Originally Posted by
Gray77
I disagree with a lot of this. Murdoch and Sky didn’t save RL, they just changed it. Super League in the UK only really happened to give Murdoch extra leeway in the Super League war in Australia, and RL was doing fine beforehand down there.
The NSWRL had a successful comp, with good crowds, good teams, and it produced the players that made up the all conquering 1982 and 1986 Kangaroos touring squads. It also had Balmain, Illawarra, Western Suburbs etc, before the NRL era forced these old traditional clubs to merge or disappear. The pre NRL era also saw the birth of State of Origin, a concept which I doubt would have been invented in the NRL era given clubs aversion to their players doing any kind of rep footie.
I’m not sure that saying “without Murdoch we’d have no NRL” means anything really, because what was around before it was perfectly fine. I’m not sure the average Australian RL fan enjoys the game anymore now than they would have in say 1985.
Over here I also don’t see the big thing about arguing in favour of Murdoch and Sky just because they gave us Super League. The game existed before Super League, and whilst crowds have gone up since 1996 they should have done given that we moved the game to Summer (away from football for 10-12 weeks every season) and moved games to Friday nights. Grounds are also better, but the £1.825m a year clubs get from Sky didn’t go towards building LP, the Halliwell Jones or the new stands at Headingley. Grounds improved either because clubs moved to football grounds or because of hard work by club owners and lots of money from public and private sources. If Super League and Sky are responsible for us not being at KR then they'd have been responsible for Bradford (the poster club of the first decade of Super League) not being an Odsal.
I also disagree that we’re seeing all these new fans in the game. Crowds are flatlining or going down across the league, and TV ratings are not what they were even 5 years ago. Crowds did go up, but the move to Summer rugby coupled with the new culture of reasonably cheap season tickets meant that people bought them and got their fix from league games, at the expense of easily more important Cup or play off games. Back in the day less people went to league games because season tickets weren’t as good value, but we had a far bigger catchment number of fans who would go to the bigger games. We used to get 25,000 regularly at Cup Semi Finals in the late 80s and early 90s. Saints and Wigan at OT in 1990, Wigan v Wire at Maine Road in 1989 etc were big time Semi Finals in front of big crowds. Nowadays we stick the semis together because we cannot muster crowds big enough to have them played on their own. Cup Finals are also becoming embarrassing, with under 70,000 at the last 3 Finals (one of them 50,000). In the 1980s we didn’t have a single Cup Final pull in less than 80,000, and several went well over 90,000. So, I disagree that we have more actual RL fans nowadays. We simply have more buying season tickets, but the number of people who go to RL games in an average season can’t be any higher than it was when I was a kid because the floating fans are nowhere to be seen on the big days anymore.
International RL is also a shell of what it was, mainly due to the Super League war and the subsequent attitudes towards the Ashes series and towards the GB Lions. Thankfully we are bringing both back, but no thanks can be given to Sky or Super League for that. From pulling in 50,000 at OT in 1986 and 50,000 at Wembley in 1990 for Ashes Tests we now go crazy over 35,000 in London for a England-Australia 4N game. Who knows if the length of time since the last Ashes Series or a proper GB Lions tour will mean that the magic of both will exist for a generation that has little knowledge of either.
So, all in all I disagree that without Sky and Murdoch we’d have folded as a sport. We existed before them and big crowds went to RL games in an era when many communities in the North were not doing that well. Sky simply took advantage of a changing landscape, with multi channel TV and the internet changing the world. There would have been other chances for RL to make money and go in a different direction, and the change in working patterns and the improved economy in the North would have made it easier for more people to go to games or buy season tickets regardless of who owned the league.
I will repeat what I said the other day. The game and the structure of the game were better in my youth than they are now. If Murdoch and Sky get your praise for the modern game then so be it, but they simply existed at the right time and got in there before someone else did. I doubt I’d even have got into RL had I been born in the 00’s to be honest. Back in the 80s I couldn’t have lived without it.