I remember when Rugby League went through the "Regionalisation" bit in 1995 when all the American/Aussie name rebrand shit went on (I'm no fan of St Helens, but they will forever have my respect for telling the RL to do one and not have some stupid suffix to their name).

Apart from half-a-dozen or so of the larger teams, a plan of mergers was proposed, whereby Warrington and Widnes would merge to form Cheshire, Whitehaven, Workington and Barrow would merge to form Cumbria. Castleford, Wakefield Trinity and Featherstone would merge to be come Calder, Oldham and Salford would become Manchester and Hull and Hull KR would join together to become Humber.

As you can well imagine, this did not sit well with the teams affected and resulted in the nearest thing to a revolution this country has ever seen, with ponytailed guys from the Leagues PA consultants called Oliver or Piers, in their rainbow-braces and mint green Armani suits being told to shove their mergers up their arses, by miners, factory workers and foundrymen from obscure dots on the map who hated the team from the next dot along.

Imagine if the FA tried that (and I'm sure that a few of them have) and declared that from net season on, we were to merge with the Shyte to form Mersey FC? Spurs and Arsenal to merge into North London FC etc.

The move to professionalism seem to have had more negative than positive results for all but the largest teams.

** Remembers Orrell, Waterloo and Liverpool in the inaugural Rugby Premier League 30 years ago **