This weekend, the 14 teams of Super League, including teams from Wales, London and France have kicked off the 16th season of summer rugby league in Cardiff. When Super League kicked off in 1996, the competition included two ‘expansion’ teams, the newly formed Paris St Germain and London Broncos, who were fast-tracked into the top flight to take part in the inaugural Super League season. Paris St Germain was rushed into take part in Super League I in 1996, having being granted a place at the end of 1995.
A Newcastle United Rugby League outfit, part of John Hall’s attempt to start a multi-sports club on Tyneside, were tipped to be part of the Super League competition, as were a South Wales team, likely to be based in Cardiff. Toulouse were part of the initial line up of clubs to take part in the Super League competition, closer to the French Rugby League heartland than Paris St Germainand even Bordeaux were considered in the early part of Super League. Early architects of the Super League revolution, Jacques Fouroux (The man behind Paris St Germain RL) and Maurice Lindsey saw a long term prospect of teams in Dublin, Barcelona and Milan and I’m sure there were many more.
At the start of Super League III in 1998, Paris St Germain were no longer part of the Super League set up and London were the only team from outside the M62 corridor in the competition (Sheffield Eagles can’t really be counted, can they?). Franchise bids were invited for a new Super League team to enter the competition in 1999 and an extra round of games was taken on the road with matches played at Edinburgh, Gateshead, Swansea, Cardiff and Northampton. All of those places (though apparently Glasgow instead of Edinburgh) submitted bids to enter Super League and Gateshead were granted in a place in August 1998, with kick off coming in March 1999. It was intended for another franchise to be entered in the competition in 2000, with Dublin, Leicester and Birmingham / Walsall as potential locations.
Gateshead Thunder kicked off the 1999 season before 6,000 fans at the Thunderdome / Gateshead International Stadium, where they lost narrowly to the previous season’s grand finalists Leeds. Thunder went on to end the season with a 6th place (out of 14) finish, unluckily in the days when the play-off format only incorporated the top 5 teams. For a team so hastily put together, they had a very credible season, with some special moments such as beating champions Wigan, in a road game at Tynecastle, Edinburgh. Cheered on by their mascot ‘Captain Thunder’ the club averaged just shy of 4,000 in that season.
Gateshead Thunder went out of existence just 15 months after being granted the franchise and only 8 months after playing their first competitive game, taking a significant amount of money from the RFL to ‘merge’ with Hull Sharks and save the Hull club, with over a hundred years history, from oblivion. The Thunder were reported to have made losses of £700,000 in their first season, but this was a result of the club only taking half the amount of Sky money that other clubs received; having to assemble a team at short notice, which included many expensive Aussies; and having very little time to lay down the groundwork of marketing the product of Rugby League on Tyneside. Presumably, in the wake of the Gateshead experiment and the Sheffield-Huddersfield ‘merger’ at the same time, any plans for expanding Super League once more in a similar fashion were shelved.
It is probably quite unavailing to look ‘across the pond’ to major league sports competitions to draw comparisons with rugby league, the amounts of money are totally different for a start, but I shall make the comparison anyway. The NHL is the main North American sports league that I follow and during the 1990s this saw teams moving to the desert (Phoenix Coyotes) and the sunshine state (Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning), away from the traditional Canadian and American cities where you’d expect hockey to be played, i.e. cold places!. Some of these teams had relocated, i.e. Winnipeg Jets becoming Phoenix Coyotes, but some were new expansion teams. There was around an 18 month period between the franchise being announced and the puck being dropped for the first game for most of these teams. These expansion teams are all still playing today and have accrued 2 Stanley Cups between them (Anaheim and Tampa Bay).
It is hard to say if Gateshead, having winning the franchise bid in 1998, could have kicked off in 2000, or even 2001 and still being in Super League today – having had the benefit of time to grow and market their brand to the north east public and also having the benefit of the same Sky money as everyone else. It’s intriguing to think what happened to the prospective Super League franchise bidders at the end of the 1990s; did they just walk away from rugby league having seen the Gateshead, Sheffield and 2000 World Cup debacles?
Although the licensing system in Rugby League now places more stringent criteria on teams wishing to enter the elite competition, this still does not eradicate the short term issue, with a team only having six months to assemble a team for the elite competition. As Crusaders showed, this defeats the object of licensing for clubs to be run in a more sustainable manner. Catalans Dragons or UTC had around 18 months to prepare for their first season in 2006, and they have had much success, although they are relocated in the game’s French ‘heartland’. Indeed, the expansion for the NRL in Australia will give the new franchises a similar amount of time to prepare for elite competition.
I think that earlier forays into expanding rugby league at Gateshead and Paris will have only served to have put potential investors off, as they were rushed into the competition. If Rugby League grows and gets more successful and Football continues to be completely nonsensical in terms of how much money is being thrown at the game, investors might be taking a look at rugby league. The question is does the current regime provide them with the opportunity to put their money into the game and take the sport to new places and new audience?
No comments:
Post a Comment