A look at the RFL proposals - Super League restructure

I'm going to start with a quote from Tony Smith which sort of sets my stall out from the start:

“I am over the innovative tag for rugby league, that we are innovative as a sport. I’m over it. What about being stable, strong, consistent? What about those being our traits? We are judging the current systems in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the great depression. We are in the worst economic climate for decades and yet now is the time are choosing to judge our current systems." 

The RFL essentially presented clubs with four options for the future of the Super League:

1) Stay as we are - i.e. 3 year licensing, and I assume 14 team Super League, 8 team playoffs

2) Go back to the way we were before - i.e. 12 team Super League, 1 up/down promotion and relegation (P&R) with Championship

3) Go to something pretty similar to what we had before but a little different - Two 10 team divisions of Super League, I assume with P&R between the two, unsure how playoffs will work but I guess 5/6 teams

4) Do something new and innovative - Start with two 12 team leagues, after 11 games split to three leagues of 8, each has playoffs and a final, I assume 4/5 team playoffs

The first option has been rejected by the clubs, so they will now enter a consultation period before a vote on one of the other three options. Obviously, with the third option being the most radical it has seen the most press chatter, and it seems to be getting some support too. Voices of support have claimed every game will matter, it gives clubs a pathway to Super League whilst managing the rise from part-time to full-time operations, and of course, it continues to show the sport as being an innovator.

One thing is for sure, some sort of promotion and relegation is returning. I've already made my views fairly clear on this notion in previous posts (see below, Structure of Super League in March and Relegation and Player Movement in May). I, like Tony Smith, think licensing has suffered apparent failure because of the economic times it has faced. The global economic downtown has been felt fairly acutely in the parts of this country that dominate the Rugby League landscape. Add to that the economics of this particular sport have shifted in the past 12 months - exchange rates combined with TV and commercial revenue boosts in Australia have made the NRL a more dominant force over the Super League. The game has faced incredibly challenging times in the UK, with more to come, so surely some perspective would be sensible and fair? Some stability in the face of the storm perhaps?

Licensing was a decent concept, and if anything didn't take things far enough - three years isn't enough time to really find stability and I didn't see any need to put a time frame on things in such a manner. Licenses should have been indefinite but with failure criteria that clubs must avoid - if they failed then they would have their license removed and the best placed club from outside Super League would get their chance. But the current system did offer some sense of stability. You could plan medium term on your playing squad - my previous investigations have demonstrated that its preferential for stability, development and success to keep a team together and see the core of your team remain intact from season to season. There is also the impact on seeing more young domestic talent getting to play for teams because regular season pressures are reduced - there are games you can play your young players in and it not ruin your season or risk the Super League status of your club. You can give young homegrown players a chance when injuries strike, instead of looking for an overseas player not getting NRL game time and parachute them in. You can also, to some extent, plan what you do with the money you have - for example, you could sacrifice a bit of on-field spending for a couple years to help get some off-field stadium or facilities upgrades in place, knowing that in doing so you aren't going to lose your place in the league if you have one really uncompetitive year.

I see the game in four levels in this country - grass roots (i.e. junior teams), amateur open-age, semi-pro (i.e. Championships, as things stand) and professional (i.e. Super League). For me, the two most important are the bottom and the top levels. You have to get them right before you can truly support the semi-pro level and they need to be in good order to ensure that there are enough people who fall in love with the game to maintain the amateur scene. The top level is the true advert for the game, and needs to be in order for the whole thing to work well and grow - the top level inspires the bottom level and this then fuels the middle levels.

