Originally Posted by
Gray77
The most watched and most financial pumped up league in the world is the Premier League, which has 4-5 'dead rubber' games every weekend from about December to May. After about 15-20 games only 6 sides can qualify for the CL and only about 6-8 sides can be relegated. The 6-8 teams in between are basically playing half the season knowing they are playing to finish somewhere between 7th and 13th.
I find the 'dead rubber' argument so bewildering when it comes to RL. We have a salary cap, there is no excuse for clubs to not be able to compete (unlike the PL) but we then make it even easier for the under-performing clubs by setting them an artificial bar which we deem as success. Now, Top 5 is the best play off system we've had, but a team will finish 5th and find itself 3 games from the Grand Final after probably losing at least 40% of their league games this season. That isn't success, it is mediocrity.
Some years a team will win the league comfortably (like the PL) but most years the race for 1st would be alive for at least 75% of the season. I would rather have a system where vitally important games are played by the best teams going for a league title for 3/4 of the season than the current one. You seem to favour mediocre clubs playing artificially important games to reach 5th place over the best teams playing genuinely important games to reach 1st.
I can't work out why anyone would favour the focus of a salary capped competition to be on underachieving teams that struggle to win half their games over the focus being on the ones competing to be the best. Instead, allow these mediocre teams to jockey for positions in the Top 8 to then qualify for a trophy that is less important than being champions or winning the Cup, which is exactly what the Premiership was. It allowed the crap teams to keep their seasons alive in the way that you advocate, encouraging them to finish Top 8 or even sneak 4th to get a home tie, with the reward being that they could maybe win the 3rd most important prize. Under the current system these crap teams are being encouraged to maybe win 55% of their games in order to have a chance of winning the most important prize.
As for the Premiership not being taken seriously. No, it was taken seriously, it was just not taken as seriously as the League and the Cup, which is entirely justified. But, for a comp that wasn't taken seriously it managed to pull in around 40,000 every year at OT for the Final (2 weeks after 90,000 were at Wembley for the Cup Final) and QF and SF games in the late 80s were getting crowds we'd consider good for play-off games now.
I got into RL in 1985 and I was wondering whether I'd overblown the kind of crowds Premiership QF and SF games got back then, so I had a little look. In the first 5 years that I was a fan (85-86 to 89-90) the 30 Premiership QF and SF ties averaged 10,790. Only 8 of the 30 games pulled in less than 7,000 with 12 of them getting above 10,000 including 4 crowds over 15,000 and one at Wigan of 22,000. Premiership games got bigger crowds than most league games, and fans turned out for them.
To be fair I then had a look at the crowds of the last 30 non Grand Final Super League play off games to see the average compared with those non-Final Premiership games from 86-90. The Super League play-off average was 9,760. So, the comp that was purposefully designed to keep clubs seasons alive and was known by everyone to be less important than the league and Cup drew bigger average crowds back then than modern day play-off games have over the last 5-6 years, despite the apparent differences in seriousness that people put upon them. Add to that the fact that average crowds in the league are higher now than they were back in the late 80's and you'll see that the Premiership most certainly was not a comp that fans didn't take seriously.
Now I know you'll say 'but you've left out the Grand Final', so I won't. The GF is replacing the CC Final as the go-to game of the season, by virtue of it being closer to home for most fans, it isn't in the Summer holidays and it of course is the game that crowns the Champions. But it's succeeding in a bubble, because the play-offs that come before it are only being watched by crowds that you'd see on an average weekend, if you're lucky. But, compare the cumulative attendance at the Cup Final and Grand Final over the past 5 years and then look at the cumulative attendance at the 5 Cup Finals and the 5 Premiership Finals played at OT between 1986-1991 and you notice that the numbers are very close. 690,000 have been to the last 5 Cup Finals and 5 Grand Finals combined, whereas 620,000 went to those 5 Cup Finals and 5 Premiership Finals combined. A slight edge to the modern day, but nowadays those Finals represent the 2 top prizes and are 6-7 weeks apart whilst back then the two Finals included the 3rd biggest prize and were only 2 weeks apart most years. The Grand Final is a success in it's own right, but it's not added to the fanbase of the sport but simply pulled fans away from the Cup Final. We've seen a change in the priority fans give to which marquee Finals they go to rather than the sport attracting more fans.