France 2025

[The Wee Waa Womble]

If Qatar throw money at it, there needs to be a very specific plan for where all the money goes. Every penny MUST be accounted for and invested back into the sport. We can’t afford to lose money with a World Cup, if someone is willing to bankroll it then we can’t ignore it. If it wasn’t for the £25m the uk government put into the last WC it would have been a financial disaster

[DD]

Let's not beat about the bush here, as soon as somebody has a quiet word with the people in Qatar and informs them that it's the Rugby League World Cup and not the Rugby Union World Cup, they'll realise that it's a non-starter and run a mile. Nobody would turn up.

I'm not really a massive fan of the RL World Cup anyway. We don't have enough countries that play the sport properly. It's just manufactured and contrived, and it's mere presence doesn't show the game in a positive light, when games are played in front of miniscule crowds.

The dream of trying to match the Union World Cup is a forlorn one and instead of trying to showcase a copycat event and drawing very negative comparisons, the sensible thing would be to play a competition based upon our strengths and not weaknesses.

In truth, PNG has a national competition, and in Australia, England and France, the sport is essentially regional. In New Zealand, it's virtually non-existent at club level, and in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa it is non-existent. Nevertheless, those eight nations are the top and bottom of meaningful international Rugby League.

Now, I'm not saying that all the other nations should be discarded, but for me we need to go back to doing something similar to 1995. We need a main World Cup competition and we should have a parallel second tier Emerging/Manufactured Nations World Cup running alongside.

The World Cup itself would consist of four groups of two with two semi-finals and a final, which could give us pools of, for example:-

A
1) England
2) New Zealand
3) Tonga
4) France

B
1) Australia
2) Samoa
3) Fiji
4) PNG

With the exception of games against France and possibly PNG, it would provide a tournament full of meaningful and quality games, instead of the stale and predictable formula we had last time around.

I would also then subsidise that by having a play-out compeition between the bottom four with the losers of both semi-finals meeting in a last play-out, with the loser of that dropping out of the next World Cup to be replaced by the Emerging Nations winners.

The Emerging Nations competition could be something along the lines of
A
1) Cook Islands
2) Wales
3) Scotland
4) Qualifier

B
1) Ireland
2) Italy
3) Lebanon
3) Qualifier

That too would give us another meaningful competition and one that all six of those team mentions could feasibly win.

The international board needs to take the decision of France as a wake-up call. They don't want to host it because it's just not financially viable. They know that no bugger is interested and that lack of interest is because of a reason.

RL must stop trying to compare itself to RU or it will slowly kill itself. Be independently minded and try and make decisions based upon our own sport and its merits, not based upon what rivals do.