ON the face of it, Sunday’s press release about the record-breaking attendances for the Betfred Super League’s Easter weekend was the standard PR guff.
You’ve seen all the headline figures now: The second-best-attended round of fixtures in the competition’s history (86,080 aggregate), rhe highest average attendance for a round of fixtures in Super League’s 30-season history (14,347), average crowds up 21 percent on last year (11,191 from 9,221) – all very enouraging and worthy of celebrating.
This does, however, come at a time when RL Commercial, and by extension it’s marketing agreement with IMG, is heavily under scrutiny as part of Team Nigel‘s club-led review of rugby league in this country.
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After all, it is quite reasonable for such a review to question what £400,000 per year – not a signifanctly exhorbitant figure to pay a global sports marketing giant for its expertise, but a signifcant enough figure for a sport which doesn’t have that kind of money to spend on a whim – is actually delivering in terms of return on investment.
There are also questions around whether RL Commercial, the entity jointly owned by Super League (Europe) Ltd and the RFL, is fulfilling it’s purpose too.
And while Team Nigel or whoever ends up running the governing body post-July could not unilaterally termimate the 12-year agreement with IMG, if RL Commercial is closed down then, so the theory goes, the would be no entity for them to have an agreement with.
There would be no surprise if a few people might be getting jumpy then.
Indeed, RL Commercial managing director Rhodri Jones, a man who chooses his words very carefully, had a couple of paragraphs of quotes in the aforementioned release which were seemingly aimed at the detractors as much as anyone else.
“We’ve worked with the clubs to focus on these big games and attract attendances which are historically significant for rugby league,” Jones said.
“This success has maintained the momentum that’s been building throughout the 2025 season, from the record opening night for Wigan versus Leigh back in February, through the historic Round 3 fixture between Wigan and Warrington in Las Vegas in March, and now with the 500,000 milestone reached in record time, and with a best-ever average attendance for Super League of over 14,000.”
Tl;dr leave us alone, we know what we’re doing (even though Las Vegas was very much the NRL’s show, with Wigan Warriors and Warrington Wolves laying most of the groundwork from this end).
The mention of the crowds at the Betfred Championship match between Halifax Panthers and Bradford Bulls (4,887) and the Workington Town-Whitehaven Cumbrian derby (2,310) in Betfred League One was some classic “we’re thinking of the little people”, too.
Will it be enough to show to the club-led review that RL Commercial and the IMG agreement is worth persevering with?
Will there be any future for one, or both, even if the proposed NRL takeover of the British game goes ahead?
Ultimately, we’re unlikely to know the answers to any of those questions until July.
But with Super League’s Magic Weekend (May 3-4) and the men’s and women’s Betfred Challenge Cup finals (June 7) on the horizon, expect RL Commercial to be making plenty more noise about anything remotely positive they can seize on.
