Sadly, the biggest issue will always be football. That eats up the big sponsorhips deals, the TV money and all of the press and social media attention. I posted before about womens' football, crowds seem to only be a few thousand at club (the interest there is, like rugby, at international level) but they have prime time TV deals, massive media attention and sponsorship because it is football. This is shown on prime time BBC, Sky, the lot.westwinds31 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 1:15 pmAgreed, and you'd think that the standard of the Championship will improve, given smaller Premiership squads and the sad aspect of Worcester, Wasps and now London Irish academy/fringe/squad players ending up in that league. The flip side of course is developing local players, more of whom either can't get in because of the above clubs going under and those players being picked up by clubs, as well as the loan of Premiership Academy players. The whole structure is wrong. Was there a crowd of over 5,000 in the Championship last season ? Unless the Jersey v Ealing games attracted that many, but I would doubt it.GB72 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 09, 2023 12:09 pm I would love to see a fully supported championship but I really do not know how you get there. There is mention of a TV deal but I honestly do not think that you could give the TV rights to the championship away at the moment. Advetiser are not going to pay for such niche viewing. Then you have attendances. They are perhaps about 10% of what they need to be to be of a benefit to the premirship. To my mind you can disregard the ground size but should require an average attendance of over 5000 for the season to gain promotion. Than you move on to the facilities which are not even close to being near the required standard.
There would be years of investment, marketing and development needed to bring the product and experience to anywhere close to being what is expected of a top sporting day out.
Tnen you have the elephant in the room for promotion and relegation, the promoted team gets hammered and relegated and the relegated team wins most matches by a cricket score and gets promoted seems to be the pattern. The championship is good at the moment because there is no prem leval club hammering all opposition.
There is so much to like about the championship but it is so far away from being a decent, marketable sporting product. Sadly I think the gap with the premiership will close but that wil be because the prem clubs will have to slash budgets and lose top players.
The interesting thing is that we are probably more comparable to county cricket, the difference is that the average County crickter earns as little as £25000.00. and their wage cap is about £3million.