AT the height of the NRL finals series, I’m going to have to beg your forgiveness. I want to discuss a breaking-news proposal for how the parallel play-offs on the other side of the world might look 12 months from now.

I’m talking about something that has come to the fore in the last half-day and which no-one else has had time to do analysis on.

Firstly, a refresher course for those of you who may not follow British rugby league too closely. Super League has 12 teams. You get a chance to gain promotion to Super League by finishing in the top four of the Championship, which is the second division.

Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Reddit Email Share

The top four in Championship and the bottom four in Super League form a new mini-competition two-thirds of the way through the regular season. The top three at the end of this self-contained competition go up, while the fourth and fifth play off in what is called the Million Pound Game for the final spot in Super League.

Got it?

Recently, the Super League clubs have made a power play. They want to be more like the NRL, where most fans would not know who is leading the NSW or Queensland Cups. Super League should be the focus, they say.

They want to get rid of the qualifiers and have one team up, one down. Ian Lenagan, the Wigan owner, even admitted this was “a trade-off”. He’d prefer to just pull up the drawbridge completely.

On Friday, there is going to be a showdown between the Super League clubs and everyone else. Who knows, things could turn thermonuclear, in a 1995 sense. They might break away and form an Extremely Super League.

What has happened in the last half day is that the Championship and League One teams have made public their own counter-proposal.



Funding is a big part of the argument, of course. Championship and League One clubs currently get 12.5 per cent of TV rights money.

NRL clubs receive a much smaller percentage of the NRL’s total TV revenue than Super League clubs currently get of the Sky pot, with more Down Under going into grassroots.

The promise from Super League clubs is that the lower division clubs’ percentage will stay the same if the next TV contract is the same or higher. But if it drops below a certain level, they might be cut off completely.

The compromise the lower division clubs have come up with works like this (listen carefully!): the top team in the Championship is automatically promoted and the bottom team in Super League automatically relegated.

But the second last team in Super League would have to survive a helter-skelter play-off with teams two to four in the Championship, finishing with a Million Pound Game, to survive. So, a three week round robin with three championship teams and one Super League team finishing in a final.

The concept ends the uncertainty surrounding the draw with fans not knowing who they are playing after the season ticks past two-third done. An entire season’s worth of fixtures can once more be announced in November or December.

Not only that, the qualifiers can be run concurrently with the Super League play-offs, proving telecasters with a full weekend of fixtures even with the season at the knockout stages.

The concept is genius. Super League clubs would want to have a very good excuse for rejecting it if they don’t want to come across as nothing more than greedy.

Advertisement