With difficulty, because everyone that matters is either out injured or has recently returned.

How do you interpret the 2025 Brisbane Broncos?

With perhaps even more difficulty, because it all worked when it really, really shouldn’t have.

Even with a fair bit of hindsight, it’s hard to work out how it all came together at the right time for the Bronx to pick up the Premiership.

They were exceptional at knockout footy, that’s for sure, in that they were able to produce when it mattered, and incredibly lucky when it mattered as well.

Brisbane trailed 26-12 to Melbourne in the Grand Final, 14-0 to Penrith in the Preliminary Final and 28-12 to Canberra in the first round of the Finals. They won all three games.

Even prior to that, they snuck into the top four on points differential, winning 13 of 15 from the midway point of the year, when they were as far down as 11^th.

This, clearly, owes something to fortune, because even with improvements, a lot is still required to fall your way.

But within that, coach Michael Maguire takes a huge amount of credit. His style is based much more around intensity than it is tactics, but much like his mentor Craig Bellamy, he is exceptional at eking value out of the worst player on the team, then getting the top end stars to perform.

It’s why he was an exceptional rep coach – there’s only elite players there – and why he was terrible as Tigers coach, because you can’t improve the level of everyone when pretty much everyone is bad.

Madge was often laughed at for his hard-nosed antics, and perhaps correctly so. Bellamy would also be laughed at if he didn’t win all the time, and is still ribbed for his sprays even in victory.

At the Broncos, we have seen this writ large.

When it wasn’t going well last year, we got all the inside mail on how Maguire was flogging his team, how much the players hated it, how difficult life was.

Even in victory, the noises around Payne Haas’ impending departure tell the story on how much it still rankles.

He is the latest in a long, long line of disgruntled players, and one does not have to be overly connected to the NRL grapevine to find examples of this.

Again, this is why he was a great rep coach: getting the blokes up for a short period of time is the whole game in the Test/Origin arena, and comes with the added benefit that nobody has to be subjected to it for too long.

When the chips are down, Madge can do this too, because siege mentality works best when you’re actually under siege.

That was last year, with the Broncos old boys chirping from everywhere, and it’s this year, with a constant stream of injury outs.

That can elevate lesser players, and Brisbane always had just enough of the good players to keep things tight.

Similarly, you can’t have fortune break in your favour if you’re not there in the first place. Competing is always the first part of the Bellamy/Maguire philosophy of rugby league.

The second part, where your stars win you the game, is ideally suited for finals footy.

As I have mentioned before, rugby league tactics change markedly in finals, with your best players becoming more prominent as weak links are weeded out, and Brisbane were always set up in that regard.

What changed in 2025 was the manner in which those players performed – perhaps outperformed – when it mattered.

For that, we need to slide along the coaches’ box from Madge - to Trent Barrett.

If you’re new to my work, short history: when I was working full-time in the NRL, I’d often ask tactical and statistical questions of coaches in press conferences.

Some coaches loved it, others didn’t quite understand.

Trent Barrett seemingly hated it – he was under massive pressure already, so having his failings listed to him in numerical form by some Pommy smart-arse rankled, to say the least.

This came to a head after a defeat to the Panthers, prior to which the pre-game media narrative had been about Kyle Flanagan’s place in the team.

I asked whether, given the paucity of touches any Bulldogs halfback got in his side, it really mattered anyway. Trent did not take to this well, gave a one-word answer and flounced from the presser.

Now at the time, I just laughed – watch the video and you can just about hear it in the background – and it was undeniably funny.

It all blew up on social media, initially aimed at me and my long-winded questioning, but most punters quickly turned on Barrett and his lack of engagement with a legitimate (if admittedly lengthy) question.

He got sacked soon after, and the whole incident became a funny footnote in a disastrous career as a head coach.

He was terrible at Manly, worse at the Bulldogs and did little to recover that reputation as an interim at Parramatta.

