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For the first time in a long-time, rugby league is – to use a cricketing analogy – on the front foot. There has been little off-season player mayhem in the nocturnal bars, clubs, and dives of Sydney.
We are seeing an intriguingly even competition. And finally, a new Australian Rugby League Commission has been formed to replace the hopelessly compromised and divided group of bodies that made up rugby league in Australia.
The game has its destiny in its own hands for the first time in 15 years and the Commission has started positively by scrapping the hated McIntyre Finals system and talking up the broadcast rights deal.
But the one issue that has divided the game for 104 years has not gone away. That is, who decides which teams should play in the elite competition? Who should stay and who should go? Do you go for consolidation or growth? By what criteria – crowds, television, juniors, stadium, membership, money, or media exposure – do you decide who lives and who dies?
The financially precarious position of the Gold Coast Titans shows the trouble with rugby league’s 100-year-old licensing system. Rugby league clubs at the elite level in Australia have a high attrition rate, suggesting that the licensing system hasn’t been a great way of determining long-term viability and football success.
While the teams in football’s English Premier League are much the same as those that dominated in the 1920s and the eight foundation clubs from the Victorian Football League’s first premiership season from 1897 still play in the top competition (although South Melbourne and Fitzroy have been relocated to Sydney and Brisbane respectively) the NRL has only one stand-alone foundation club playing continuously since 1908.
That is, Eastern Suburbs, now the Sydney City Roosters with the other foundation stand-alone club South Sydney evicted from the NRL in 1999 and reinstated in 2002.
In fact, the Super League war of the mid-1990s that almost destroyed the code as the dominant spectator sport in New South Wales and Queensland was partly motivated by a desire to reduce the competition from the then 20 teams.
But now the Commission has a new list to sift through; franchises that want to enter the competition in 2015 ranging from Perth, another Brisbane team, Ipswich, North Sydney (to be rebadged as the ‘Central Coast Bears’), Central Queensland, Papua New Guinea and Wellington. And yet what are the chances that any or all of these, after the first euphoric years, will remain viable, and how thin do you want to spread the top talent?
Although a magnificently skilful and athletic game at the highest level, the code shows its relatively small player-base once injuries and the salary cap start to bite into even the best rosters.
Hunter Mariners, Peth Reds, Adelaide Rams, Gold Coast Seagulls (and Gladiators, Giants and Chargers), Newtown Jets, South-Queensland Crushers, Annandale, Glebe, University… the game is littered with extinct teams that couldn’t cut it in the long run or were destroyed by either demographic changes or politics.
For amalgamation clubs like St George-Illawarra, Wests Tigers, and the ill-fated Northern Eagles, one of the original clubs dominates at the cost, fatally for Norths Sydney, of the other.
The drop in player talent from the National Rugby League to the New South Wales and Queensland Cup competitions also does not augur well for the long-term health of rugby league. Penrith supremo Phil Gould , one of League’s few original thinkers, continually harps on the lack of alternative employment this offers younger players.
One only had to witness last year’s New South Wales Cup grand final: a low-standard try-fest eventually won 30-28 by Canterbury over Auckland Vulcans, who still managed to lose the game when gaining possession with only 40 seconds left on the clock.
But there is a way forward to encourage the development of top-level rugby league while also maintaining the top-tier and overcoming the lottery of licensing with all its inherent politics, subjectiveness, and bitter rejected applicants. No more bright new teams that join the comp with high hopes and then falter after four or five years.
The ARL Commission should look at establishing a second-tier national competition with the TV rights gifted to the ABC to broadcast around Australia.
The benefits of the second-tier competition would be manifold, allowing a career choice for players who don’t quite make the top grade, allowing a stepping-stone into first grade that often proves too hard for physically and mentally under-prepared Toyota Cup players, and allowing discarded under-20s players to stay in the game.
A second-tier comp would be the ideal way for new franchises to find their feet. Former ARL Chief Executive John Quayle said recently that the criteria the old ARL employed to look at expansion teams were the four key things that the league didn’t have to fund – travel, a stadium, finance and support.
What better way for a budding team to show their mettle, commitment, and professionalism than in a second-tier comp?
But what would be the motivation for the teams, having to travel around the country and playing in a competition that, regardless of how nostalgic, would always be second-best?
Could promotion and relegation to the NRL be the answer? Yes and no. In the world’s wealthiest football competition, the English Premier League, “yo-yo” teams like Birmingham City, Middlesbrough, and Norwich City come up with high hopes of glory one year, and go down the next, providing cheap points and practice runs for the billionaire giants of Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester United.
The English Super League meanwhile abolished promotion and relegation in 2007 only to see the Celtic Crusaders from Wales, one of their preferred licence-holders, fold after three years, while traditional clubs like Widnes and Sheffield languished in the second-tier competition.
Could cash-strapped teams like Penrith and Cronulla survive with the even further dilution of player money and talent that a second-tier comp would create?
Not if a modified promotion and relegation system were established to ensure that only the best teams played in the elite comp. This could be capped at about 14 teams to reduce player burnout, costs, and season length.
The modified promotion and relegation system would see the team that wins the second-tier comp – either in a grand final or first past-the-post – play the last-placed team from the NRL each year in a sudden-death final to determine who gets the final licence to play in the elite competition the following year.
The advantages are obvious: there would be the added interest in the second-tier comp knowing that the winning team has a shot at promotion to the big league.
By only promoting a second-tier team that was a better outfit than the last-placed NRL team, one would avoid the yo-yo effect of an inferior second-tier team going up while threatening the NRL wooden-spooners each year with the death-knell of relegation. The battle for the NRL wooden spoon suddenly becomes for more than just pride for the teams that are already out of the finals race by August.
John Singleton or a mining billionaire wants to put together a champion team to challenge for the top comp? Let them do it. The Bears want to return to the big time? Let them try. Cronulla shouldn’t be in the comp? Let someone knock them off. Western Suburbs want to again stand alone in their famous black-and-white, go for it.
Far from threatening the weaker, poorer teams in the elite competition, this system would allow them to attract more interest, fans and excitement at, for them, the back end of the season with the added income and exposure from the “the survival final” at the end of the year.
A few bad financial or management years for a franchise would also not mean their eviction from the top-tier permanently, they could be relegated for a time until they sort their problems out and then be able to re-enter the NRL triumphantly.
Rather than the current system where some ARLC sub-committee sifts through voluminous submissions full of claims, exaggerations, projections, and bold promises to decide who the best new applicants for the top-tier of the competition are every few years, let the teams’ performance on the football field decide.
That’s why it’s called a competition.
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