Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" This RLWC will be the best attended in the history of the comp.

Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" This RLWC will be the best attended in the history of the comp.

There is enough rugby league fans to make this a success, whether we do is the concern. Regarding twitter, Leeds have 42,000 followers, England RL have 20,000, rlwc 12,000

Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" Some of the figures quoted in that article are incredibly depressing....and scary.

Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" Some of the figures quoted in that article are incredibly depressing....and scary.

Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" Why post this on GF day? Standard rah rah anti-RL propaganda. Get behind your sport.

Quote the exile="the exile"I'm rather surprised this article hasn't been mentioned before. Quite thought provoking I thought! www.independent.co.uk/sport/gene ... 60091.html'" Why post this on GF day? Standard rah rah anti-RL propaganda. Get behind your sport.

A quick visit to the RLWC Ticket sales thread shows there has been a sudden rush on tickets and there are only 25% of the odd numbered seats in the blue section of the middle tier in the Orange zone of those originally released for sale left.....





Seriously, I do the telegraph crossword daily and it's easier to decipher than some of the Press Releases coming out of RLWC2013 HQ

RWC 2015 has well over 180k fans on FB and is 2 years away, RLWC has 22k and is 20 days away. Why is this?

Yeah....RFU are ting themselves over the SL GF which will be watched by 300,000 on Pay TV and the RLWC 2013 which by all accounts has managed to sell only 56% of its target of 500,000 tickets, even with a lot of said tickets being as cheap as £7.50 a pop





Since they dropped the shamateur status of Union for full on Professionalism 18 years ago, the RFU and other European Unions haven't had to give RL a second thought......whereas their club games used to get a couple of thousand in attendance and Internationals were their lifeblood, they now have a domestic and international club comp that averages more than it's old professional rival and the series of FRIENDLY internationals on at the same time will attract crowds that the RFL could only dream of.....



...and you think a bit about how little is known about the RLWC or that it is even on is Rah Propaganda





...the biggest threat to RL is RL fans themselves.....£7.50 a ticket and still they are struggling

Some adult tickets for this World Cup were priced at £5 using the half price promo code 100days and 50days.

whilst there are some valid points in the article (the marketing has been terrible so far, and social media could be more heavily exploited) i find it a bit ironic that a newspaper which gives league a quarter of a page every weekend if lucky and union 3 to 4 pages can harp on about the popularity of union over league. its as if they don't realise the newspapers are a major part of the problem

The article is pretty much 100% on the money....









Why do the broadsheet/serious newspapers give Union 3 or 4 pages and League only a quarter? Is it a massive conspiracy by the RFU or is it more of a case of the editors actually printing what the readership want?



Here's an article from 2008......the torygraph no less.

[urlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyleague/3259506/Rugby-League-World-Cup-Englands-match-full-blood-guts-and-skill.html[/url.there are plenty of journalists out there who need to be regularly engaged by the RFL.....the RFL still think it's all about sticking posts in the ground and announcing a KO time.

The fact the sports journo starts off with how he should know about it but stumbled across it kind of gives you a good indication of his abilities as a sports writer and/or his right wing rugger leaning. He's paid to knwo about sports yet seems quite ignorant to this particular sport.

She was at the times for 10 years and led their Olympic coverage. Not sure if she is freelance now or if she's been hired by the independent. As for a bias view....... What facts did she get wrong?

Who chooses the amount of media coverage that RL gets ? It's certainly not the RFL (who put on various press conferences), but it is the editors of the media companies.



The RLWC trophy goes on a nationwide tour, but gets very little local coverage, and virtually nil national coverage. Compare that to the Olympic Torch relay, or even what the Russian Winter Olympic Relay got this morning.



You see virtually no advertising for the Olympics or Commonwealth Games, because the media love big athletic events and therefore the tickets sell themselves.



The RLWC dodesn't get media interest because the media choose it to be that way, essentially still coming down to the class divide and "journalists in a southern-biased media".



Even in this weekend's Sunday papers union games still got more coverage than the SL Grand Final, that cannot be blamed on a lack of publicity, but on deliberate editorial choice.

A thousand times this....



RL is a bloody tough sell to anybody - and the RFL's cause isn't exactly helped.



The RFL's biggest asset is it's 'audience'. The fans are what the RFL has to sell to sponsors, the press and anyone else who is looking to spend a few quid in exchange for some exposure.



The RFL has struggled to sell 'access' to it's audience over the last few years (in the form of lucrative competition sponsorship), but let's be brutally frank here, it's trying to sell a Primark jumper to people who are used to shopping in Harvey Nichols.



Put yourself in the position of a blue-chip sponsor, or a media publication with an affluent reader-base. You're approached by the RFL and you ask the most basic of questions; "what's your audience"?