The top level maybe hasn't been doing its job well enough, because lots of people feel we're in a crisis and a crunch time for the great game of Rugby League. Financially, this is certainly the case. There is no title sponsor for the flagship competition and commercial revenues aren't at their strongest. We've seen one club fail, three come very close, and two or three others potentially on the edge during the licensing period, which doesn't exactly sell the system when viewed without perspective, as it tends to be. I think what the evidence tells us is Super League can't, in the current climate, afford to maintain 14 sides. Which is why I feel ideas to expand the Super League to 20 or 24 teams don't really make sense - there isn't enough money as it is, so where would more money come from to make more teams competitive, without completely watering things down of course (and in doing so, escalating the talent drain concerns over the future of top players and prospects). None of the proposals do anything to address the issue of insufficient revenues at a number of clubs and across the division as a whole from the governing bodies point of view. I don't see what has been suggested to help put all Super League clubs in a position to spend to the cap limit and remain sustainable whilst doing so. I don't see what has been proposed to make clubs outside the top division be put in a position where they have full-time structures and organisation in place to give them a chance of sustaining competition at that level. I haven't read or heard what will be done to maintain the stability and sustainability of the clubs that will suffer demotion from the top level. Without strong ideas on these serious pivotal issues, I can't see the positives for the sport as a whole from taking any of the routes put forward.

If you rule out the bigger Super League options on this grounds - which if being sensible you might just - then you're left with what we had before and we'll see clubs expected to jump levels without much time to prepare and without appropriate structures in place - Hull KR are really the only team to have shown success in making the jump up, every other club have had to take two or more cracks at getting it right to stick around after entering Super League, or have slipped away from the competition.

One group the proposals theoretically benefit is the semi-pro clubs who now have a more straightforward opportunity to compete at the top table, as all they have to do is beat the teams at the same level as them to get a shot at the big time. As already alluded to above, how much they can prosper from this shot is questionable. P&R has brought instability in the majority of examples, from whatever angle you view things from - their are plenty of examples in Rugby League, but there are even more high profile ones in some of our biggest Rugby League city's football teams, see Leeds United and Bradford City as your points of reference.

As I've shown previously, 78% of the core Super League playing squad on average is lost when a team drops out of the top division, compared to just 30% turnover of the core of the team for clubs remaining in Super League. Hardly the basis for stability and growth. I've also previously demonstrated that during the licensing period the number of overseas players in Super League match day 17's has reduced by over a player per squad per match. This sort of long-term planning and development has also been highlighted by Tony Smith and is another unanswered issue hanging over the new proposals. On this, Smith said:

"We have been producing some really good young players, so much so that the Australians are coming here to take them. We are starting to produce some half-backs, outside-backs, types of players that we have not produced for years and yet we change the system again.We take away that production system, take away the responsibility for clubs to produce those players and we go to a system that is 'popular' by all accounts. To just throw the whole system out the window is a knee-jerk reaction."

I personally feel quite strongly that Smith has got it right on this occasion. Big decisions are being made for the wrong reasons. Popularity, perceived or real, is taking precedence over planning for the future in my view. I agree that you can't maintain the status quo as things aren't going well right now - but the main problem is a financial one. People who say not enough games matter, need to understand that all games would matter if all teams could compete with each other on a more level playing field. The key to competing with one another is having some equality in the ability to attract and develop young talent, an equality in training systems and facilities, and equality in coaching support staffs. An equal ability to pay wages up to a salary cap limit which allows for star players to be signed and retained would be the final piece in the puzzle. Once you have the top division of clubs ALL at that capability, then you can think about clubs at the next level looking to get the same infrastructure and capabilities in place, so they can join a league able to expand and still support its clubs. If you can get 20 teams capable then you can discuss P&R again, not that its needed when teams can all compete on a largely even field. The RFL should be working on getting 12 clubs in that position, then try and get to 16, then 20, but really focus on those first 12 clubs best positioned for this to work.To get into this position, money is needed - the league and the clubs in it should be doing all they can to maximise revenues, and to support each other in the quest to do so - stronger clubs need to help weaker clubs, successful clubs need to share ideas with struggling clubs, and struggling clubs need to be able to stick to the tasks at hand.

