Samoa vs Tonga showed what the future of rugby league could be - if the NRL would actually believe in it

ROCHDALE – ‘Snackable content’ is one of the dumbest marketing buzzwords in the world, but it’s one that the NRL marketing department will know well.

It’s the term for the memeability of small clips, the instantly viral video that wings around the world within seconds of something happening. Entire sports are set up to create snackable content, and rugby league is one of them.

The NRL marketing department know this, because it is one of the key reasons that they keep changing the rules of rugby league. Removing the corner posts allowed for acrobatic tries, the six again begat more point-scoring moments and the two-point field goal was, theoretically at least, designed to increase the number of late equalisers.

They’re not as dumb as you think down at Driver Ave, and they know exactly what they’re doing. Let’s hope they were watching Samoa’s win over Tonga this weekend.

If they were, they might have been briefly reminded of their marketing slogan for 2022. “It’s all the real that makes Rugby League so Unreal” was a terrible line – and I am highly qualified to say that, having worked for a decade as a copywriter for much bigger brands than the NRL – but the concept behind it is a good one.

Rugby league trades on authenticity as a USP, and authenticity is the hardest currency to buy. In a previous role with one of the world’s biggest fashion companies (I won’t name them, but you probably own a pair of their underpants), we would pay multi-millions to get musicians to be our ‘talent’, because their cool is what we wanted to have conferred onto us.

As marketing ideas go, selling rugby league as sporting realness is a no-brainer. The Super League has marketed on tough Northern blokes do exceptional things for literally decades. They lean in.

The NRL has run through the players being simply the best, the fans declaring what their team was and, yes, even direct appeals to authenticity as a concept. What you get is what you see, ain’t nothing more to it.

Samoa vs Tonga showed that in spades. It was all the things the NRL would like to the non-rugby league punter – rugby league punters, of course, don’t need convincing on the merits of rugby league – to think of. It was fast, tough, skillful and dramatic, sure, but also diverse, respectful, egalitarian and modern.

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It does make you wonder why they wouldn’t want it more often. It’s what they think Origin is, but hasn’t actually been for about ten years.

Prior to the invention of snackable content, or at least the coining of the term, we all understood the concept anyway because of Origin. I don’t know about you, but when I want to explain to a non-fan what Origin is about, I don’t go for Mark Coyne at the corner or James Tedesco on the bell. I go straight to the MCG, first scrum, 1995.

That, then, was real. Now, it’s not. Dane Gagai took a swing at Matt Burton in Game 3 this year and all I thought was: why? We’ve all moved on. Origin is a nostalgia product now, a boomer wet dream that plays into a wider stereotype that rugby league is for Anglo-Celtic men from NSW and Queensland.

It is, in short, what AFL thinks we are, and we live up to it like dancing monkeys every year. Replay the old fight tapes, ask if the other side wants it as much. You know the score.

That’s not a slight on Origin: I personally find it a bit of a sideshow bagatelle but, once the footy starts, I do enjoy it. It’s an all-star game that matters, and not many sports have one of those.

But Samoa vs Tonga – or any combination of well-matched international sides – knocks it into the middle of next week with more force than Taylan May got into Keaon Koloamatangi on Sunday arvo in Warrington.

International footy, especially the sort that foregrounds the diversity of cultures within our game, is what terrifies the other codes.

Rugby union can never have it authentically, because theirs is a sport based around where you went to school above all things. AFL can’t have it either, because they’d like to be like rugby union in narrowing their talent pool, plus nobody outside of Australia cares one iota about it. Soccer has it, but Australia has long since decided it would like soccer without the authenticity, thank you very much.

When they’re doing the Collective Bargaining Agreement with the players, the NRL marketing department should be battering on the CEO’s door, armed with reports telling them about numbers, engagement, metrics and snackable bloody content, and how they might want to factor that into the scheduling.

The war dances alone have done a million views in less than 24 hours on Twitter alone. Won’t somebody think of the Tiktok?

International Rugby League (IRL) can put games on, sanction them, provide refs and generally organise things, but it is the NRL, who own player contracts via their member clubs, who hold the purse strings. IRL would love the Australian authorities, the old white guys who sit in glorified casinos and make decisions, to back the concept.

They don’t have to back it because they like it, but because it would make them so much cash. They already sell a premium product in State of Origin, and they could have a second one.

Samoa vs Tonga was great, and it would also be great to see them do it more often in convenient timeslots and at locations where you’d get a full crowd every time. Then, when they’ve done, give the Fijians and Kumuls and Kiwis and Kangaroos a go too. There’s nothing in the diary, currently, for this time next year.

Hope springs eternal in the world of international rugby league. Games like yesterday’s demonstrate the product at its best, clippable and shareable and authentic. We were all winners yesterday. We can be winners again, if there’s a will.