Netflix are doing a docuseries on the 2023 competition yet more money and exposure for the other code
Netflix are doing a docuseries on the 2023 competition yet more money and exposure for the other code
Posh privilege being used again. There will always be rich people at the top of companies like Netflix that will do things like this purely as a mutual back slapping gesture to their mates and for their own interest in it. It'll no doubt be full of faux-beef like in the Spurs Amazon one and lots of positive culture messages the rahrah lot like. I'd love to hear the meeting where they discussed this and what justification they made for it. It's well outside their area of expertise and there are so many more interesting stories in sport at the moment than the 6 Nations. A documentary on Everton at the moment would have been gold dust, it would have been the most entertaining and revealing show ever made.
Subscription service makes program about a world cup win 20 years ago,I'm failing to see the problem.
Edit,read post on my actual pc and not tiny phone screen,does it really matter if it's the 2023 comp ? It's on netflix. Our world cup got a lot of coverage on the BBC.
Last edited by brook; 18th January 2023 at 20:08.
It’ll be driven by the viewing figures:
According to the BBC, the highest viewed match from the RLWC was England v Samoa which peaked at 1.8 million viewers on a free to air channel.
From what I can find, the average viewing figures from Amazon for matches in the 6 Nations last year was around the 3 to 4 million mark on a subscription channel.
Then considering that the RL match was the World Cup opening game (which suggests that viewers fell away after that rather than being drawn in) and the union matches are basically the same year on year, with just the home/away teams alternating, it shows the gulf in the way each code is embraced by the public.
To me, this is the major concern that IMG should be tackling. I’m not saying that League will ever be as popular as Union, but they’ve got to find a way of closing the gap
Netflix are going off the back of the huge success of Drive to Survive. The tennis version is also going down very well. Amazon have also had great success with their All or Nothing series, of which the All Blacks series was one of the highest rated. Like it or lump it rugby union is a global game on a scale that dwarfs rugby league, we may have a chance to piggyback off any success rugby union series might have though.
Forwards win games. The backs decide by how much.
Six Nations is on BBC and ITV, I think you might mean the Autumn internationals. Six Nations games actual get around 5-6m on free tv, and the last RUWC Final in 2019 got 9.5m and the Eng v NZ semi got 7.9m. We're miles behind them internationally, we just don't have the international presence and the two biggest playing nations really don't take internationals anywhere near seriously enough.
We're a sport run to suit the club game, which I'm not against, but that comes at a cost to the international game. RU is a sport that prioritises its international game because it knows that is where the interest comes in. Millions watch 6N and RUWC games but wouldn't be able to tell you who won the league last season.
99% of RL fans would be able to tell you who won our comp last season, but we don't have the millions who take a temporary interest our sport when England are playing, and that's all it would ever be. We'd make more money, get better sponsorships, be more high profile, but only when England were playing. It wouldn't mean we had massive crowds at club games and millions watching Super League, because outside of a few clubs RU crowds aren't much bigger than ours, despite the international game being big.
Great post. I’m not sure where we go with our international game, or even whether we should emphasise it at all. The club game has plenty of challenges and I don’t see us competing with international rugby union. Meanwhile the club rugby union part of the sport is going to hell in hand cart and that is where the international players come from.
A Netflix documentary following the 4 times champions on a season long behind the scenes show, with the characters we have, would be a sure fire success. The Wrexham one is a brilliant watch.
Totally agree when you consider that for England Internationals, Twickenham regularly fills the 82,00 capacity, yet for the last England RL match on home soil v the Combined All Stars (when no other Super League matches were on that weekend), the reported attendance was a paltry 9,393.
For me, this should start from the top down, if you can draw in additional people for the internationals (albeit not against the best opposition in the world), they may naturally transition in watching their local Super League team. If you leave it up to the clubs to improve their attendances, the general malaise around the international game will probably continue.
Quite simply there is more demand and a much bigger audience for international RU vs RL (domestically or internationally), so there is never going to be anything like this from a RL perspective until audiences (both TV and matchday attendance) increase massively.
I ate a tuna sandwich on my first day!
I've said on here before that the only way we'll attract millions is via the national team, but I still only think those millions will be 5-6 weeks a year fans. I joke to my in laws about how the RU season is starting soon, and they don't actually get that I'm ribbing them because the start of the Six Nations is really when they start watching the game, and the end of it is when they stop. They are now aware of RL loads through me, but they wouldn't watch a SL game outside of maybe a Final, but they did watch a few RLWC games. There is a market for that type of floating audience that only international sport can provide, but I really don't think it translates to people flocking to the club game otherwise every RU Prem club would be getting 30k a game given 6 million watch the Six Nations every year.
If we want those floating fans we need to do a hell of a lot better, obviously, but even if we did we need to realise these aren't going to turn into club fans in the vast majority of instances, because the internationals will scratch their itch enough, just like with RU.
I don't know what the approach should be, but I do look at Australia and see how the NRL and in particular Australian Rules thrives with massive tv deals, good crowds and a top grade comp with loads of regional feeder comps underneath, and they don't need the internationals at all, and in the case of the AFL don't have any even if they did need them.
I'm firmly of the belief that competition structure has harmed our game. Wigan's crowds are well down on 10-15 years ago, ours have flatlined despite winning 4 comps in a row and the likes of Warrington and Hull should be fairly embarrassed at the crowds they get most weeks. We're talking about getting new people involved when we've actually lost some long time fans from going to games in the last decade, and not replaced them in sufficient numbers. I believe that the massively diluted regular season has played a part, and the first thing I'd do if in charge would be to change it so that the weekly rounds mean alot more, and see if we can get the people we've lost back into the grounds. Once we've done that is the time to try and attract the millions out there who in reality have little interest but may be interested enough to watch England if it matters.
Yes, agree again. The current structure hasn't helped. I think I prefer each team playing ever other home and away and top of the league is champion. 10 teams 18 matches. Then bring on another comp which involves the 10 top teams and the 10 teams from the the league below with 4 groups of 5 of 4 playing home and away with the top four playing in a knock out. Or something like that
It was Last Chance U that really got me into American Football and Formula 1 has had a surge in support from the younger generation off the back of their series, so it’s possible to create new audiences.
The womens documentary on BBC was good but hasn’t really taken off from what I have seen.
St Helens Rugby League Football Club
Will be interesting to see if this causes a drop off in both player and spectator numbers. Hopefully this never happens in our game
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/64333462
In the 80's, outside of a couple of clubs and a few showpiece games, the vast majority of club rugby union was watched by a max of few hundred people.
'Twickers' would often be sold out, but not always - and that was with a lot of tickets given away.
Yet the print media (outside of the Mirror and the rag) would plaster rugby union stories over their back pages whenever there were internationals. Often to the detriment of football, which was already massively bigger and more popular than rugby union. Of course, rugby league barely got much of a mention. Similar with the BBC (ITV only got involved much later)
Rugby union got a lot of things right in its early years of ditching their shamateurism and going openly professional. They - with the help of a friendly print media and ITV/Sky - wove the narrative of rugby union internationals being national events that you just had to take interest in. Winning that RUWC was manna for them, and you had all kinds of people who had no interest in the actual sport (likely couldn't name any player outside of the England team nor any RU clubs, let alone know the rules) acting like they were diehards, talking about Jonny Wilkinson being so great.
They rode a popularity wave for a while, but club attendences aren't great and general interest has generally waned. They failed to take full advantage of their publicity boost.
He's not the Messiah, he's a naughty boy.
Parliament discussing the new tackle laws been introduced in Union claiming there'll be a mass exodus to league if its introduced in the Premier & Championship