However, as Love Rugby League reported last month<\/a>, the favourite for the schedule choice is one based on seedings, with clubs playing what are deemed to be the most competitive fixtures for them.<\/p>\nThat was confirmed by Butterworth on Whitehaven\u2019s Facebook channel on Monday night, as he confirmed their league seeding of 19 out of the 21 teams means they will mainly face teams who are also in the bottom portion of the seedings.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIt\u2019s 21 teams next year in the Championship from what we\u2019ve heard, and you can\u2019t play 21 teams home and away. It\u2019s like the Champions League in football, you\u2019re going to be in and around teams based on your level.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere we finished last year, which was 8th in League 1, we\u2019ll be seeded 19th of the 21 teams. There\u2019s going to be ten home games against teams around your level.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo if you were in the middle of the table it\u2019ll be five above you and five below you, they\u2019re your standard games. There\u2019s then two extra home games when.. the RFL are trying to find the most compelling games. For us, chances are it\u2019ll be Workington and Barrow. If three Cumbrian teams are playing each other it\u2019s fantastic for all three clubs because it\u2019s bigger gates and less travel.\u201d<\/p>\n
That means it is possible a team at the bottom of League 1 this year has a theoretical better chance of wining the Championship \u2013 because they will play seemingly poorer sides than those who finished in the upper echelons of the second tier. Oldham, for example, would play games against the likes of Halifax and Widnes and play no low-ranked League 1 teams from 2025.<\/p>\n
And Butterworth admitted it is a difficult balancing act to get right.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIf we won every game playing lower-level teams, Whitehaven would win the league. It seems crazy and it will devalue the League Leaders\u2019 Shield because someone could be seeded bottom \u2013 Newcastle, for example, are combined with York, so they bring a lot of good players in and they\u2019re seeded bottom. They win the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re a League 1 club struggling from last year and now all of a sudden we\u2019re in the Championship and how do we compete? There was talk about putting a more realistic salary cap on but if London are wanting to get in Super League next year, they need to spend the full cap and build a realistic team where if they do well, they can compete in Super League.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no perfect solution. We\u2019re playing teams around us who have smaller budgets like ourselves and the bigger teams are playing the better performing teams, but they\u2019ve all got big budgets. The teams that will miss out are the ones in the middle who have the not so bigger budgets and they go up against the better teams.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve got a smaller budget but we\u2019re playing teams with similar budgets.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whitehaven CEO Lee Butterworth has revealed that the schedule for the newly-merged Championship is likely to be based…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243605,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-243604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243604\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}