Yet, despite this, Barrett remains an elite assistant and was sat alongside Madge in a Premiership-winning box last year.

He didn’t fail because he couldn’t coach - he failed because he couldn’t coach everyone.

This was explained to me by a former colleague of his as follows: Barrett’s coaching is as good as the player he is talking to.

As an assistant at the Panthers, Barrett was exceptional, because he had been elite and could talk to other elite players on their level.

If you wanted a Cleary Whisperer, then Barrett could do that better than just about anyone.

As a head coach, however, he was required to talk to everyone – and he had no idea how to translate his messaging to people who were not as good as him.

What works with Nathan Cleary, for example, would not work with Chris Patolo or Jayden Okunbor, but the nub of head coaching is about making the worst player competent, not the best player better.

This is not an unusual situation: across all sports, most of the best coaches are guys that were Jayden Okunbors as players, because they needed to understand the game very well to reach the level they did, whereas the best players did it easily, often without thinking.

Craig Bellamy, Trent Robinson and Ivan Cleary were solid first graders, but not superstars. Pep Guardiola was good enough to play for Barcelona, but was never close to the best player on the team.

The number of top 1% players who become top 1% coaches is vanishingly small across all sports – and Barrett, it is often forgotten, was that good: Dally M Medallist in 2000, Super League Player of the Year 2007, Origins, Kangaroos, the lot.

At the Broncos, the dynamic that worked for Barrett at Penrith is clearly working again.

If he talks exclusively to Adam Reynolds, Reece Walsh, Ben Hunt, Ezra Mam and literally nobody else, he would be doing his job.

Another former Broncos assistant, Lee Briers, told me exactly this philosophy in an interview: you give detail to those that need it, you don’t give it to those that don’t.

Barrett is a credible supplier of information that elite players accept because he was there too, and he doesn’t really have to bother himself with the collective parts that everyone else needs to know about.

Ben Te’o, now departed, could do that bit in defensive systems, and Madge, always an expert on that side of the ball, doesn’t need much help.

This is Barrett’s secret sauce. It’s hard to say it hasn’t been working.

At this point in the Thursday Preview columns, we usually cite stats and try to track where teams are. As mentioned off the top, however, that doesn’t work with the Broncos.

The point of the stats is to illuminate the areas that you might not get from watching them play, to provide a counterpoint that supports, rejects or complements the eye test.

With the Broncos, we know they’re elite in some areas, maybe lucky in others, flawed in some and currently battered by injuries. Stats don’t really do much in that regard.

Instead, let’s leave it at the vibes.

Madge and Trent probably prefer it that way – and if you’re going to talk to Barrett about it, make your question open-ended and short.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

Penrith are now on top of both ladders, having avenged last year’s defeat to Manly on Sunday night, putting them a clear four victories above 2025’s record.

The Sea Eagles remain -2, as you might expect given their weak draw in the first period of the Kieran Foran reign, in which they were largely playing teams they usually beat.

Brisbane are also down with them, but their loss to the Roosters saw Easts move up to +3, alongside success stories Souths and the Tigers. They remain the ones to watch.

Melbourne are bad, but the Bulldogs are now just as bad, a full four victories worse off. You’d expect the Storm to click at some point, but there’s little evidence that Canterbury might.

Also in the ‘watch-this-space’ zone are Cronulla, still behind the metaphorical 8-ball, and Parramatta, who are tracking exactly where they were in 2025 despite a massive injury crisis. There might be a team in there, somewhere, if they were ever on the field…

Denis Betts

Last week was a 1/3, with the Warriors doing the decent thing but Melbourne (again) and Manly (surprisingly, again) going against script.

That leaves the punting basically flat for the year – well, a marginal profit if you include the still-open bet on the Roosters to win the Premiership, which has gone from $8 when I took it to $6.50.

That makes this an interesting juncture to change tactics. We’ve proven that, by and large, I can punt at a break even rate, not winning much but also not losing, with little data put into the process beyond watching footy, knowing people and pointing at random stats.

