Playing a whole league in one city was convenient and it cost the sport

The travelling caravan model is cheap to run and easy to broadcast, and it has quietly stripped the home advantage out of the competition.

Run every match at a handful of venues, move the whole league between them in blocks, and you get a tournament that is far easier to operate. One set of mats. One production crew. Hotels booked in bulk. Nobody flying between cities on a Tuesday.

You also get a competition where being the home team means almost nothing, and I think that has cost more than the savings are worth.

Home advantage in an indoor sport is not about pitch conditions or wind. It is about noise arriving at the right moment. A do or die raid in front of a hostile crowd is a genuinely different task from the same raid in a half filled neutral hall, because the raider is trying to hear a call from his own bench over several thousand people who want him to fail. Take that away and you have removed a variable that used to separate teams that travelled well from teams that did not.

The knock on effect is on the fan side and it is slower to show up. A franchise named after a city, playing four matches in that city per season, is a brand rather than a club. People will buy the shirt. Fewer of them will organise a Saturday around it. Loyalty is built by repetition in a familiar building, and the caravan model does not produce many of those.

I understand the counterargument and it is a strong one. Full home and away doubles the travel bill, spreads the medical staff thin, and in a sport with this much contact per minute, more flights means more soft tissue trouble and more players missing matches. Franchises are not printing money. Some of them are barely washing their faces.

But there is a middle option nobody seems keen to price. Half a season on the road as a caravan, half a season with genuine home legs at real venues. It would test whether the audience is actually there, which is a question the current format is carefully designed never to ask.

A league that never finds out how many people would show up is a league that has decided it would rather not know.