"Well, Mr BMW or Mr Telegraph, our audience is a relatively small group of people, the majority of which support badly-run clubs in small towns in the north of England. They're suspicious (and even resentful) of anything south of Chesterfield and most of them are outraged when they're asked to pay more than £15 to attend a semi-final of an elite competition."



Other than Poundland or Brighthouse, who in their right mind is going to want to pay for access to that audience? Which media outlet is going to think that catering to that readership is going to help them attract big-budget advertisers?



There is a huge onus here not only on the RFL but also on the clubs to attract a 'better' audience. One that will come into the game, spend money, talk positively about the sport and be the sort of people that advertisers want to talk to. To do that, clubs need to pack it in with the bargain basement pricing and instead, offer the facilities that those audiences expect, offer an experience that is worthy of a premium price tag and start using tactical offers tactically. What they need to do is start using that dirty "M" word - "marketing".

The journo must have missed the double page spread in last week's Shortlist magazine then - a publication that has almost 8 times more readers than the Independent...

Gutter fax, folk up North don't give a sheeeite about RU but it gets far more column inches up here than RL, why?

We need to target the influencers in the press, get rid of the clowns representing our sport on Sky and get on FTA nationally every week with a quality production - perception is our problem

Exactly.........it is up to the RFL to change the perception........as it stands, they don't have a clue

The job isn't easy with all the years of apartheid but we need people who understand the importance of perception and are passionate about changing it

Because they are based in Sth of Engalnd owned, managed and edited by public school types who have grown up on Union and taught to sneer at league?



Or maybe that is just my Northern RL chip on the shoulder and in fact the media are very open to giving RL equal footing and it is just the media dept at RL HQ that are not engaging them? I guess we will never know.

There's a media bias, we all know that. It's not some kind of deep conspiracy (in the main anyway), but ignorance. I posted a picture of the crowd near me at the GF and a southern mate was amazed at the size - he genuinely thought the GF was attended by about 10,000 at most.



About 20 years ago, League was making steady progress in media coverage. I remember two-page spreads in national dailies discussing the Challenge Cup final, etc. and the likes of Ellery Hanley, Martin Offiah, and particularly the Union migrants were generating press coverage. Any genuinely institutional bias was worse back then than it is today - a lot of senior people in Union are very complimentary about League now (much rarer back then) and yet our media profile today is much worse.



The 'bias' is just a fact on the ground today which defines the work we have to do. It is not an excuse for the pathetic brand-awareness and marketing of the sport. Essentially, we all know the general gist of the biased perception of what League is. Do you really think the likes of Nigel Wood leading the RFL is a good idea when it comes to overcoming that perception?



Finally, if you're going to restrict the best clubs from hiring the best players with a tiny cap ( however sound your 'level-playing-field' motivations are ), then you might as well wee into the wind if your ambition is to build a high-profile sport. Have the tiny cap if you like to feel great about making the sport egalitarian, but don't complain when the media isn't particular interested in writing about average players.

Check out Twitter and Facebook and tell me that some public school educated has somehow managed to restrict the number of followers on social media





RL gets SFA coverage because it doesn't know how to sell or promote itself.....it speaks volumes about the sport that the best RL advert produced in the last 18 years was the one SKY produced this year to promote their coverage.....yet it's sat there on 33k views, yet the other lot have has 81k views for their 2011 promotion for the 2015 RWC







[urlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Q3LQGHEl8[/url



Time for change at the RFL........the sooner the better!

Sorry Whippet but I don't check my posts on here as I once did. Apologies for the delay.

However it was your comment re standard rah rah stuff that got me as I'm anything but a union fan! I've been getting behind my sport for over 40 years, hate union with a vengeance even when people say I should move on. Union discriminated against us almost 90 years and somehow we are supposed to forgive and forget in the last few years of their professionalism.

Whilst I've begun to hate the negativity about another sport ( rugby union) I'm 100% a league fan who will happily watch lots of games, pro and amateur and still feels dirty watching anything related to union.

Just felt I needed to respond to that slur on my good character!

Oh dear.....

Quote JB Down Under="JB Down Under"Because they are based in Sth of Engalnd owned, managed and edited by public school types who have grown up on Union and taught to sneer at league? Or maybe that is just my Northern RL chip on the shoulder and in fact the media are very open to giving RL equal footing and it is just the media dept at RL HQ that are not engaging them? I guess we will never know.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhG5DfrrfsQ

Quote JB Down Under="JB Down Under"Because they are based in Sth of Engalnd owned, managed and edited by public school types who have grown up on Union and taught to sneer at league? Or maybe that is just my Northern RL chip on the shoulder and in fact the media are very open to giving RL equal footing and it is just the media dept at RL HQ that are not engaging them? I guess we will never know.'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhG5DfrrfsQ