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| Martin Offiah remains the most iconic Broncos player despite only playing 16 games for the club Pic: Getty Images |
And in some ways not a lot has changed. Wigan Athletic may now grace football's Premier League (and share a ground with the towns rugby league team, the Wigan Warriors) but for town's like St Helens, Hull, Bradford, Widnes, Warrington and, to a lesser extent, Leeds the true sporting heroes are rugby league players. Football remains prominent in the north but it is a place where it is equally legitimate to grow up dreaming of being a barnstorming second rower for the Huddersfield Giants as it is of scoring goals for Manchester United.
Which is what makes the London Broncos such an oddity. Despite some speculative attempts in the 1930s rugby league has never had a history London. Whilst a professional club has been a fixture in the area since Fulham Football Club branched out in 1980, the Broncos have gone through a number of manifestations (and bases) since that time, the most recent as the ill-fated Harlequins Rugby League. 2012 saw the return of the London Broncos name and the Broncos 'brand' was relaunched amid some fanfare in November 2011. However, as yet the bright future that was talked about is yet to materialise with the Broncos finishing the season in twelfth place in the table only two points ahead of joint last-placed Castleford and Widnes (and nine points behind the Bradford Bulls, who went into administration half-way through the season and famously made all their staff, including their coach, redundant).
As a self-professed rugby league fan I ashamedly admit that I only attended two of the clubs 2012 fixtures - against St. Helens and Leeds (on both occasions largely due to an interest in watching the visitors). Maybe it's just that I've been spoiled by watching to much of Australia's NRL competition but quite honestly the prospect of watching the listless Broncos get absolutely trounced by teams who, despite their superiority, rarely played high-paced enterprising entertaining rugby league wasn't sufficiently appealing to get me to show up more regularly than I did. I live five miles and an easy half-hour bus ride from the Broncos home ground.
When I mentioned this to my dad his response was: "They need to give it away. Rugby League's a northern game. Put another team in Leeds where it actually matters." But I refuse to accept that Rugby League cannot be a success in London. Whilst 32 years of failure (the club has never won a major trophy, with losing finalists in the 1999 Challenge Cup being their crowning glory to date) are hardly encouraging, the fact that the club lives on provides hope. What they need is a template, a successful team upon which to model themselves, a team that faced and overcame the same sort of challenges a rugby team in London is currently enduring.
Of course, the clubs current name harks back nostalgically to probably the best period in the clubs history when in 1994 they were bought by the Broncos of Brisbane. At the time an Allan Langer-led Brisbane team had just won back-to-back Winfield Cups and it would have been difficult to find a more successful template in Rugby League on which to base oneself. 18 years on though the differences between a rugby league franchise in Brisbane, where rugby league rules, and London could not be more stark. Instead, a much better model for the 2012 London team exists in the form of the Melbourne Storm.
The Storm have established themselves as a championship pedigree team in Australian Rules heartland, and whilst they have had some significant (and at times dubious) advantages along the way, they are the organisation which the London Broncos must seek to replicate. Here, in no particular order, are just some of the ways how:
1. Exploit uncertainty at other clubs
The inaugural Melbourne Storm benefited from the demise of the Perth Reds and Hunter Mariners enabling them to sign foundational players of the calibre of Glenn Lazaridis, Robbie Ross, Scott Hill and Brett Kimmorley. In recent years both the Crusaders club and the Bradford Bulls have struggled enormously financially (with the Crusaders being effectively disbanded at the end of 2011) with financial difficulties plaguing a number of other Super League teams. So far the most noteworthy addition London have been able to recruit from either the Crusaders or Bradford is Michael Witt, hardly the sort of signing to set pulses racing or build a team around. With Bradford players so disenfranchised with the last season that many of them are choosing to retire London must be able to offer them an attractive alternative.
2. Find a committed owner
It's pretty difficult to offer a viable alternative to players at clubs suffering financial hardship if you're not financially secure yourself. While I don't claim to have any knowledge of the London Broncos current financial situation I think it's safe to assume there's not a enormous amount of coin floating about. Melbourne of course have benefited enormously by being owned by Rupert Murdoch's News International. London, who Murdoch "fast-tracked" into the Super League when it was launched in 1996 on "commercial grounds", could do with hitting up the media mogul for the same sort of support. And let's face it, the bloke could do with some positive publicity in this country right at the moment. But even assuming Murdoch has enough on his plate at present and can't foresee Londoners signing up to Sky in their droves to watch a rugby league team (surely a large part of his motivation for his initial support), one mustn't forget that the London Broncos have attracted hefty financial support in the past. In the late '90s Richard Branson's Virgin Group were briefly majority shareholders only for the club to be sold to supporter David Hughes in 2002. Such support, if it can ever be replicated, can not be allowed to slip through the Bronco's fingers again.
3. Build partnerships
One of the keys to Melbourne's success has been their relationship with Brisbane-based feeder club Norths Devils. Such a relationship has played an important role in the club securing the likes of Queensland and Australian representative players Cameron Smith, Billy Slater, Cooper Cronk and Greg Inglis (amongst others). Rugby league may not be established in London but that doesn't mean the club can't benefit from where it is established. By building partnerships with clubs in Britain's next tier down, the Championship, London can exploit some of the emerging talent from the north and encourage it to make it's home in the nations capital. Similarly there are plenty of players knocking about Australia's reserve grade who are just shy of making the breakthrough into the NRL but could have a massive impact in the UK Super League. Even better, given the Storm's occasional necessity to offload players who they are no can't keep under the cap but wish to retain (Ryan Hoffman for example) why not sign up to some sort of (legal) agreement that sees them come to London as a first port of call rather than Wigan.
