• Australian clubs won all three matches in series with aggregate score of 118-28 • Blake Solly says expanding series can help Super League teams improve

Super League will press ahead with plans to further develop the World Club Series despite a second successive whitewash by Australian teams, the general manager, Blake Solly, has said.

North Queensland Cowboys’ 38-4 demolition of the Super League champions Leeds on Sunday completed an aggregate score of 118-28 in the 2016 series and made it 6-0 to the NRL clubs since the one-off World Club Challenge was expanded into a six-team competition last year.

But Solly was pleased with the aggregate crowd of 52,889 – slightly up on the 2015 total of 51,902 – and says he will begin talks with Super League clubs in the coming weeks on how to grow the concept.

“It has to go ahead,” Solly said. “The only way in which Super League and the players that play in Super League can improve is by this sort of competition. It’s a great learning experience.

“If you look at a guy like [the Leeds teenager] Jordan Lilley and what he has learned from this, he won’t get that out of an average Super League game. It’s a lot more than just three games of rugby. There’s a lot of activity that goes on during the week that helps boost the profile of the sport and there’s obviously a hunger for it from the broadcasters.

“For us, it’s a great short-term and long-term way to grow the profile and the revenue of the sport. There’s obviously an appetite for people to come and watch it, what we need to do is get better at Super League. It’s been a great experience and we’ve learned an awful lot. What we’ve got to do now is work out over the next 12 months where we can improve and come back and be better when we meet NRL opposition next year.”

Leeds took the place of Warrington for this year’s event while the Cowboys and Sydney Roosters qualified instead of St George Illawarra and South Sydney to line up alongside Brisbane Broncos. The NRL general manager, Andrew Hill, says there is now a clamour from Australian clubs to take part.

Brisbane’s veteran coach, Wayne Bennett, unveiled last week as the new England head coach, has called for the series to be staged in Australia and Hill has spoken about the possibility of expanding it to eight clubs, with two matches in each country over the same weekend.

Hill said: “This year we could only take three and we’ve had to leave nine teams who wanted to come behind. We’ve seen fabulous crowds and whilst ever the clubs want to come, why wouldn’t we keep the series going?

“A little bit has been said about what the future may hold and it coming to Australia, well that may be next year or it could be the year after. I don’t think we’ve any time frame on it. There’s a few things we’ve got to work through.”

Huddersfield and Castleford are understood to have expressed reservations about taking part, deterred by the £170,000 bond needed to guarantee the NRL clubs’ costs, but Solly believes seven of the 12 Super League clubs are keen to participate.

“You talk to Adam Pearson at Hull and he would love to play in it, Mike Smith at Hull KR, Christophe [Jouffret] at Catalans would love to be in it and [Warrington’s owner] Simon Moran is a huge fan so easily half the competition want to be in it and I don’t think anything you’ve seen over the weekend will change that,” he said.

“I think, if anything, the ambition is stronger than it’s ever been. You look at full terraces and big crowds, a new sponsor in Dacia and some great TV audiences, there is a lot of appetite for it.

“It took us 10 years to get three NRL clubs interested and we went from three to 12 inside 12 months. The goal for us is to get all 12 Super League clubs and all 16 NRL clubs desperate to play and we’re well on the way to that.”