Licensing hasn't worked because of unfortunate economic timing and because it wasn't strong enough in its conviction and delivery - P&R doesn't work because there is nothing to deliver other than, by and large, the status quo - it suits the big clubs because they can watch the smaller clubs fight each other for the Super League scraps, picking off any talent they want as these clubs go by the wayside, and feeling no responsibility for the wider prospects of the game.

...

Well, there it goes, I've rambled on again about licensing and promotion and relegation, and I still feel convinced franchising would be the best way to go forward, the opposite of what anyone else seems to think. This post was actually supposed to break down some of the issues I see in the 2x12>3x8 proposal, but I've lost my way in it all a little. I'm going to try and wrap up some of my thoughts now, without going too far of track with the temptation to elaborate on the bigger picture of things.

"Every game will matter", or at least "more games will matter", is a line getting trotted out to support the radical proposed system, a system already rejected by Scottish football.

I currently look at a league where pretty much each match has some sort of playoff implication. Of course the big-game-ability of the experienced Leeds squad has made people think it doesn't matter where you finish in the playoffs. The current system doesn't offer the most incentives, granted, but there is still incentive and for your club it should matter to finish in the top two, or the top four, and obviously the top eight. Like I say, pretty much every game has some playoff implication. Even when the top eight might be decided, the placings won't be. Ok, by the last third of the season there are a numbers of teams effectively out of the reckoning, and there are some games in the earlier parts of the season you don't need to win and you can recover from, but that wouldn't change in the 2x12>3x8 system.

How the playoffs would work haven't been fully revealed, but if there are more than 4 teams involved then you'll have the same criticisms that currently exist about bottom half teams being involved when its questionable if they deserve to be after being below par in a full home/away schedule. Plus, we've never had an 8 team league to draw comparisons from. For these reasons I can't really assess how many games in that second part of the season will matter, but its safe to say some won't have to be won early on and some won't matter in the final shakedown.

The first section we can consider based on some evidence. There have been twelve 12 team Super League seasons, on which detailed results and statistics are available from my usual source, the Rugby League Project. Over those seasons the first 11 rounds haven't always seen teams play the same number of home and away games, and it hasn't always seen all teams play each other once, and most notably the incentives on the games wasn't exactly the same as they would be under the new system. However, what we can gleam from this is the closest indicator we have of how many games might matter.

I decided that the first 8 games would matter equally as each other, because as noted above, you can lose some early games and have the chance to make up for it - none of the games would be must win, bar a few occasions where a team might lose the first 7 straight. In rounds 9, 10 and 11 there would be must win games and games close to that status with chances for points running out. Obviously as the games move on, fewer teams will have anything to play for - either they can't reach 8th or they've sealed a top 8 place already. Here are the results:
Over the three rounds, in 12 years combined, 45 games meant absolutely nothing at all - that's one fifth of games at the supposed exciting part of the this league section not mattering at all. One year, none of the games in round 11 meant a thing, on average less than one game per year will have something on the line for both teams in this round, and in three quarters of round 11 games at least one team had nothing to play for - imagine trying to sell that Magic Weekend if that is where it would fit in the new proposal, as seems likely. Imagine that one of the apparently most decisive weeks of the season only actually has ONE game that really really matters at the top of your structure. Then of course you get the lull for the opening rounds of the second half of the season, where early matches can again be recovered from so don't matter so much - this system gives you that twice, remember that all you 'every game matters' folk out there.

And remember a good number of these games that appear to matter in round 9 only matter beforehand, with the future untold. With hindsight we can see a clearer picture. On average in the 12 seasons you needed 8.5 points (so, 9) to be in 8th or higher after 11 games, and in only two years was 9 points not enough to guarantee top 8 succession. That was a mark that 42% of teams had already reached after 8 rounds - 47% had reached the final points total needed for the relevant season to be in the 8.

Using the same data set, I could make some observations on what would happen in Super League 2 in the fight for the top four as well. On average 13.5 points sees you get 4th (so, 14). By the end of round 8 in the 12 seasons, no matter what happened in the last three rounds, 46% of teams couldn't get to this points total, and 41% couldn't make it to the actual points totals they would need in the respective seasons to rise to the mid-tier for the rest of the season. There are games that do not matter.

