The Virtual Terrace • North America
On the face of it, it sounds great, however, we have a history of expansion without really understanding how to expand in my opnion.
So I thought I would go through some of the pros and cons of what I have heard (which is not a lot).
Firstly, Toronto are going well in 2017, whether they can make it to the promotion to SL in 2018 we shall see, but they have setup pretty steadily, I do not know the costs involved or their bottom line, how much is costing the owner and is it sustainable? Getting 7K to me would say it probably is just about sustainable, if it continues.
Secondly, there is talk of a match in Denver, essentially Denver is smack in the middle of the USA, not exactly the location I would pick, and the reason for that is due to the end game, we need to go places where we can setup a pro league and thus get folks involved, this location needs to be in close proximaty to other large towns and cities and have large university close by. It also needs regular flights to the airport is the plan is to get into SL. Denvers population is 682,545, the state of Colorado, 5 million, but they are mainly well spread out, with quite comes distance between towns, it doesn't really stack up to create a pro-league here to me.
Denver doesn't really tick all the boxes, certainly not like New York City, but those plans need to be in place along with costings.
I hear that LA, NY are also in the mix for a possible SL club, LA is just way too far for the SL, NY and Toronto are right on the edge of distance. Again we need to see long term plans and costings and how the leagues are going to step up from the amatuer setups they have now into teams that can turn the massive amounts of young americans athletes into top class RL players.
If we are talking about just world cup venues, then we obviously want big cities, but the problem is the organisation and cost if they are 7 hours between flights, we need to good attendances and also a plan to deliver a pro league in at least 1 area of LA or NY in order to make it worth while.
There is talk of all this being funded from outside the RFL /NRL but I caution this, we should not consider "money" to be the reason we go to a place, we need to always make sure the end goal is to end up with a 3rd pro league in the world somewhere, I beleive the USA is it, but I know my RL History and our ability to forget about everything to take some cash and run a tournament or team until the money runs out. We need to make the teams/ leagues self sufficient wherever we go whatever we do.
Statistics: Posted by Sadfish — Mon Dec 18, 2017 10:17 am