Fourteen clubs say yes to a fifteenth
Super League will not stay at 14 teams for long. At a shareholders’ meeting held this morning, the competition’s member clubs voted in favour of moving to 15 teams for the 2027 season, Super League (Europe) Ltd confirmed in a statement.
The vote does not settle who gets the extra place. SLE has handed the matter to the Rugby Football League Board, which will now draw up entry criteria and assemble a panel to judge applications against them. “A recommendation will be made in due course,” the statement said, without a timeline. Clubs are expected to be invited to bid for the spot.
A 15-team league brings an obvious scheduling quirk: with an odd number of sides, one club will sit out every round of fixtures, so the calendar and the bye structure will need rethinking before 2027 kicks off.
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London Broncos lead the queue
Nobody has been louder about wanting a top-flight place than London Broncos. They completed a treble in the Championship in 2026, a season that did their case no harm at all, and they are expected to apply. Whether other clubs will enter the process is not yet known.
The Broncos also have fresh backing. Since dropping back to the second tier, the club has been taken over by an ownership group that includes Darren Lockyer, a legend of the NRL and of the Brisbane Broncos. For a league that has long talked about growing the sport in the capital, a well-funded London side with that name attached is an easy sell.
Salary cap rules loosened too
The meeting also produced two changes to the salary cap. Clubs will be able to claim dispensation when a player misses more than eight cap-relevant matches through injury, letting them sign cover for that period. A player who is already exempt and then gets hurt again cannot trigger a second dispensation unless he misses another eight such games.
The second tweak targets youth. A player aged 23 or under with no previous salary-capped appearances can now feature in two matches without any hit to his club’s cap. Between three and five games, 50 per cent of his salary counts. Beyond five, the full figure applies. It gives coaches a cheaper way to blood academy talent without gambling their cap space on it.
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