It’s been a rollercoaster ride but Super League is still offering the thrills for fans – and after success in 2015, this season is the most crucial yet

There is a quote attributed to Jacques Fouroux, who was president of the now-defunct Paris Saint-Germain club, after his side and Sheffield Eagles kickstarted the bold new era of Super League on 29 March 1996, following rugby league’s switch to summer rugby.

PSG won the game 30-24 in front of 17,873 people, offering what would ultimately be false hope on so many levels. “98% of them [the crowd] were new to the game,” Fouroux said, “but they understood it right away. They saw tries, lots of commitment and lots of movement. They saw beauty. They attended a great party.”

The party would not last long for either club. PSG folded at the end of the 1997 season and Sheffield were last seen in the top flight in 1999 after they merged with Huddersfield Giants because of financial problems. Fouroux may not have been totally accurate with Parisians and their views on rugby league but the advent of Super League and the subsequent 20 years certainly justify a lot of attributes he described on that night at the Charlety Stadium.

If nothing else, Super League has carved out a reputation as being unafraid to be brave in the past two decades. Innovations have come and gone. Some, like the Magic Weekend, have stayed, but just how much has the league moved forward since its inception in 1996?

Nobody is still playing from the inaugural season of Super League, but the Widnes captain, Kevin Brown, is more experienced than most. He made his debut for Wigan in 2003 aged 18, and as the salary cap has gradually evened the field out over the years, Brown now sees a more competitive Super League than ever before. After all his Widnes side missed out on the top eight last year by a solitary point.

“The quality across the board now is a different class,” says Brown. “When I was a kid at Wigan we used to play teams like, no disrespect, Leigh and Halifax, and you could play poor and win by 50. You were basically mucking about, and then you’d go and play Leeds or St Helens and there’d be all the best English boys and all the best overseas imports all in three or four teams. You’d have a handful of tough games a year but now it’s just week after week: there are genuinely no easy games.”

Brown’s comments seem to tally with the league tables over the years too. The gap between first and fifth in 2003 was 14 points; last year’s Super League table yielded a gap half as big. The champions of Super League I, St Helens, edged Wigan out to the championship by a point, but they were 16 points clear of fifth-placed Warrington, which does suggest that Super League’s competitiveness has increased.

The salary cap, widely seen as the reason for levelling the competition between the clubs, is another Super League innovation. The league’s general manager, Blake Solly, believes that creativity and experimentation is what now makes the competition more appealing than ever, as well as, perhaps more crucially, stability at club level in a financial sense.

“We have to be realistic and admit that other sports don’t need to do those sorts of things but we’re willing to experiment and be courageous, so we get the benefit of things like Magic Weekend, which was really well received last year in Newcastle,” says Solly. “Because we have to innovate more I think it makes us a more appealing prospect.

“The clubs as a whole are better businesses than they were then. That move 20 years ago from part-time to full-time was with clubs that weren’t ready to do it, and it put the sport back five or 10 years. The clubs are infinitely better than they were and the sport is better presented than it ever has been before, certainly 20 years ago.” Despite television money increasing, the £1.85m salary cap has remained almost the same. It is now dwarfed by the NRL’s £3.4m cap, almost double that of Super League.

Somehow, though, the league still has its appeal for the big names from Australia, such as Frank Pritchard, the Samoa captain who rejected advances from other NRL sides to sign a three-year deal with Hull. “I still had one more year at Canterbury,” he says. “But things happened over there that meant I had an option to come here, and I was delighted to take it. Super League is a challenge that really excites me.”

After arguably the most exciting season in the competition’s history, Solly knows there is a prime opportunity for Super League to break into the mainstream this year but concedes it will not be without its challenges. “Super League is in a better position to capitalise now than ever before,” he says.

“We’re working off a great platform this year. We need to attract new fans; 2015 was a great year and we got the core fans back involved properly with the sport, and now it’s our opportunity to grow that fanbase over the next 12 months.”

What was initially a bold move to turn the sport on its head in 1996 has undoubtedly paid off, but this year, on the back of such success in 2015, is without doubt Super League’s most crucial yet.