My Mate Ronnie wrote:
“I get sick to death with the media in the south of England giving absolutely no profile at all to fantastic sports people and matches. It’s only in that M62 corridor where it gets profile in the main.
And?
The reality is that 8,000,000 or so Northerners live in Yorkshire/Lancashire/Merseyside, which to a certain extent is the greater part of the "corridor", yet on a given weekend, 51,000 fans will watch the 6 top flight games (in the area) and another 8,000 or so will watch the 7 x 2nd tier games, so let's call it 60,000 fans. The following week and with no allowance for away fans, the figures would be 43,000 (Catalans at home) and 4,000 (Bradford & London away), so it could be argued that 106,000 people attend one of the 24 RL games in Yorkshire/Lancashire/Merseyside/(and Cumbria) every fortnight......outside of this corridor, 8,500 in France and 7,000 in Toronto attend games once a fortnightly in the top 2 European divisions of the sport.......
......RL punches well above its weight in terms of exposure in the Media, but in South of the Watford Gap, 1,000 at The Broncos in tier 2, or 2,000 in tier 1 and 300 at the skolars in tier 3 is what the sport attracts in the way of paying spectators......and it's not like the Southern Population doesn't know RL exists.....45k for a stand alone game at the Olympic and 68,000 for a double header at Wembley......but the RFL decided not to take NZ there this year.
People need to stop blaming the "media" for the lack of interest in the sport and start looking long and Hard at their clubs and the RFL. I have been a broncos fan since 2002 and in that time they have made little effort to attract fans to games, or anything other than "mates' as sponsors.....it's not because they aren't in the evening standard every night that they get crap crowds and no attention.....it's because they don't know/ to market themselves......
HOW MANY TIMES?????
