Come on you ‘quins

Does anyone in London know the way to Harlequins RL?

I just saw the attendances for last night’s games, and they made disturbing reading.

• 1,502 attended the impressive Leigh Sports Village in the so called heartlands of rugby league for a vital Co-operative Championship clash with Toulouse.
• 2,600 attended the Harlequins v Salford engage Super League game in downtown Twickers.
• 9,800 attended the Catalans v Hull FC game in the sunny south of France.

The Dragons crowd obviously stands out. Not enough is said about the success of the Catalans Dragons experiment and all involved – yes even the RFL – deserve credit (or even big wraps) for that. The club regularly draws 9000+ gates in a city that is the home of French rugby union champions USAP, yet which has taken the trieziste club to its heart.

For a club with such vocal Super League ambitions and such a super stadium, Leigh really ought to do better than that. OK, Toulouse brought only a handful of fans on the team bus but that still means only 1500 people in the town could be bothered to show up. Really? Why? The game experience was excellent. The football exciting if in need of improvement, which by all indications is a work in progress for next season. But that has to translate into footfall if the club is to have any credibility in terms of a Super League license application.

But the figure that disappointed me was the Quins’ 2600. We can wring hands and moan all we want about the Middlesex 7s across the road and the Premier League season openers and London Transport and bloody tourists with rucksacks and dog-eared maps. But just two thousand and six hundred souls in a city of millions cared enough to trek to the ground and watch. Why?

Don’t give me the cultural “rugby league is a northern game it should stick to its roots” rubbish” either. Go ask Leigh about that. Or Swinton, or heck Salford for that matter.

And this comes on the back of some fantastic news from the Harlequins RL club too about youth development at grass roots in the city, with masses of kids involved. So we can’t put this down to any lack of effort on the club’s part either.

Is it a perception problem? From up here in th’heartlands London is one amorphous lump of a place. Yet people who live there may see it as a quaint collection of villages, or maybe ‘hoods, with Quins simply in the wrong location. Location, location, location we are told is everything. However the London club that is Quins has been pretty nomadic, yet rarely pulled consistently above 5,000 crowds in any of its guises.

Perhaps marketing rugby league in London requires a unique and radical approach. Certainly the effectiveness of whatever is being done cannot be defended.

I’m not a marketeer so I’ve little insight as to what that approach might be, and any ideas I have may well have been done to death already by people who know what they are talking about.

People can easily lose their individual identity and sense of self when living in such large conurbations, that’s why the gang culture flourishes in cities; it gives a sense of belonging, of extended family, of self importance. Now I’m not suggesting the Quins ‘tatt-up’ and get down and dirty in da ‘hood. But tapping into the basic human social need to belong may present a way to build a fan base.

And what about adopting some of the multi-level-marketing techniques? Use the power of networking and pyramid-selling to grow the club. Ok, that may have sinister overtones but it’s no more than offering incentives – say redeemable club ‘points’ – for the number of downline members in a member’s ‘gang’.

• I join the Quin-gang (or whatever snazzy marketing name) and get a shiny plastic card.
• I sign-up Betty and Colin as gang-fans and get 200-clubpoints each.
• Betty and Colin each sign-up another two people each. They both get 200-clubpoints and I get a further 50-clubpoints for their efforts.
• Betty’s people each sign-up two more gang-fans. and get their 200-club-points. Betty gets her 50 and I get another 25.
• At which point I pop into the club shop and get a baseball cap and a mug for work. Oh and the club has another 10 gang-fans tied into a loyalty scheme and part of a tightly-knit social grouping.

I don’t know if that’s viable or not but the model works for me. How you build on that with gang-recognition and rewards and stuff I’ll leave to proper marketers.

Whatever it takes the Quins can’t fail. Even if they have to call Rent-a-crowd we need their presence in the engage Super League to give the game any semblance of national credibility.

The M62 corridor is no longer enough.

Rugby League;RL; Sport