One minute the clubs are trying to overthrow the Moore Park administration, the next Rugby League Central is talking a $2 billion TV deal and paying the players a shedload more. The net is being cast wider than ever for talent, with Super League introducing a marquee player allowance last week in a desperate attempt to compete. Competitions overseas seem to be popping up every second week – as clubs and leagues in the bush go broke. How should we feel? It doesn't make for a nice punchy column but the way Discord sees it, things are not as bad as the harbingers of doom will have you believe, nor as rosy as you might be persuaded if all you read is NRL.com. Rugby league in Australia is in a state of enormous transformation – and if you remember the years of the Super League War … well, how much do you remember about the actual football? Not much, right? Newcastle winning the ARL grand final and that's about it? Who won the Super League tri-series or the ARL Tooheys Challenge or the World Club Challenge or the World Nines or the ..?

We will look back on the years 2014-17 the same way eventually. The stuff that will be recorded in the game's history books seismic, controversial, painful administrative change with some long-lasting rule alterations thrown in. During this period the salary cap is going to double, the NRL administration is going to increasingly turn the clubs into franchises in the real sense – ie, they are gonna run them. And it's possible to see the League playing hard ball with the recalcitrant, of making the sort of unilateral, historic decisions we saw between 1994 and 1998 and risking deep schisms as they do so. Junior development is going to be streamlined, international football is going to get a massive injection of resources and focus, players will become professionals in the way Premier League footballers and NFL stars have, with their private lives taking place behind six foot fences. We've already lost many of the things we saw as hallmarks of rugby league – fighting, shoulder-charging, a big chunk of sledging, bagging the referee, a big slice of team bonding. So far, you are probably thinking of this column as being somewhat apologist for the current NRL administration. I disagree with a lot of the way they run things day-to-day.

My point here is that ANY administration – run by a banker, a lawyer, a butcher, baker or candlestick maker – was going to have to make these changes for the sport to survive in the modern world. We live in a hyper exposed society, thanks to technology. We are all much more accountable for our actions than we have ever been. Rugby league had enough skeletons in its closet to fill Rookwood Cemetery. They needed to be exhumed and incinerated if the game was to avoid being pushed back into its strongholds of western Sydney, south-east Queensland and south Auckland by rivals near and far. Parents don't want their kids risking serious injury every Saturday morning. They don't want their kids watching blokes on TV who are poor role models. Sponsors and advertisers don't want that either. Kids grow up with ambitions that go beyond playing a game that takes them to Campbelltown once a year. There's only a small percentage who want to do something for fun that is guaranteed to hurt, and a big battle for a decent share of that percentage. And there are better things to do with your weekend now than officiate in a sport where you are going to be vilified no matter what, to a bigger audience than you could ever have been vilified before. Rugby league needed to be hauled out of small patch of soil that was growing barren from over-use.

Now, I think the majority of games have become too predictable and boring, even if this seems to have given the minority some sort of staccato split personality. I think you should be able to say that the referee was wrong, even if you have you bite your tongue over your opinion of that mistake. I think the NRL should have an expansion plan on the table now. I think it should be doing more to help the developing states. I think Australia should be playing this spring. I think there are too many teams in Sydney and the second tier should help revive the clubs that can no longer compete in the top tier. I think there are too many club games. I don't like all the empty seats on TV. I think the referees are trying their best but the way they are administered has been over-complicated. I think this is a rather listless season – we have them from time to time, no matter how good the marketing and promotion, how well intentioned everyone is. But the question is not really how rugby league is going halfway through 2015. It's whether the game is going somewhere – somewhere better.

And I still believe it is.