By STEVE MASCORD
ON Sunday week, if everything goes according to form, Robert Elstone will wake up the commissioner of a North American sports league.
Rhodri Jones will be Vice President, commercial, of a North American sports league. Adam Treeby will be digital lead of a North American sports league, James Peacock will be head of media of a North American sports league. Their horizons will stretch from Manchester’s trendy northern quarter to marijuana-loving Vancouver Island, 7371 km away.
That’s a lot of doors to be knocked on over the coming off-season – sponsors, broadcasters, government agencies, potential investors. And a shitload of potential new fans.
A lot of the focus right now is on whether the Toronto Wolfpack will be allowed to go up if, as expected, they win the Championship grand final against Featherstone or Toulouse on October 5.
We don’t know the specifics of what hoops the Wolfpack are being asked to jump through. I suspect that if I did know them all, I would agree with many of them.
We’ve heard of multiple reports of unpaid bills. A governing body wouldn’t be doing its job if didn’t express concerns about these issues and seek answers from the club’s owners.
Perhaps the £1.9 million in funding the Wolfpack will voluntarily forgo, instead of being diced up between the other clubs, could be held in trust to cover for emergencies such as them not being able to fulfil fixtures.
Or perhaps it could be spent on travel to Toronto for visiting teams, given the widespread belief that the Wolfpack are supposed to cease footing this bill next year as per their original Rugby Football League participation agreement.
I suspect there would also be Super League demands with which I disagree.
I would put in this category anything that is in conflict with that original participation agreement. The Wolfpack joined the RFL pyramid under certain understandings and if those understandings are broken – the split in the British game is not their problem – then they could fairly be expected to call the lawyers over these moving goalposts.
The RFL may have promised something that they have subsequently proved unable to deliver, causing material harm to the Wolfpack’s business.
But really, the word on the street is that the ‘Pack’s new boss Bob Hunter is a gun operator (it’s an expression, it has nothing to do with firearms) and in the end, everything will be fine.
That being the case…
Rugby league in the UK has trouble opening certain doors commercially. It has trouble getting national publicity. It has trouble making money.
But how many of those doors that are slammed in their faces in this country because of historical bias against rugby league would be opened in Canada? Yahoo Sport in Canada, as one of many examples, has taken a shine to the Wolfpack.
Yahoo Sport in the UK takes agency copy on Super League.
Let’s say, as a purely hypothetical example, Super League approached Subway (the sandwich chain) to sponsor the corner posts and were sent packing.
On Monday week, could they not contact Subway Canada with the same offer? Here’s a new transatlantic sports league that has a Canadian team! Wanna sponsor our corner posts all year?
Or our video referees? Or goalpost pads? Or buy a place on LED displays pitch side?
Suddenly, the old frustrations melt away – our patch now involves virgin territory where there are no preconceptions of what rugby league is.
Instead of seeing this off-season process as “letting a Canadian team into our competition”, it has to be perceived as our competition annexing a whole new continent.
Southern France and North America are not “outposts” from whence we send and receive teams. They are OUR territory and should be as financially lucrative as the so-called heartlands.
As we have seen, it wouldn’t take much for them to be more lucrative. Much more lucrative. Everything the competition isn’t in Britain, it can aspire to be in the New World.
This – the next six months – is when the term ‘New Beginnings’ must take on some actual meaning for Super League.