Oh, and do any games in the third level in part two of the season matter at all? We'll have 8 teams playing for not very much, knowing they have next season to look forward to but nothing to really get them going for the rest of this season. It isn't it's own standalone competition, it is part of Super League, so winning it means pretty much nothing, you've already lost, you lost in week 11 (or week 8!), you're already one of the worst.

Now, these figures are not perfect, I'm not even sure if they are robust, but we know that form and luck make the observed picture likely in the new reality too. Plenty of outcomes will be decided with no must win games having been played, and plenty of games will not matter in the 2x12>3x8 format. Quite frankly, there isn't a sporting league structure where the outcome of all the games matters - what you need to do is make the quality and outcome uncertainty of every game high for your regular season play - see NFL and NRL as your examples.

I know this is a long one, but I don't feel like breaking it into two or three smaller ones now I've got going, but please stick with me for one final point. This to me is THE CRUCIAL FAILURE of the 2x12>3x8 system - teams will lose revenues in this system.

A 25 game season means 12 home games (12 away, 1 magic, is the proposal). In these 12 home games you might not get any against your big local rival or any against Leeds or Wigan - one of these three fixtures is every teams highest crowd of the season. Super League, unlike other 'top level' sports leagues in the world (Premier League, NFL, MLB, NRL as examples), still has a large importance on ticket sales and gate receipts - the league and it's governing body just doesn't make enough money from the other sources to marginalise this source of income.

You're now getting fewer home games and potentially none of your biggest home gates, yet are expected to produce a team that can compete. In fact, you have to produce a team that can compete to try and get into that top 8 league for part 2 of the season to ensure you can get the revenues to survive. All this trying to survive might just see you fail to develop, as we've seen before and elsewhere.

The only way to maintain ticket revenues is to try and further exploit your loyal supporters with yet higher ticket prices. Fans have already shown they are so price sensitive these days in austerity times that they won't pay for the extra knockout games, with playoff and cup crowds being low in recent seasons. These games really do matter - they're the most must win you could get - but fans can't afford to spend more money. This is the reality, so higher prices isn't really an option.

Beyond this, TV opportunities might reduce. Firstly, you'll get a smaller slice of what I suspect will not be a much bigger (if at all bigger) pie. Ok, the smaller teams that are currently miles away from competing will do better, but the teams who could get competitive with just a little more help, actually get less.

Secondly, there is what live TV games do for you. If you're 1 of  24 teams, your chances of getting live games is less than when you are 1 of 14 or 1 of 12. Less TV exposure means less chance to sell your 'brand' to a wider audience and significantly it will make you less attractive to large scale potential sponsors. The best way to sell your club to a shirt sponsor is plenty of nationwide TV exposure. That will be reduced now. Even if, as I suspect would happen, we see 3 live 'Super League' games per week, you still have less chance of being shown than in a 14 or 12 team Super League as any contract will have a requirement for all teams to feature live a certain amount of times - odds of being picked for TV of 2/6 is better than 3/12.

In terms of revenues, this system offers less for clubs in a position close to being able to compete and they will end up losing further ground on the top 4 or 5 clubs who have better structures in place. People feel it will benefit smaller clubs. It might do, but they won't become big clubs in this system. There will just be more medium sized clubs, with that 'medium' size becoming relatively smaller to the top as years go by. I appreciate this is just speculation, and this system has never been seen before so nothing is set in stone, but European football offers all the omens you want, even if their system isn't as innovative, if you look close enough you'll see the similarities. This sort of approach will always favour the big teams really. Trust me. And I support a big team, so in a way it makes my opposition more commendable...no?

If you've read all of this long rant then I thank you heartily. Agree or disagree, please leave a comment, or better still tweet me, and please share my views with your friends.