As those who follow my social media will know, however, there’s a new feature a-coming to this site – a predictive model.

One of the fun things it can do is overlay outcome thoughts with odds, giving us what could be an edge.

As a soft launch, that’s what we’ll be doing here: three bets based on what the model suggests, plus my usual punt against Manly (picked up at an early $1.98 price, on the expectation that it would tighten).

The point of models is to tell you edges that your normal brain might ignore, and the point of betting against it is to trust the numbers - and we’re going in at the deep end on that, because it is telling us to back the St George Illawarra Dragons.

It’s very confident that this line is wrong, so we’ll take the Dragons at it, and it’s slightly less, but still pretty optimistic on the Storm, taking the logic that form is temporary and class is permanent.

A major strength of this model is that it includes the Super League - and while it’s Challenge Cup semis this weekend, it’s pulled a serious edge out with St Helens to beat Wigan.

They’re $2.50 at time of writing, and my model thinks they’re favourites. Fill yer boots.

It’s easy to sit in the box when your side are running up a score, your best laid plans coming to fruition, all that hard work in the box paying off.

It’s a lot more difficult when the spotlight is on you: the gameplan isn’t working, you’re getting overrun and the other blokes in the box are asking what to do.

Most coaches, at this point, will draw on their experience. Seen it before, did this, that worked, let’s try it again. Send the trainer on to tell them.

Others might not do anything at all, trusting their leaders to get themselves out of a hole on the field. That’s what they’re paid to do, after all.

It might not matter anyway, because at that point, the players might not be receptive to messaging. Plan A is failing, so why should we listen to your Plan B, genius?

Very few will use data at this juncture – either because it doesn’t exist, or they don’t trust it, or they don’t want to devolve their decision-making process to some nerd with a laptop.

Now take yourself out of the footy environment and put yourself into a regular corporate setting.

Would you make a business-critical decision without referring to data? Is that what financial analysts, doctors or CEOs would do?

Granted, you probably have a little longer to make that decision, but you also have an architecture already made so that, when the time comes to make the call, you have a probabilistic value that can be put on different choices.

Data doesn’t make the decision, but it sure can help inform it.

Let’s return to that scenario: it’s the hour mark, you’re losing. In fact, you’re losing by two scores. What does the data say you should do?

Thankfully, What You See Is What You Get is sat in the box with you.

This Substack has already covered how to optimise strategy to cause an upset, overturning conventional wisdom on underdog tactics to prove that teams that are more than $3 outsiders give themselves a higher probability of success by playing far more expansively, focusing on maximising points over minimising risk.

That was made possible by an in-house dataset1 of over 1,500 games, covering every match of NRL and Super League played between 2022 and today, which can be split, spliced and segmented to discern what the data says.

The data query for this scenario was simple.

First, filter the data to only include the games where a team that was losing after 60 minutes won.

To make it doubly interesting, there’s also a subset that is teams that were losing by 13 or more points - my proxy for ‘two scores’ – and came back to triumph, so we can isolate big turnarounds separately.

Then, take the stats accrued in those games in key areas prior to 60 minutes and contrast them with the same stats in the last 20 minutes, to work out what teams changed tactically to overcome the deficit.

So what does it say coaches should do when they’re trailing going into the final quarter?

Well, the unfortunate information is that they should start planning their excuses for the presser, because things don’t look great.

Game state, which is what stats nerds call ‘scoreboard pressure’, is huge.

Obviously, that margin is relevant in the likelihood of a comeback, because it’s easier to come back from a point down than 50 points down, but even at just a point, it’s much more improbable than perhaps people think.

In fact, they’re becoming less probable, too – I did this analysis previously at The Roar in 2023 and it was closer to 75%.

I would say that percentage is in line with what most people would expect, even in the slightly more momentum-driven Set Restart era.

Where this gets interesting is in the tactics.

When teams are losing, they tend to deviate from Plan A, and with good reason: it’s clearly not working.

