Castleford Tigers received the verdict of their IMG appeal finally after weeks of waiting.
The Tigers finished 13th in the IMG rankings which would see them miss out on Super League if the same happened ahead of the 2025 season.
They appealed their score because there was an error in their score. Their appeal failed but they were encouraged by being instructed that their score would be 12.91 which would put them 11th above Leigh Leopards in 12th spot.
This would push Leigh down out of the top 12 which is a concern for the club. However, Derek Beaumont believes the club will receive a Grade A score and this will be helped by the club’s impressive memberships.
Beaumont explained on Leigh Leopards TV: “The memberships have been really successful. The big headlines on it really I suppose is that we’ve passed three and a half thousand, I think is really really important.
“On the Red Card membership, which I think is really important, the one thing that I was questioned about that internally, by Mike, and anybody else, are you not fearful of people downgrading to that? That’s the exact reason for it though, people downgrading to it means really what they’re going to do is not actually stay as a member for whatever reason.
“People’s circumstances change. These times are hard and so people might have bought membership before for all 13 games knowing even though you knew you could only come to 10, so financially you’re better off just buying individually.
“So that’s why you make the membership more than just the games. The packaging you get, the memberships, keeping that status, the role, all the other added benefits, which we’ve added more to. So that was a big reason for that, whereby it could downgrade to that if you kept it as a member.”
Leigh have shown great ambition and deserve to be in Super League and so do the likes of Wakefield Trinity and Toulouse Olympique who would be at risk of missing out because of this development but so do the Tigers.
This begs a question about potentially expanding the league to 14 teams.
