Are we arriving too late to a packed party?
Imagine turning up late to a high society party, one that you weren't originally invited to, but you managed to get an invite at the last minute. It's a very crowded party but you find some space in the far corner of the room.
At worst, you'll spend the night being completely ignored by the high-profile attendees and their many guests. At best, some of the guests will spend some time with you, for a bit of pleasant small talk, before moving back on to their high-profile hosts.
They do this, because, a few years ago, you were offered a place at the top table but contrived to ruin it, in the process becoming something of a pesky irritant to the party organisers, and they haven't forgotten.
You are rugby league.
Your chance to arrive at the party in the 1990s led to the Super League War.
The high-profile guests are instead, high-profile sports and that thing that pretends to be a sport, WWE which has just landed on Netflix.
The other guests are the viewers, each representing a million viewers each. The party is hosted by the TV and streaming market. Streaming has replaced satellite TV that was there 30 years ago.
Rugby league has blown far many chances to be a huge global player in sports and the positivity coming our way now is unfortunately, too little, too late. We finally look like arriving at the party, but to me, we are arriving three decades too late.
I really love our sport. Always have and always will, but it's historical failure to capitalise on its greatness suggests to me that the damage is already done.
I really applaud the administrators Peter V'Landy's and Andrew Abdo for their ventures into domestic expansion, new broadcast avenues, Las Vegas and their efforts to re-invigorate the Ashes series. They have raised revenue, raised crowds and raised interest and morale in the game.
Yet for there to be real change to the fortunes of the sport, V'Landy's and Abdo need to be in charge of the sport for the next 20 to 30 years. With V'Landy's - very much thought to be the driving force of this movement - at age 63ish, that is not likely.
It's taken three decades for us to get a leader for the game to rival what happened in the early 1990s. So, what happens after V'Landy's? Another 30-year wait?
As long as I have been involved in the sport (39 years and counting), we have always been talking about growing it. But has it really grown? Please hear me out.
In the early 1990s in Australia, where rugby league was traditionally a sport of New South Wales and Queensland, the game was going from strength to strength. World megastar Tina Turner was heading the promotion material and the Winfield Cup was only a few years away from expanding its' elite competition to include the North Queensland Cowboys, South Queensland Crushers, Western Reds in Perth and Auckland Warriors from across the ditch in New Zealand.
Genuine, true, expansion.
While all this was going on, the worldwide commercial behemoth that we now know as the English Premier League was still only in its first season and, despite packaging it as a ‘whole new ball game', it seemed to be just the same as what came before! Crowd violence, poor stadium quality and human tragedies were gaining more headlines in the UK than what was happening on the field.
Rugby union was also still officially an Amateur sport and some of their best players found themselves in our game. League was the second biggest spectator sport in the UK and dominating in Australia.
In my lifetime, 1992 to 1994 was when rugby league was arguably strongest and ready to strike on the world stage. Administrators on both sides of the globe seemed to know that, too.
Expansion in Australia, a never before seen ten-team World Cup to be held in the centenary year of 1995 and a ground breaking Emerging Nations World Cup to be held alongside it all gave the impression of a sport ready to grow.
Rupert Murdoch, the then owner of what we now know as News Corporation, was hellbent on making sure his brand-new satellite TV option was taken up in as many households as possible.
Murdoch's company gave Football in the UK an offer it couldn't refuse and a few years later, offered rugby league something that it decided to resist (in different ways) on both sides of the globe.
I am not going to revisit the Super League War here, but what I will say is Murdochs intervention has helped Football (Soccer) to become a behemoth. The English Premier League is broadcasted in 212 territories to 643 million homes, and a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion people in 2025.
Also, the vast majority of the best ‘ball-kicking' stars in the world ply their wares in the EPL.
Contrast this with rugby league, which is celebrating a 371,000 viewership in the United States for its 2025 Las Vegas venture, and just over 1 million viewers per week in 2024 in Australia, its biggest market, including free-to-air. In England, the Super League Grand Final, only aired on Pay TV, was watched by an average of 374,000 people in 2024.
In the years between 1994 and 2025, while Soccer has grown steadily and then exponentially, Rugby Union also declared itself as full time professional, and in 2023 played a 20 team World Cup in front of 2.4 million attending spectators and a TV audience of 800 million.
The Rugby League World Cup in 2022 was watched by 473,606 people in attendance (a record apparently) and made a loss of $830k, despite a total of 30 million people tuning into the tournament on the BBC, the UK's ABC equivalent.
And how many of the best, and well-known rugby playing stars, play rugby league?
In Australia, the game is now trying to bring back an elite team in Perth, along with the North Sydney Bears brand but there isn't a team in Adelaide. The Dolphins are here but we lost the South Queensland Crushers. The Super League War also saw many fans disappear forever.
The sport of rugby league is played in more countries than ever, we are told. Yet twice as many people in Australia play football (soccer) as play rugby league in the entire world and over two million people in the land down under watch the English Premier League on Pay TV, the only place it is available live.
By many measures, Peter V'Landy's, Andrew Abdo et al are the best administrator's rugby league has had since the 1990s. They are aiming for a record $3 billion in the next TV deal, after $2 billion was secured with COVID as a backdrop in 2021. Crowds are up and expansion (or returning to places) is well under way. The aim is to get to 20 NRL teams. It's starting to boom again, if it isn't booming already.
The NRL has now opened its season in Las Vegas for the second year in succession, with great crowds and a ‘feel good' factor about the whole thing in Australia. These much-heralded developments have prompted many in rugby league to get excited again for the future of the sport.
Rugby league lovers preach the importance of being positive and slap down anyone who dares to tell things as they are, labelling them as negative.
According to them, we are on the brink of the game breaking into the big leagues, with viewers galore in America and potential NRL involvement in the UK heralding the start of a brand-new dawn.
V'Landy's knows the road. In his quest for a $3 billion deal he has suggested that the next broadcast TV deal could bring multiple partners to the table from the international streaming market such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney.
If you go to all these streaming services, you'll already see shed loads of English Premier League, Rugby Union, Cricket, NFL, Boxing, Wrestling and who knows what else in the sports realm.
So, rugby league is already going to be late to the party, and it is a packed party.
The time to strike was the 1990's, when football was bereft with issues, when Union was still amateur, when cricket hadn't even thought of T20, when boxing was fighting efforts for it to be banned, when the UFC wasn't a thing, and when we were climbing out of the 20th century and preparing for the 21st.
Also, that revolution happened in a flash – streets were all of a sudden awash with satellite dishes in the early 1990s as the revolution sprung up quickly.
Streaming has been around for years, and gradually, sports have encroached on the space that was originally started for movies and TV shows. They've all got their historical documentaries loaded up there as well as the live events that are already happening.
Rugby league (may) land on those services in 2028 at the latest, with the current broadcast deal expiring in 2027. But what are the chances of PVL still being in charge then?
We've got to try everything we can to get in, but the party has already started, and we may be arriving too late. Have the 30 years we've wasted going to be our undoing?