As they spend their lives working on Plan A, however, that often looks a lot more chaotic - typically involving a riskier style that often compounds problems with more errors.

Remember, four out of five teams trailing after 60 minutes lose, so this is clearly not a strategy that works enormously well.

In the data, there is an obvious improvement in outcomes – tries, of course, but also the precursors to tries, like run metres and line breaks – which you would expect, because we know these teams ended up winning.

What we are interested in is the playstyle indicators, the things that show us how they did it.

Off the bat, it’s worth mentioning there is a noticeable change in tactics – and it is not as obvious as you might expect to say that, because plenty of coaches would encourage their teams not to change tack when things are going awry.

You will not find a bigger Ange Postecoglou fan than me, but clearly the answer to Plan A not working is not to do Plan A better2 - at least, not as a general rule.

This is a big dataset, so within it there will be examples of a team playing well, not getting much luck, sticking to their processes and triumphing eventually, but taken across the whole sample, change performs better.

Teams do have to embrace risk, but what matters is what risks they take, and how they take them.

There is no discernible benefit to passing more, for example, or kicking more, or attacking from deeper.

What does impact comebacks is the ability to take physical risks, both in terms of contact and in terms of efforts.

Teams that enact comebacks play far straighter, go closer to the line, get men around the footy and, generally, put their bodies on the line to get the win.

This is counterintuitive to some extent, in that the response of most teams to being behind is to take the easier options such as sideways passing and low-probability kicking rather than putting themselves in the line of fire with the footy, running draining supports and charging into the line.

The risk part comes on the back of that.

Offloads require someone to offload to, which comes from the push supports – which players have to run even if the arm never comes free. These are the real chances players need to take.

Shifts can happen, but only if there’s line engagements, decoy runs and straight hit-ups to win the ruck, then move the footy.

Ultimately, the reward comes from upping intensity. The risk, for want of a better phrase, become less risky when you’ve changed the nature of the contest. Faster, harder, then wider.

Phrased like this, the question is more around willingness and desire, because it’s a lot easier to play low-probability, high-risk footy and hope it comes off than it is to strain every sinew when there’s a decent chance that you lose anyway.

Those in charge know this intuitively, even without data: how often have you seen a solemn-faced coach in the press conference lament his side for ‘taking the easy way out’, or ‘doing it on the cheap’?

The joy of this dataset is that we can also teleport ourselves to the other coaches’ box.

As we isolated match-level data for each team that won, we also have it for every team that lost – so what do those that fritter away leads do?

If anything, the data is more counterintuitive here, because the conventional wisdom would be that teams who are in front can play more conservatively, using their lead to minimise risk, complete high and force the opposition to take chances.

The data is very, very clear, however, that this is a bad plan.

Resting on your laurels is a great way to lose, because you’re abandoning the things that gave you the lead in the first place.

Play the Ball Winning percentage plummets, which suggests teams just taking tackles rather than attempting to win the floor; and attacking metrics like Combined Supports, Line Engagements and Shifts crater as attacking becomes more one-out and formulaic.

What appears to be a sensible plan – conserve energy for defence, kick long, make them run it back – actually results in your opponent being able to conserve energy for attack, as you’re asking fewer questions, not moving them sideways and allowing defenders to take it easy.

This is also reflected in the coaching cliché - “We stopped playing” being the obvious line from someone who can’t believe his team just lost that match.

This data is drawn across hundreds of games, only a small fraction of which are from 2026, but you’d have to guess that this is even more true now, when momentum and possession swings are so much more impactful due to the over-officiating.

In the coaching box with time ticking away, these are the calls that you might make. The data could inform that decision, telling you what the teams that achieve the unlikely comeback – or are caught by one – actually do.

If you’re behind, you should increase intensity, not risk: get up around the footy, get close to the line, do the hard parts and play off the space that appears.

It’s not riskier footy, it’s more footy – and often, that’s the hard bit to do when you’re tired and losing.

