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At a recent Sydney business conference, NRL chief executive David Gallop stated that the NFL was the benchmark that rugby league aspired to. Can the NRL truly become Australia’s football behemoth?
In comparing American football and rugby league, legendary coach Jack Gibson reduced it down to one line: ‘Same game, different rules.’
Gibson didn’t need to enroll in a rugby history course to deduce that – take away the forward pass, acknowledge that the play-the-ball and line-of-scrimmage are alternative renderings of rugby’s scrum, and decide on four ‘downs’ or six tackles.
Done.
In 1933, Chicago’s legendary coach George ‘Papa Bear’ Halas and Australian rugby league’s chief spruiker Harry Sunderland, were thwarted by both time and distance in their planned cross-code exhibition on America’s east coast between the Bears and Kangaroos.
Halas was a bit of a ‘lone wolf’ amongst 1930s ‘gridders’ when it came to studying rugby, persevering with his ultimately forlorn hope that rugby-style chain-passing ‘laterals’ would be embraced, revolutionising the American game.
From the early 1970s, Australian rugby league coaches began to make visits to the USA to study methods and tactics of the NFL teams, a path that began after Terry Fearnley (who worked for General Motors) had seen a short, motivational film – ‘The Second Effort’ – which centred upon the famed Green Bay Packers and their iconic coach, Vince Lombardi.
These days, the NFL is, of course, available to anyone in Australia to watch, study and read about, enough to satisfy any appetite.
The suggestion, though, that the NFL could provide an aspirational model for rugby league in Australia initially seems a good fit, but there are differences.
The NFL only exists to serve the NFL – a professional league of franchises, engaging services of professional footballers, all with the objective of making money to fund it, profit from it.
The NFL isn’t a governing body for a sport.
It may donate dollars, expertise and equipment to gridiron youth development and school programs, but has no responsibility over, nor any duty to, anything but the interests of the NFL and those that comprise it – the NFL itself, the franchises and their owners, the players, and the television, merchandisers and sponsors that work with it.
The percentage of the NFL’s monumental revenue (approximately $9 billion per year) allocated to the players, depending upon who you believe, is somewhere between 50% and 60%. That is double the rate for player pools in Australia’s football codes.
However, that is understandable, given the codes in Australia also care for their game as a whole.
Ironically, rugby league in Australia has, since 1998, had a NFL-style arrangement, where the professional NRL club league has existed separately from the sport’s governing body (the ARL) – although, in both perception and reality, the wall between the NRL and the ARL (and all the other ‘RLs’) was more a blurred and moveable line.
Of course, with the advent of the now near-finalised deal between News Limited and the ARL, the arrival of the Independent Commission will result in the formation of one body again for the entire code – professional, social, bush and juniors.
The advantages of that scheme for the code have been well articulated far and wide.
Conversely, in December 2009, the NSWRU created ‘NSW Waratahs Ltd’ to unbound the business of the state’s professional Super Rugby franchise from the governing body – a move intended to ensure competing interests no longer stifled opportunities, when it came to ‘the business’ over ‘the game.’
The NFL, no doubt, is a positive corporate member of the community, cares very closely for its brand, and is concerned where future generations of players and fans will emerge from.
But ultimately, the NFL has the advantage of not having to worry too deeply about the effect its image or activities has on other gridiron levels, or whether parents cower in fear at the brutality and violence of the game.
For example, if the NRL was concerned solely with being a pro-sport league, and nothing else, it may well have viewed and treated the recent Manly-Storm brawl in a completely different manner.
Its focus (and the interest of its potential sponsors) might have been on the 75% of poll respondents that thought the brawls added spice and emotion to the game, and that the players ought not be sanctioned too hard, rather than reacting to a much smaller number of fearful mothers, concerned about detrimental influence upon their precious young boys.
With an independent commission now imminent, the opportunity for the NRL to truly follow the NFL has passed.
But time may yet prove that operating an entire sport, professionals and all, under the one body, might well turn out to be an archaic model best left in the 20th century, as the popularity of the NFL, and that of the fast-rising and media-savvy UFC, seem to evidence.
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