London Broncos need to improve as a club across “all categories” to stand a chance of being a long-term Super League club beyond next season, IMG has conceded after their provisional and groundbreaking gradings system was revealed on Wednesday.
Only the clubs ranked in the top 12 at the end of next season will be in Super League in 2025, and Broncos now look all-but certain to have a one-season sojourn back among the elite after being ranked significantly lower than many expected. They won promotion to Super League when they beat Toulouse in the Championship Grand Final on 16 October.
With 12th-ranked Leigh scoring 12.45 points out of the maximum of 20 and London scoring just 8.07 and finishing 24th out of the 35 professional clubs, it seems practically impossible they would be able to make that ground up via various on and off-field metrics by the time the gradings take full effect at the end of next season.
Clubs are scored on on-field performance, but also on areas like attendances and social media metrics and somewhat farcically, even if the Broncos won Super League, they likely wouldn’t score the requisite points to stay in the competition. IMG’s vice-president of sports management, Matt Dwyer, stopped short of admitting it was likely they would be replaced for 2025 but admitted it would be difficult given the work the club would have to do both on and off the field to survive.
“We can all see their current grading level is towards the bottom of the piece,” he said. “There’s obviously a lot of work to be done there. Without going into specifics, it’s pretty broad, so across all categories London need to be improving. There’s plenty of room for them to improve. While I don’t want to predict what the 2025 numbers will look like, what they now have is clear outlines where to improve their score.”
Seven Super League clubs have achieved the highest Grade A, reached by scoring a minimum of 15 points out of 20: Leeds, Wigan, St Helens, Catalans, Warrington, Hull KR and Hull FC. They will be joined in Super League in 2025 by the next five highest-scoring teams. As things stand, those clubs would be Salford, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Toulouse and Leigh, who ranked between eighth and 12th. The provisional gradings also resulted in current Super League club Castleford finishing in 13th, but they confirmed on Wednesday they were intending to appeal against their grading.
IMG initially felt only four clubs would achieve Category A status but with seven doing so, Dwyer admitted it heightens the possibility of Super League extending from 12 to 14 in the future. “It probably has accelerated things a bit because we’re closer to having 12 Category A clubs than we thought we would be,” he said.
