The State of It — Part 2— Rugby League almost 20 years into the new millennium.

Paul McNally spent 15 seasons in the backroom at Salford Red Devils, saw more than most folk see in a lifetime in sport with several owners and countless CEOs along the way. Maybe he came up with a few thoughts and ideas worth listening to along the way.

This is the second part in this ‘series’. In all honesty I wasn’t sure I would write more than one, but as the first part (which you can read here) opened up some good, honest debate, I thought it best to maybe expand on a few points and (as I was criticised in a few quarters for not fixing the game overnight and just being negative — something I wholly disagree with for what it’s worth ;) offer up a more enhanced viewpoint and some ideas to bounce about.

I will say though, it’s not up to me to fix the issues — now more than ever. I don’t have answers, only maybe a tad more common sense than some. I’m, these days, just a fan with experience of being on the other side of the wall.

What I want to do is encourage discussion and try to offer up, in the words of politicians, a mandate for change. Will rugby league die without a drastic change of direction. I don’t think so. Will it remain the same? Almost certainly not. Will a number of traditional clubs vanish. Yes they will. Should they? Controversially, possibly.

In this one I want to quash the idea that people will just come if you put posters out. They don’t. I’m also going to look into a bit more detail about the ticketing scheme I think has the potential to harm the game from within.

Also a few society issues affecting the vast majority of sports clubs in this country, not just rugby league ones. That should see us right for now but there will probably be a few tangents along the way. Bear with me, and as ever, you don’t have to agree with me. That’s the point of it.

Addendum: so Widnes happened last night which brings the problems I’m trying to underline even further to the front. Look we have just welcomed promotion and relegation back as a good thing yet the last two teams to go down are clinging on for dear life. Can we try and fix some stuff before condemning teams? No? Okay. Here goes.

I don’t think you realise your days are a mixture of despair and desperation when you you actually work at a struggling club in a sport that doesn’t necessary consider itself to be struggling.

Certainly not at the time at least. It’s draining. You get through the days trying to chalk off as much as you can off what needs doing, knowing full well that by the time you get back in the morning there will have been a raft of emails adding more and more to that list.

I had a standing joke, because I’m a funny guy, that I didn’t have a To-Do list at Salford, I had a list of things I didn’t have time to do.

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that you know the vast majority of them aren’t going to make a single bit of a difference to the only tangible measure held up against the back room team at any club – attendance.

In the last article I touched upon the lack of return in numbers for the work that is carried out across the game to get bums on seats, and yet still goes on taking time away from where it needs to be focused.

Anybody who has worked at a club will be familiar with the “you don’t put any/enough posters out how do you expect anybody to come?” argument.

It ended up openly being acknowledged, and not just at Salford, that while we know they don’t actually make any difference whatsoever, we needed to do them to appease fans who were coming anyway to “make it look like we were doing something.” I’ve had that conversation with people from other clubs and from the RFL. Ridiculous eh?

Now you might be thinking here “But you don’t put any/enough posters out how do you expect anybody to come?”

Don’t.

If you can tell me that me pasting A3s around the streets will bring me, say, 500 new fans I’ll do it myself, and I don’t even work there anymore.

If you can only promise say between zero and a couple of hundred it’s not ultimately going to make a blind bit of difference. And I know it’s probably going to be zero anyway. So how about we call it quits and just stop doing it, at least until we get to the point where it’s worth the time and effort.

At The Willows Salford used to spend 500 quid a game on the poster run. That was on printing and distribution. That’s probably in excess of 7k a year. Now at the time we were at maybe £15 a ticket. Do you think it broke even? That’s 500 completely new people coming that weren’t going to originally just to get level. At a club with very little money.

Ah but brand awareness that’s a thing isn’t it? And yes there is a reason Coca-Cola still advertise at Christmas, but there is also a reason you don’t go to all those circuses you see posters for all year round.

The sooner we accept that people don’t come to our games not because they were waiting for us to tell them the date, but because they just aren’t interested enough is the point we can start to address the problem and start to work out how to get them interested.

You have to be interested to pay to go to anything. Surely?

So what do we do?

For me the game needs a think-tank, a committee of people who can come together independently of the clubs and however many governing bodies we have at the time.

Beyond that though they have to know that they will be taken seriously and that any crazy-ass scheme will just rightly get voted down.

Even this makes me nervous. We are all bought into a sport that managed to convince itself that Club Call – the gimmick where the league leaders got to choose their opposition for the semi-final themselves should be a thing. Yes. That happened. For about three years. And not that long ago.