If you’re ahead, keep going to get further in front: don’t shut up shop, keep asking questions, don’t try to play out the sets.

Again, this is the hard bit: you’re ahead, it’s going well, the instinct is to hold what you have.

As ever in rugby league though, it’s the tough stuff that makes it work.

If you’re doing it, keep doing it. If you’re not - it’s the first thing you should change.

If you know someone who laments the lack of in-depth analytical writing in footy, then send them this article using the button below. Word-of-mouth is the greatest engine I have.

Share

Next week, I’ll be launching the model - a project six months in the making designed to add another level of analysis to rugby league that you quite literally cannot get anywhere else.

Subscribe if you want to see it first.

Subscribe now

They were new, they were fun, they were great to watch – and, crucially for the fans of the other 16 NRL teams, they tended to lose.

Year One was Phins Up, Year Two was consolidation, Year Three they were the best team to watch and Year Four? Yeah, bit more difficult.

The temptation with any expansion team – cough, the Titans, cough – is to immediately stroke the beard and wonder aloud about why they’re here, but for Redcliffe, they have already proved that and then some. As a club, they’re great.

On the field, though, we’re well into the ‘who knows’ phase.

It’s not the ‘who cares’ phase that characterises the Gold Coast, but that’s the next logical step if Redcliffe don’t kick their collective backsides into some sort of success relatively soon.

The Wayne Bennett Years were, as Bennett Years often are, a combination of high-floor, boring footy combined with the motivational woo-woo that the Master has made a career out of.

He eked every inch out of a poor roster, because in the NRL, if you can get guys you can trust to do the basics well, a significant minority of the league will beat themselves.

At that point, when Wayne doesn’t have the best players, he tends to leave and let someone else pick up the pieces.

At least with the Dolphins, this always the plan, so it went a little bit better than it has elsewhere.

The Kristian Woolf Years have been, commensurately with the increase in roster strength, a lot more interesting, especially in attack.

They are now no longer high floor but high ceiling, with the ability to rack up spectacular tries but also a tendency to implode, sometimes in the same game.

The Phins topped the charts in 2025 for points, tries and line breaks, so the outcomes were going well, and the underlying data suggested that it wasn’t a fluke either: all the precursors of production were there, meaning the team wasn’t running hot – they were hot.

In 2026, that has changed. They’re running exceptionally cold.

Redcliffe are way down on points, tries and line breaks – no outcomes – but actually still hold up on the bits that tend to produce those stats.

They’re in the top three for Metres per Run, Metres per Set, Offloads, Passes per Run and Line Engagements, which are all the things you’d expect to correlate highly with attacking success.

Their problem is that the process no longer delivers results.

It’s telling that the two categories in which Redcliffe are ranked number one in the NRL are Errors per PTB and Early Shifts – so they’re clearly trying to play their footy, they’re just not executing.

That error rate then compounds what they were already quite bad at.

The line speed has never been a strength under Woolf, but has cratered even further. The worst two matches of the season for Pre-Contact Metres across the whole comp are both Dolphins games.

They drop the footy, which gives them too much defending to do, which under this ruleset, can only end one way.

If you’re going to play like that in the 2026 NRL, you better be able to defend your errors – or play so conservatively that you don’t make as many.

At the risk of tapping the sign very, very hard: you cannot divorce the rules from the tactics, and boring football is heavily rewarded in this current interpretation.

That’s the diagnosis, but what about the cure?

The obvious place to start would be the coach, but he’s coaching roughly the same footy that people loved last year. It’s the players who aren’t executing it as well.

He’s not got with the programme as far as the rules are concerned, but knowing Peter V’Landys, the rules could just as likely change back to what they were last year within a month, once data feeds through that people hate blowouts.

The U-turn may be imminent, and at that point, suddenly the Phins are great again.

They’re 2-5 so far, but that five includes three of the current top four, plus the reigning Premiers.