4. Find a niche and invest in the grassroots
Partnerships are important in getting established but it should be complemented with grassroots investment to make a career in rugby league a realistic ambition for London-based kids. There's nothing like a homegrown hero to galvanize a club (see point 5). An essential part of that is finding a niche. Basing yourself in middle class south west London - sharing a ground with Harlequins no less - puts you in direct competition with rugby. Rugby league has always been a working class game, and a sports' alignment with a certain class is even more entrenched in Britain than in the relatively egalitarian Australasia. For the Broncos to thrive they need to find themselves a working class community, on the outskirts of London (preferably in the north of the city), with a relatively uninspiring football club and invest in that community. Afford me a slight departure from my Melbourne model here: the Auckland-based Warriors are the template for this. By basing themselves in south Auckland the Warriors ensured they were not in direct competition with rugby and offered a relatively deprived community (in a sporting sense, as well as in other areas) something to get excited about. The Broncos needs to establish good training facilities, do lots of community work, and provide encouragement and support to schools to the point where they develop a reputation like the Gold Coast's Keebra Park Secondary School so end up attracting aspiring rugby league players not just for the local community but from all over the south of England and beyond.
5. Continue to cater to away fans
If either of the games I attended this season are any indication (and I have no reason to believe they were in any way exceptional), away fans continue to make up a significant proportion (if not the majority) of the attendance at London Bronco's games. But they bring so much more than ticket revenue. They bring atmosphere, loyalty, dedication and passion which is a spectacle in itself. London needs to do all it can to encourage away fans to keep attending and make the away trip the highlight of their season. There are a number of ways this can be achieved but the obvious one that springs to mind is to cut down travelling time and expense by basing the club somewhere north of the Thames.
6. Sign a marquee player
In the short term it's important to give the fans something to get excited about, a reason to turn up on a Saturday. The Storm are fortunate enough to be stacked with marquee players and it was arguably this more than anything else that led them down the track of their salary cap indiscretions. The temptation to add the freakish talent of someone like Israel Folau to an already stellar core was too much. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world it says a lot that many people still associate the glory days of the London Broncos with Martin Offiah. London-born winger Offiah was 30 by the time he returned home to play for the Broncos and his best years (for Widnes and more famously Wigan) were almost certainly behind him. He only actually played 16 games in three seasons at the club but the combination of a hugely charismatic local boy with the capacity to still occasionally turn it on ignited something in supporters and opposition fans alike. The London Broncos need that again, preferably over a slightly longer period of time, but a 34-year-old Craig Gower, who would have been quite a card about eight or nine years ago, isn't going to provide it.
7. Sign a decent coach
Your chances of attracting a marquee player (and the rest of a decent team) expand exponentially if you can attract a coach that players want to play for. Attracting future Australia coach Chris Anderson as the Storm's first coach was a bit of a coup only really surpassed by tying up Craig Bellamy five years later. I remain perplexed that Australian rugby league players continue to choose to semi-retire (let's face it, for most of them that is all that Super League is) to Wigan or Huddersfield or Widnes rather than the bright lights of London. Sure your chances of winning the title aren't as great and you're not going to be noticed in the High Street but I would of thought that this might act as a positive given some of the scrutiny players in Australia face from both the public and the media. For whatever reason, I feel like this argument should apply several times over for coaches. What's more, high quality Australian coaches seem to be in even greater supply than players. Nathan Brown's success at Huddersfield was not deemed sufficiently impressive for him to attract an NRL coaching job and he has now signed with St Helens. Heck, Chris Anderson himself is currently available and with a decent track record in both Australia and the UK. It would be interesting to see if Bluey McLennan could replicate his Leeds success in London and Brian Smith could potentially be coerced into a London-based sabbatical having coached Hull and Bradford earlier in his career. These are all established NRL coaches and completely overlooked the up and coming coaches who are struggling to get a look in at the top level due to lack of opportunity. They could do a lot worse than spend a couple of years in London and they need to be reminded of that and remunerated in such a way that it makes it worth their while.
8. Win something
Melbourne's credibility increased out of sight when they made the finals in their first season and went one better to win the grand final in just their second year in existence. A lot of factors contributed to that result but London must target winning something, anything, to boost their credibility. The old cliche is that success breeds success but the Broncos should be entering every competition they can - local raffles and all - in the hope of building a winning mentality.
9. Overhaul their image
If, in the unlikely event that even some of the steps outlined above are followed, this may become more or less unnecessary. At one level supporters don't care what badge the players wear on their chest as long as the team is winning. On the other hand the most recent rebranding seems like an enormous missed opportunity. Perhaps it was done on the cheap - it certainly looks like it - but I have no emotional attachment to the new Broncos logo, shirts, brand etc. As a West Ham fan I'm happy to be seen proudly sporting merchandise for a team that loses more often than it wins but not if it looks crap. Give the supporters something they can feel some sense of pride in wearing in public. If I'm honest, the whole Broncos thing feels a bit old hat and whilst I'm reluctant to advocate further identity overhauls for one of sports most weathered franchises I think one final one could be in order. If the Storm do indeed end up acting as the model for the London franchises success why not go the whole hog and adopt their moniker too? Anyone who has spent any time in London would realise that in many ways a weather-based name couldn't be more appropriate. After all, I've been in London a year and am yet to encounter my first Bronco.
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