That’s an example where a simple thing like thinking can go badly wrong. If that idea had first popped into my head and I’d somehow ever convinced myself to blurt it out in a meeting before sobering up, I would have been relieved to know that everybody else in that room would have reassuringly told me it was ridiculous and never to speak again.

We had it for three years. I’m saying no more.

No, the think tank needs to be an intelligent body tasked specifically with solving problems without the use of game-show gimmicks.

The people, for me who sit on this ‘panel’ need to be drawn from all areas of the game. A couple of fans, journos, administrators, players — at Salford just before I left we were looking at getting the likes of Mark Flanagan and Tyrone McCarthy involved in marketing meetings — these are clever guys with both outside business acumen and a real in-depth knowledge of the game. Every club will have some. If I was still there I’d be sitting down with Jackson Hastings trying to devise a plan around engaging kids and encouraging them to get them to just pick up a ball to start with using social media.

We need to quickly come up with a method of solving, or at the very least mitigating the longer term problems we are clearly ignoring currently. And if it turns out there is no answer, okay, move on and solve the next one. It is possible to have a problem that can’t instantly be solved, as much as you’d like it to be.

A) First up, and massive for me, and I mentioned this last time is the generational gap.

How do we get today’s kids to bring their kids in the future? Hands up if you thought posters?

This is not going to be an easy process, and from the responses on Twitter when I mentioned it last, is certainly not exclusive to rugby league. The draw on parents and kids time from all aspects of life is huge. Gone are the days where the only thing to do on a Sunday was go and watch Fev v Halifax.

Junior supporter’s clubs, with access to the players are a must. And not just token gestures. They need committed organisers who will push the clubs to provide what they need and there will be a cost, but it’s difficult because a lot of the kids you need will never have even heard of the team you are trying to get them to support.

At The Willows the basis of the idea of giving every school kid in a Salford free tickets was interesting and you could at least dole them out. These days with safeguarding etc kids aren’t allowed into stadiums without an adult. And you don’t give out adult tickets, which means for a kid to come for free they need an adult that’s prepared to pay over £20. Not going to happen in the numbers we need.

This is actually a big deal. Kids for a quid is lovely because it rhymes but the little * next to the T&Cs saying it has to be bought with an adult ticket is the deal breaker as has been proven time and time again. Add to that the fact we only do promos like that for the least attractive games. On a Thursday school night.

B) Next, the elephant in the room. Expansion. This needs a whole piece really but here goes, indulge me or scroll down a bit.

People who know me know I’m an expansionist. Romantically I want to see the game played everywhere. Having said that when you hear things like Toronto are the worlds first intercontinental team, the first thing in my head is “yes, but what’s the reason for that?” Why is it just me wondering why nobody has done it before?

Let’s not be glib enough to think it’s because we are pioneers. Down that road leads to a world of disappointment.

So anyway we have a Canadian team and a French team. I’m not counting London because football teams manage a trip to the capital often enough without seeing it as a need to dig out the passports, but for the sake of my continuing rugby league economy theme then they do bear some similarities.

Besides the extra logistics and cost of running the teams, and ignoring the frankly bizarre fact we seem to have tried to stop them playing in our cup competition in case it meant they dared to get to the final and we had an empty stadium — something we are comfortable with most other weeks of the season - we are engineering a situation where the rich teams continue to get richer by including them.

How? I’m going back to the 25% away ticket tax again so bear with me, but in a bit more detail this time. Catalan and London don’t sell any away tickets as such so they get 25% of nowt for half their games.

Wigan, Saints et al sell 2000+ for each game. Even on those figures that’s roughly 10k a game extra if you use £20 a ticket as a marker. Say 80k a year. From away games. It won’t be exactly that but lets stick with the ballpark because that is the price of a good Super League player’s wages. Throw in the extra TV revenue from being on all the time at home and woo hello £150k. That’s an international player, or maybe four alright-quality squad players. Would that make a difference to your finishing position this season? Now bear in mind you haven’t really done anything to ‘earn’ this. It just comes to you — well some of you.

The yin to that yang is that if just four big teams bring 2000 to your struggling Super League Club it’s also costing that club getting on for 50k a year just to play the big boys a season. At your own ground. Why thank you ambassador you are spoiling us.

That money is not available to the Dragons, Wolfpack, even the smaller British teams who are simply not able to wrangle 2000 people together to go to a rugby match at this stage.

Now all of a sudden in Salford’s case you potentially have visits from London, Catalan, Toronto even Toulouse. A truly international affair – watched by nobody. No income from away teams at almost a quarter of your games and the ones where you do have away fans, some clubs are taking 10k back on the bus with them. Are we crazy?

