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Club rugby is suffering – will the R360 breakaway league be the cure to its ills?
(www.theguardian.com)
(This comment written by an American who's only watched rugby for ~5 years, from the outside-looking-in, so feel free to tell me to frig off)
I want to say that this kind of greed has ruined live sports over here in the US, but the numbers that you see in the stands during the TV broadcasts would disagree with me. To give you an idea of what it's like to attend an NFL game, you're looking at $250 for the worst nosebleed seats in the house, $20 for a beer, and $15 for a small hotdog with a bun that's still slightly refrigerated. $120 for an official jersey at the team shop if you want a souvenir. For the MLB, a league which plays 10x the number of games as the NFL, the prices are the same except for tickets, with the worst seats in the house being more like $70 (varies a lot more per team than the NFL tho).
What you end up with are crowds that are there for the experience, rather than actual fans - think families just wanting to get out of the house for an evening, businesses entertaining clients, etc. It's a shitty atmosphere for faithful sports fans, but it keeps the leagues afloat I guess. I have to wonder how much longer this can continue with millenials and zoomers knowing how to use streaming sites (legit or not) and being perfectly content to watch the game at home with some pizza and legal weed.
If you look at the NFL, they were broke for the first few decades of their existence but they stayed alive by merging with other leagues. My ignorant question to Europe is do yall really need so many leagues? Why not merge the URC, Premiership, and Top 14? Make it the Champions League instead of the Champions Cup? And maybe reduce the international test interference during club season? (keep the 6N as is though, I think it's a cool midseason tourney, sorta like how the MLB has the allstar break midseason).