News keeps filtering out of the UK that Super League is finding every single possible reason not to re-admit the Toronto Wolfpack into Super League.
Despite 2020 being impacted by COVID 19, with the Super League competition turning into a shambles of unfulfilled fixtures and a draw that is being thrown together on a week to week basis, and the fact that the competition has bent over backwards to make it difficult for the two teams based outside of Great Britain to compete this year, the powers that be have decided that the competition does not need a team in Toronto any time soon.
Its understandable really…
Toronto is only a major city in North America, the biggest sporting market on planet earth. Toronto as a city has shown it can support and sustain teams in the NBA, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the Canadian football League, as well as many other sporting competitions, but apart from the way the city embraced, promoted and turned up in great numbers to support the Wolfpack in the English championship, do we have any indication that the city of Toronto even likes sport at all?
I mean, what would they even add to Super League that you can’t get out of locations like Whitehaven, Bately, Dewsbury, Swinton or Sheffield? Small towns with a history of failure in their own right as opposed to the crushing costs of competing in Super League with no central funding during a Pandemic. It makes sense why you would want these exotic locations in Super League rather than Toronto. Who doesn’t want to tune in to see Whitehaven play Widnes on a Friday night from some local ground that looks like you’d need a tetanus shot to play at!
How are Super League officials supposed to get any money out of having a team based in North America anyway? To have a team based in a major city in Canada sounds expensive. Sure there are a wide range of commercial opportunities, but do any of them involve free tuna and corn pizza?
It really seems like supporters of the Toronto Wolfpack, and there are many of them based not only in Toronto, but across the world, just don’t understand what Super League is all about.
Super League is a geographically isolated oddity to people ion Great Britain. A quaint little competition playing a long lost and dying form of Rugby that people in the nation use to care about, you know, before the age of mobile phones and colour television.
Super League isn’t about attracting new supporters to the game. Its about dying with the old ones. Its about nostalgia, and thats something Toronto supporters will never understand. A vibrant new city just doesn’t get the fact that Super League is about little old towns that look like backdrops for historical movies about the downfall of society.
Toronto might be a wonderful place to live and visit and enjoy a game of Rugby League at, but does it even have a Nandos?
Super League gets exactly what it wants out of rejecting the Toronto Wolfpack at the worst possible time. It gets to stay small. It gets to be irrelevant. Less people get to watch at the administrators of Super League keep giving CPR to the rotten corpse of British Rugby League.
So keep your entire continent, your big city, your commercial opportunities and your new and committed fanbase. We have a game between Wakefield and Castelford to fire up about. Its like the Super Bowl, except no one gives a shit.
All the best Toronto fans.