I believe the bigger teams taking such a cut of the small teams gate revenue is like that mole on your arm you haven’t noticed before — it might turn out to be really, really dangerous and nobody has even realised it yet. The clubs at the top need to accept that they are only big teams because there are smaller teams in the first place.

I accept that bigger teams are always going to make more money. Obviously, but the argument that those teams put more into marketing to fans to travel to away game just doesn’t wash to me. They put effort into getting their fans to pre-buy so they get the 25%. The fans were going to go anyway. maybe you could give 25% over a certain number sold rather than on the whole batch as currently it assumes that nobody was going and the away team have done all the work when in reality they haven’t.

Two years ago it was actually mooted that the 25% was to rise to 50% in all seriousness. All the clubs just nodding along in compliance at the prospect with me seemingly the only one clutching at my throat in dismay.

Now the truly scary thing is that you would think it would just be the big teams who were all for that but I have a horrible suspicion that even the minnows were thinking “great we get extra money from our away games” without ever doing that sum that shows they are actually bleeding out and losing far more than they can ever make.

Back to the point. Sorry. A think tank could analyse cause and effect of things like this independently and advise accordingly. If the clubs then decide to carry on regardless the there’s no helping people but I reckon you can only have so many top six derbies a year before people start to switch off surely?

I want to hear, and I don’t think I am being unreasonable, a strategy that encompasses what we are actually do with the likes of New York, Belgrade, Dublin etc when they put themselves forward. A process should be in place that has to encompass the knock-on effects that would come from it. We want to know that A will happen when B applies and when we get to C what the effect on D, E and F will be.

Does that document exist?

“We just need some marketing.”

I guess inevitably as this is my area these days I should talk about the marketing that does and doesn’t go on.

We all hear grandiose teams like “what’s your marketing budget?” — I’ll tell you. It’s nothing. As in, no, really nothing. It’s just whatever can be spared at the time, which generally is going to be..well nothing. And that’s kind of fine because you know where you are and you learn not to be wasteful pretty quickly. You learn to build relationships and call in favours. And talking to the guys at several of the clubs at our various meetings, that’s not unusual.

True story. I signed off more marketing spend in the first week of my new job than I did in over a decade in rugby league combined.

It’s not like there’s no money in the game — there obviously is, it just all goes on players and expenses. There’s just not enough to be spread round to actual marketing — although I’m not convinced that if there was more available it wouldn’t just go into another assistant coach or a new ice bath or something. That’s fine too. The sport is the sport but it also doesn’t run without the back office. It’s impossible.

On a match day it’s even worse. It was a regular occurrence on game day that I would get home and my Apple Watch would tell me I’d done over 15k of walking and running about. Players do about 10k (yes I know they get hit in the face and I was just running team sheets about but for the sake of illustration…)

I’d like to see proper incentives, and indeed requirements, on clubs to run an appropriately sized back office with specific staff and roles filled and salaried to the correct level of expertise. This kind of thing was originally in the licensing requirements back in 2007 but seems to have vanished now allowing clubs and owners to run skeleton staff operations and then bitch about how nobody comes to games.

The only way to make this work is financial incentives otherwise, the money just won’t be there. And you also have to make sure it’s not a sham and you end up with a marketing guy, who’s also the commercial guy who does a bit of welfare and is also the kitman. Or the key jobs would all go to player’s wives which definitely wouldn’t be a way around the cap. Because that will happen.

Now effectively what you have there is the governing body pretty much funding the marketing arm of the clubs themselves — is that such a bad idea? It can’t just be RFL staff though, employees have to be invested in the Club.

I say there’s no marketing budget but that’s possibly slightly misleading in one respect.

Pretty much every year since Salford have been at the AJ Bell the owner (and this is not specific to any particular one of them as much as you might think that!) would bring in some new marketing guru or other that sent a speculative message on LinkedIn that talks the talk — “Ah the reason nobody is coming is that you aren’t doing this and that. I’ll fill your ground for you.”

I’ve been in meetings with owners and these people where they have pretty much promised an 8000 crowd and I’m there knowing that when they don’t deliver that they will be gone in a few weeks and the back office would have to pick up the mess.

We had one guy who came in, took a hefty amount of money on his retainer for a couple of months and basically said “Give me a two million budget and I will turn this place around for you.” — Mate, seriously?

Anyway, a week or so later he was no more either. A lot of people have taken a lot of cash from rugby league and offered very little in return. We have to stop that bleed and trust the people who know the sport. Nobody is parachuting in to save us here kids.

I’m probably in a minority that seems to think rugby league is actually quite a difficult gig to market effectively, and by that I mean retaining repeat customers — there’s that business word supporters love— long enough to turn them into fans.