Even within that, they took the Panthers to Golden Point and lost by two in Auckland, so it’s really only the defeat to Manly as an aberration – and that featured the most kamikaze first half you’ve ever seen, with 33% possession and a 7-1 infringement count.1

If you look at the Jeff Table below, Redcliffe are two wins back on where they were last year against the same opponents, but that isn’t completely terrible, or at least, not as bad a 2-5 looks.

What matters is the expectations within the joint.

Theirs is a top eight roster, so not finishing in the finals will be a problem, especially if it occurs for the same reasons as last year – aka the defence isn’t up to it.

Terry Reader, the CEO, is a very sensible man and has managed the squad, the expansion and the coach transition exceptionally well. Next is the first coaching crisis, and we don’t know how he’ll act.

The coming sequence is a good bellwether: it’s the ailing Storm on Friday, the semi-ailing Bulldogs after that and then the Bunnies again2, all at Suncorp.

The worry for Woolf is that Melbourne have to get it together at some point, the Dogs are defensively good enough to stymie their attack and Souths already did the Phins once this year.

The hope will be that the attack starts holding the ball, at which point it all comes together in spectacular fashion.

They could be 5-5, they could be 2-8, they could be anything. At the moment, for Kristian Woolf, that’s the problem.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

Souths continue to dominate the big improvers metric, now a stunning four wins ahead of last year’s tally following their win in Melbourne.

The Storm, as you might have guessed, are propping up this table on -4, but more worryingly, the Bulldogs are now down with them on their own on -3.

What is most interesting is the middle, because we can see some narratives being countered here.

Brisbane, for example, have been on a tear - but they’re still worse than last year, which suggests the fixtures might be currently a little kind. That could drop further this weekend too, as they roll into Allianz Stadium, where they won on opening night last year.

Another to watch is Manly - they picked up a win on the road at Penrith last year, so could drop yet further should they fail (as everyone expects them to) at Commbank on Sunday night.

Denis Betts

The Roosters to win the comp is already looking better - that $8 has dropped to $7.50 - and you’d expect that to fall yet further should they put a score on the Broncos on Saturday.

I think that will happen, but the value isn’t in it, so instead, we’ll run counter to this column and suggest that the Storm rot cannot continue, and that they will defeat the Dolphins on Friday night.

You rarely get Melbourne as outsiders, so cash in while you can - the law of averages suggests they’re a great chance at the price.

Parra looked cooked and the Wahs do not, so for me, this -6.5 line should be more. I’ll be all over it.

Manly, as mentioned above, have had a rails run of fixtures and will probably chuck this one with the Broncos up next week. If Jamal Fogarty is out, and he might well be, then that -12.5 line will shoot up. I’m taking it now.

That’s the message from NRL HQ, who announced record viewership on the back of Round 7, then a full slate of sellouts for Round 8, cementing rugby league’s role as the premier sport in the Pacific.

Andrew Abdo loves a metric, and while I’ve long since rejected his ‘better than ever’ claim, there is plenty to be said for bigger than ever.

Numbers go up is, obviously, better than numbers go down – but while rugby league is clearly bigger than ever, the bigger question is whether it’s actually growing.

I am somewhat qualified to talk about this, because it’s a question I’ve dealt with professionally for well over a decade now.

Prior to moving to Australia, I was a consultant strategist at a whole load of brands that you almost certainly have heard of and might well be wearing right now, even under your pants.

Rugby league was just what I did for fun, but I also presented to Super League on their marketing and was part of those consulted by IMG when they first partnered with British rugby league in 2022.

This wasn’t a secret, either: I wrote this in late 2020 and looking back with five years’ hindsight, I’d say it holds up pretty well.

Marketing is great because, even though it is more buzzword-heavy than almost any other industry, it’s full of concepts that the general person understands, because they see it all the time in their lives.

Most people, for example, are aware of the marketing funnel, even if they don’t know the name of it.

At its widest, you have everyone, the mass of every potential customer. This is called the ‘Awareness’ stage, in that people know that you exist but little more, or Top of Funnel1.

