With a new team in the mix and a fresh deal between players and officials on the table, the NRL should be flying into 2023. But for all the blue sky some big storms are brewing.
Bitter pay war finally ends
Player strikes. Sponsor boycotts. Cancelled launches. This hot unholy mess was not the runway rugby league needed for a flying start to the 2023 season.
Only now, after months of standoffs and threats, and with mere days until round one kicks off, the NRL and Rugby League Players Association finally seem to have brokered a peace deal.
A new five-year $1.347bn collective bargaining agreement will be signed in days. Not a minute too soon for the 68% of club bosses unhappy at how long the NRL has taken to do it.
The CBA means higher salaries and better health protection for NRL and NRLW players, RLPA autonomy on how injured/retired player funds are managed, and an end to players signing with rival teams a year in advance (ala Dom Young and Stephen Crichton recently).
Does it mean more funding for grassroots growth in the bush, interstate or to young women? We’ll see. At least fans won’t hear much more about the CBA, and can focus on the footy.
Dawn of the Dolphins
For the first time in 16 years, the NRL has a new team: the Dolphins, based in the Brisbane suburb of Redcliffe and coached by seven-time premiership winner Wayne Bennett.
Despite controversially omitting a home base from their name, the Dolphins hope to draw footy-crazy fans from the 500km belt north of Brisbane to Rockhampton. Easier said than done. The Gold Coast Titans, introduced in 2007 into a similarly league-loving region, have the lowest membership in the NRL and have cracked the finals just four times in 16 seasons.
Has the NRL made the right call with a fourth Queensland club (it knocked back bids from Brisbane, Western Australia and the NSW Central Coast)? And if not, can it hold its nerve long enough to make the Dolphins into another Melbourne Storm (introduced in 1998 and with four premierships and more than 40,000 members after 25 years in the NRL)?
A rugby raid
Eddie Jones’s appointment as Wallabies coach is bad news for the NRL. When Jones took the Wallabies to the World Cup final in 2003, four league greats were in the side – Wendell Sailor, Lote Tuquiri, Mat Rogers and Andrew Walker.
And within weeks of taking the reins afresh, “Fast Eddie” was planning fresh raids on the NRL ahead of the 2027 Rugby World Cup to be held in Australia. So far Jones’s hit list includes schoolboy union stars Joseph Suaalii (Roosters), Will Penisini (Eels), Tolu Koula (Sea Eagles), Nelson Asofa-Solomona (Storm) and Cameron Murray (Rabbitohs).
With sponsors swarming the 15-man code for the 2023 World Cup and 2025 British & Irish Lions tour, Jones’s war chest is growing fast. And if the Wallabies start winning again under his reign, the challenge of a code hop and World Cup in front of home fans becomes very lucrative indeed to any NRL players disgruntled with the way rugby league is being run.
Pride Round
It’s the issue that imploded Manly’s 2022 season and saw their coach Des Hasler jettisoned. And the saga, like the rainbow itself, never ends for the NRL. Last week, an anonymous poll of NRL bosses found 82% unsupportive of a Pride round, 57% reluctant to introduce a Pride jersey at their clubs and only 38% open to Pride jersey, but only with player approval.
It drew condemnation both inside and outside the game. “What are we scared of?” asked Cronulla star Toby Rudolf, who last year spoke openly about his own same-sex experiences. The A-League and NBL have official Pride rounds and the Sydney Swans have played a Pride game annually since 2015, all while wearing rainbow and preaching inclusion. Yet, clearly still smarting from the seven-player boycott at Manly on religious grounds last year, the NRL has gingerly floated a ‘Respect round’ compromise that many clubs have put in the too-hard basket buying it.
NRL bosses on the nose
They were the league chiefs who steered the NRL through the Covid storm to global praise. But the honeymoon is over for NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo and ARL Commission chair Peter V’landys with the league supremos at record levels of disapproval with club bosses.
Not only did the CBA negotiations get nasty and take too long, the NRL’s integrity took a major hit when an employee was alleged to be secretly recording the NRL’s negotiations with the RLPA. Worse, the Sydney Morning Herald’s poll also found 36% of club bosses feel “unsupported” by the NRL (more than twice the number in 2021) and more than half of them believe the NRL was played when the New South Wales government backflipped on its $800m promise to rebuild Brookvale Oval, Penrith Stadium, Shark Park and Leichhardt Oval.
That heartland wound festered further when the NRL backflipped on threats to take the 2022 grand final interstate, signing an 11th-hour deal to keep it in NSW. But which stadium in which state will the NRL’s biggest game be played in 2023? Your guess is as good as ours.