If you arrive at a game for the first time on some promotion or other it can actually be quite difficult to comprehend. Have you ever even considered that?You might not know about six tackles, you might not know it’s 80 minutes. The chances of you having a clue about cannonball tackles and 40–20s is especially slim. Does it matter? Maybe. Maybe not.

Football is very different and we see this at world cup time. Anybody can sit down and watch a big game and not really need to know the intricacies to be able to enjoy the tension. I think it’s tougher when people intrinsically linked with the sport don’t understand half the decisions and calls that are made.

That’s not to say it’s not exciting, of course it is generally, and you don’t need to get why a two man ball steal gets punished but what I am saying is it’s easier to enjoy if you are watching with somebody who knows the game — who can add a little bit of context to events unfolding.

If we are honest, there are relatively few games where the last 10 minutes are exactly thrilling. One team or another is too far ahead and teams, even though it’s better with the shot clock now, are just “managing the game”. Now if you are a fan, you get that and it’s part of it. If you have just paid £55 quid for a family ticket for the first time, not so much. Your last memories of the afternoon are a succession of scrums and scruffy penalties.

That’s why existing fans are so very vital in the promotional aspect of what clubs do. We need to start converting those people who are prepared to give us their time to try the sport out into fans and education is a big part of that.

If we leave them as occasional visitors we become just another potential weekend attraction. And there are an awful lot of them about these days.

My kids went to games last season — obviously because of my connection, but even they, when there were two homes games on the trot said, “It’s okay we went last week”, when I asked them if they wanted to go to the match.

This is the exact same reaction I would expect if we went to Legoland one week, I saw how they enjoyed it so offered the option up again the following Saturday. As a parent I’ve missed the point. They aren’t supporters. I need to keep finding new stuff to keep them entertained.

There’s also a lot to be said about how difficult it can be for a kid to support a team that doesn’t win every week. My two go to primary in the heart of Salford and on own clothes days all the lads are decked in City shirts, United shirts, even a couple of Liverpool shirts. They only have x amount of attention and that all gets ploughed into watching teams win.

Competition, and therefore losing as well as winning isn’t really taught anymore. My lad plays under 8s football in the Bolton and Bury league and they don’t even have league tables and aren’t allowed online match reports. It’s all about the ‘enjoyment of the game’. I watched him meltdown when City got knocked out of the Champions league last season and then lost to United because he wasn’t used to seeing them lose. His shirt came off and was flung across the room.

These kids these days are not interested in watching a rugby team that wins a few and loses a few and I’m not sure how you get that back. There’s a perverse pleasure that only a fan has that allows them to wallow in a defeat.

You don’t need Einstein and an equation to work out that the club’s with the most fans are the ones that get to the finals consistently — therefore are the ones winning the most games. Maybe you’ll find the occasional pseudo-exception to that but in the main it’s generally right.

Fans will find other things to do eventually if they perceive there is no hope. Bradford, even to a lesser extent Keighley, would be a good example after their heights and successes in the community . People can only take so much but as long as there is even a glimmer of hope a fan will stick by you as long as you don’t take the mickey.

Having said that one semi final every 15 years will test all but the most ardent patience. The solution to that is to get the standard of the competition closer and that is certainly not in everybody’s interests.

Sport is incredible. A one off. My wife and kids know that my wedding day and their births aren’t at the top of my happiest memories. They perhaps even accept they are lucky enough to be in the top three. But it is all about dreams when you get down to it. Defeating the odds and sticking it to them.

A brain allows us to forget we are bottom of the table, lost six on the trot and been awful all year as that last minute drop goal slots over to end the slump. Sport is that powerful.

My wedding in the Caribbean and birth of my two kids versus Sergio Aguero in 2012 and Gareth O’Brien in 2016? It’s not even close (they won’t read this it’s fine.)

Finally, the cost of the game.

This is important so you would think it would be deserving of an in-depth view. I’m going the other way for effect.

Stop thinking rugby league is cheap to watch. It’s not. Discuss.

Cheers,

Paul

Now there may or may not be a part 3. I’ll see what comes up from this one. I really want to look into the TV deal issue amongst other stuff because that is truly scary, but let’s see.

Paul McNally has been published worldwide including articles for FHM, BSkyB, The Commonwealth Games, the BBC and the Manchester Evening News. He has edited market-leading leisure magazines and now heads up the marketing department for an organisation helping people with terminal and life-limiting illness. All this after working for 15 years in the comms department in of a professional sports club.

He drinks a lot of coffee too. Probably too much.

His two non-fiction novels ‘The Peasant Wagon’ and ‘Gym Dodgers’ continue to edge ever closer to release.

Follow him on Twitter @IAmPaulMcNally