has been remained constant thanks to the growth of women’s rugby league, which accounts for over 5,000 adult participants, and hides a decline in men’s participation. As anyone in the community game will tell you, times are tough for men’s amateur clubs.
What are the professional clubs doing to increase player numbers? Very little in most cases. Yet they have a fantastic resource of over two dozen full-time professional players who only spend a proportion of their day training. What better way to introduce schools and young people to the game than for these players to be used in regular coaching sessions in schools and to support inter-school tournaments?
It’s worth noting here that one of the crucial reasons for rugby league becoming the dominant game in Sydney before World War One was because it quickly built deep roots in the schools.
New player development pathways need to be developed because the game has failed to deal with two other structural problems affecting player recruitment. The first is obvious. Since rugby union went professional in 1995 the flow of top Welsh players into our game has stopped. This has weakened their national team, reduced awareness of league in Wales, and removed the glamour that was historically provided by such great Welsh stars as Sir Billy Boston and Jonathan Davies.
But less obvious is what might be called the ‘Ryan Giggs Syndrome’. Son of the great Swinton scrum-half Danny Wilson, Giggs was a schoolboy rugby league player – his first appearance on the Old Trafford pitch was as a ballboy for the first Ashes test of 1986 – but the money on offer from soccer was too lucrative for him to turn down. Sadly, the same story has repeated itself countless times over the last three decades – most recently with the signing of Jermaine McGilveray’s son Isaac by Chelsea.
Soccer has grown much bigger and stronger since the Giggs era but our game has not recognised the way the round ball game is undermining rugby league’s appeal. One way to do that is, again, to increase the sport’s presence in schools.
And that also means that the public image of the game needs to be radically rethought to appeal to young people. What kind of message is being sent out when Nigel Wood has a higher media profile than Mikey Lewis?
Which brings us to the core problem confronting the game. The fundamental roadblock to developing a long-term strategy for the sport is that the clubs control all the levers of power, and that their short-term self-interest always outweighs the overall interests of the sport as a whole.
If someone was to take over the sport, the first order of business for the new leadership must be to end the power of the clubs, and enforce the authority of a completely independent governing body.
But that’s only the beginning of wisdom. What do you do when you have control? The never-ending restructuring the game is a symptom of the fact that no-one has a clear strategy for the future of the game.
They’ve tried copying from other sports and bringing in IMG to advise them – but IMG are not used to dealing with anything outside of the mainstream sports world. They even tried Eddie Hearn!
The simple truth is that rugby league is not like other sports. For deep historical and cultural reasons, some of which are beyond control of the game, it has been an outsider sport, whether it likes it or not.
This unique situation has forced it to be innovative, daring and welcoming, but also parochial, short-sighted and lacking in ambition. The key to success is to highlight the positive qualities which make it unique. Follow the example of basketball’s NBA, which became one of the world’s most recognisable brands in the 1980s and 1990s by embracing its roots in urban, youth street culture.
So what should rugby league do next? Well, let’s keep it simple and have four initial aims.
1. All Super League clubs have to average 10,000 spectators per match.
2. Every club has to establish teams and a tournament in schools in their immediate area.
3. Annual internationals to be played against Australia or New Zealand, alongside the rest of the growing world of rugby league.
4. And, most importantly, the sport needs a leadership completely independent and free of all club links.
It’s not rocket science. But this is, of course, rugby league, a sport which is living proof of the old saying that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.