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If you're referring to Hans-Peter Wild then that arrangement ended several years ago. He funded Heidelberg's professionalism. Built the Wild Academy and promoted a lot of the national teams games.

There were murmurs of an Israeli team for a few months. Hell even the Cheetahs were mentioned. Romania is a sad situation. They agreed to moved out of their stadium while it was redeveloped for Euro 2021 on the grounds that they were to take up primary residence as before after. Only for the...

Will be interesting to see it evolve. Hopefully they have a long term development plan for the competition with targeted nations to get a teams while others like Spain etc. to get another team or two down the line. I know there were two bids from Spain. I'm also interested to see the...

The Rugby Europe Super Cup has been unveiled. Been in the works for a couple of years. No Romanian team involved thanks to an ongoing dispute with their govt who slayed the Union's budget. Hopefully in the future. Seen mention from Spanish based commenters that they want to grow it to a 16 team...

I'm hoping that when it reverts back to the home and away format next season I'm hoping they retain the President XV alongside introducing the Fijiana.

It's a relatively new thing in Uruguay but the Romanian Super League has been running for quite a while now. It's actually very interesting to learn about the growth of professional playing opportunities around the world.

Semi-pro is paid to play but Rugby isn't your first job for the length of the season including pre-season. While professional is the ability to focus on Rugby as your primary job for the length of a competition. At least as I view it.

I assumed they were on Bullrush's original list to be honest. As they were obvious. Adding to my above list I know the Sri Lankan league at least has been semi-pro in the past and I'm pretty sure it's similar in Madagascar. Mexico has ambitions of entering a team in either MLR or SLAR while Peru...

USA, Canada, Russia, Romania, Spain, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Brazil and Colombia. There's a level of semi-professionalism in the Netherlands. There's a pro Swiss team working their way through the French leagues. Poland will have a semi-pro/pro league from next season. That's 22.

Yeah, if we were to add a 2nd team in Sydney I actually think North Sydney would be the likely candidate. Would hopefully then force the Tahs to start to look more towards the west.

Probably hoping to get back before a mandatory quarantine is enforced for anyone returning from NSW.

Yeah, I suspect this comes with pretty clear conditions on where the Drua will be competing. Would be a fairly be f'up if they provided this funding with stipulating such a condition.

Super W games could essentially be played a curtain raisers before the Super Rugby Au games. Certainly wouldn't hurt viewership in my opinion.

It's very much a hearts and minds investment. Which can be significantly more powerful than infrastructure spends. I find the funding for Fijiana involvement in SuperW to be very interesting. This seems like a govt. backed play to essentially secure Fiji as part of our structures. Which I have...

I st At the very least someone should forward Joe's ideas. Easily the best formats I've seen suggested. Could even tweak them to form two concurrently running competitions. Domestic and TT. With points from both counting running across two ladders. One for SRAu/Au and a combined one for TT...

I'm a little conflicted. On one hand having club rugby raising the standard would go a long way to improving the depth we have but on the other professionalism such as that restricted to the one competition is of significant concern.

No. The pathway needs to involve a level that provides a far sterner testing ground than either Sydney or Brisbane premier Rugby can provide. What I'm essentially suggesting is a similar set up to NZ with the Bunnings NPC and Heartland Championship. A 6 team set up would allow for the franchises...

A lot of thought put into this and you've put up some interesting ideas. I agree with the idea of using the respective 2nd XV of each of the franchises as the base for the teams. Could even look to just wrap them in the previous NRC iterations. It would allow for those teams to be entirely...

That would require some funding.

Yep. $30m across 65 games is $461k a game. Compared to $50m across 300 at $166k.