IainB

Any chance of getting the Spotify library up to date? Or even making it available on other podcast platforms, it's quite inconvenient (for me and probably others) to have to sit down to watch it on YouTube, especially as it's not essential to see your lovely faces 😁

With a couple of GTR engines under his arms? 😂 ... Another stonking investment from British Speedway

I said as much a few weeks back

I've seen some pointless arguments on this forum but this one takes the biscuit!

To be fair we don't know, but if it was profitable you'd expect them to not be selling

Results wise maybe but Sheffield is currently up for sale because the owner's business can't cover the losses the club makes and if rumours are to be believed the Leicester owner also wants out and who can blame him as that same Sheffield owner took us up, moved us to Thursday nights, saw the crowds drop and sold up.

Shocking numbers... hey but Dan Bewley & Robert Lambert!

All 3 of those can be addressed if the will is there

I'm not so sure about that... there has only been 1 thing that has kept British Speedway going in its current form since the turn of the millenium and the rise of Poland & the SGP series... and that is a tv deal. The current implosion was always going to happen when that particular golden teat ran dry and anybody with any foresight would have known this. Now that tv deal has gone it's time to cut our cloth accordingly, get the sport in order and fit for purpose as a sporting entertainment event and who knows in the future the powers that be maybe able to approach a tv company with a proposal of bringing in top stars for a proper tv deal and not the peanuts that has been received over the last 5 years or so.

What you're not taking into account are the number of riders that have given the sport up over the last few years, many of them youngsters. If the costs could be kept under control there are still people out there that want to take the sport up. You're looking at a snapshot, you're also looking at the business as usual model 7 rider teams, what the sport needs imo is an amalgamation of all 3 leagues into 1 league with a race format meaning that Jack Smith (a capable Speedway rider at his level) isn't racing against the likes of Chris Harris/Richard Lawson all the time, it's maybe even time to introduce handicap racing which used to be the norm in the US, not sure if it still is. There was a big watering down of the CL a couple or 3 years back and nobody liked it, nobody even talks and probably remembers that now. I know from my own club that crowds are visibly lower in the PL on a Monday/Thursday than they were in the CL on a Saturday night... and that's a FACT 😁 Would you have been so vocal about the survival of the top flight when Ipswich were running in the 2nd tier from 2011 to 2018, would you have been so insistent that your club should be forced to have moved up to save the top tier? I'd also be intrigued to know why you think the BAU model will work when it's been proven not to work over the last 20 years... and that was WITH a tv contract?

It would appear so

Those 2 miles to get from the east of Leicester to the west can take the best part of half an hour at the time folk would be travelling... not that it's going to happen in a million years!

To use the Tiger's academy meeting as an example is not really fair, it was very much after the Lord Mayors show on a dark October evening asking fans to turn out to watch a bunch of riders they have zero affinity with. And I did say new Speedway fans. NDL is pitifully attended, that's because it shouldn't be being sold as a product and should be being included as part of the senior teams race night package imo. All clubs crowds are pitifully attended in the terms of other "professional" sports with maybe only County Championship cricket being the exception, but they certainly make up for that with the other formats of their sport, in fact you could possibly compare the County Championship to our NDL. @mikebv has pretty much covered the rest 👍

I think the BSPL actively put a stop to clubs running from different tracks didn't they?

Hopefully the admin staff and Phil Morris are being paid properly for their time, but you'd hope the directors aren't taking a salary and there's probably no dividends to pay out.

Actually, BSPL is a limited company and one of the directors is Danny Ford, along with Damien Bates, who wants out, the other 2 directors are Chris Louis and Rob Godfrey, so 2 PL, 2 CL.

Britain competing PL on a Mon/Thu is a relatively new thing and has just about killed off the sport, and the PL in particular, in this country. I take it you're a relative newcomer to Speedway and Ipswich? Personally I think new punters are more likely to want to come and see young Johnny Local making his way to better things in the sport rather than Johan Foreigner who flies in for his pension fund top up.

Treat yourself to a BSN subscription

Obviously none of us know the financial details of TV deals and/or sponsorship only what we pick up from different sources. Watling JCB have been on board at Leicester since our CL days so I doubt their financial input is anywhere near what the TV deal delivered. I agree that Doyley will more likely than not be back at Ippo next year (if Ippo run) but he is on the down slope of his career, is married to an English woman with a young kid and lives in Norwich, so that probably works for him to earn a bit of extra bunce on a Thursday night. He is very much the exception to the rule of the GP/Ekstraliga contingent though.

The TV deals (especially the more recent ones) allowed the PL clubs to afford their number 1's and attract sponsorship, without it they're in the same boat as every other club.

Without a TV deal the PL clubs are as hard up, if not more so, than the CL clubs, I doubt they'll be able to afford to out bid many of the financially viable CL clubs.

Link? The one above? What episode number is that? 29? Not available on Spotify yet. I'll give it a listen

What did he say then? I'm pretty sure I've listened to the recent podcasts and I didn't hear anything that made me think there was any chance of an imminent Panthers return and especially not in 2026, maybe I missed something 🤷‍♂️

Where has all this Peterborough stuff come from?

They tried this already I can't remember when exactly but I think it was something to do with the availability of GP riders at weekends. I seem to remember Coventry riding at Stoke without the likes of Hamill, Hancock & (maybe) Jonsson and it was called the BSPA Cup (I think). Needless to say it never lasted