Then you get the ‘Interest’ stage, where they consider buying your product, followed by ‘Conversion’, where they actually do, and finally ‘Loyalty’, when you don’t ever really have to market to them at all and, indeed, they market for you by telling people how much they like what you are selling.

Rugby League is quite unusual in that this funnel is upside down.

There are many, many people who are very loyal to it and also many, many people who haven’t got the slightest clue what the sport is about.

In that sense, a comparable product might be Irn Bru, the most popular fizzy drink in Scotland but barely available in London and a mystery just about anywhere else.

League suffers, from a marketing perspective, because its brand identity is very like its largest competitor, both in name and visual cues, and that competitor has had institutional support behind it for over a hundred years2.

Then again, that is also its biggest strength, as has the kind of authenticity that you can’t buy, a real subcultural clout.

Rugby union might have cultural hegemony, but nobody thinks it’s cool – well, nobody except for the sort people who listen to Coldplay and wear jeans and shoes, and I’ll not be taking any style tips from them.

And make no mistake – the NRL knows this upside down funnel as well as anyone.

Abdo has spoken a lot about their marketing success, but largely it has been turning people who quite liked rugby league into people who really, really like rugby league.

The problem is that this is something that might have happened anyway: the biggest cultural properties at the start of the streaming revolution have only become more popular, as the illusion of choice largely results in people picking what they already know.

Last weekend, for example, myself and Mrs WYGIWYS had old episodes of Top of the Pops from the 1990s on as we were pottering about the house, and it was amazing to remember the diversity of music featured in just short period of telly.

One episode had Dru Hill into Offspring into Steps into Armand van Helden, from R&B to punk to bubblegum pop to house in about 12 minutes.

We put it on for nostalgia, of course, but also because the YouTube algorithm constantly serves us songs it knows we like, not something different that we might like but haven’t considered.

Growing up in the UK, we got this from Grandstand, where rugby league was one sport alongside many other sports, and you were forced watch Ski Sunday, Pot Black and *spits on the floor* the Five Nations.

Now, we self-select on Kayo or Sky.

The NRL has benefitted from this, but it has seen Super League pushed to the margins in favour of the ubiquitous Premier League.

Again, it’s difficult to parse whether that is just something that has happened to rugby league to something the game has done for itself.

Posting larger ratings is a lot easier when you consider that there are roughly four million extra people in NSW and Queensland – essentially one and a half extra Brisbanes - than there were when the NRL started in 1998, and these numbers are always released in volume terms.

Similarly, announcing that the Tigers-Broncos game had the second-highest Foxtel exclusive audience ever loses a little meaning when you know that they have about a million and a half more subscribers than even five years ago, so there are simply more people able to watch the game than previously.

Abdo could and probably would turn around and say that the NRL is driving that subscriber base, and to some extent, he is correct.

Legacy media is totally dependent on sport as the only appointment-viewing property, which forces the two biggest media companies in Australia, Nine Entertainment and News Ltd, to do their marketing for them.

This is something of a golden cage for rugby league, because those companies actively stop the NRL producing their own global content in case it competes locally with their own output.

The arrangement is perfect for saturating a market but terrible for expanding beyond it, because there’s no value to Foxtel or Nine in centrally produced content that appeals to anyone outside of Australia.

And make no mistake, everything from the addition of the Dolphins, the Vegas games and the growth of the NRLW and the Pacific Championships has been designed to extract more value from pre-existing supporters.

In the UK, we can defer to an actual expert.

Speaking on the Unofficial Partner Podcast last week, Dan Ayers, VP of Transformation Digital3 at IMG, the ‘strategic partner’ working with the Rugby Football League (RFL) to help improve the game’s marketing footprint.

Ayers’ main take was that rugby league thrived in community, with particular reference to Reddit, where they have made significant outreach attempts.

His point was that in the lower end of the funnel, rugby league was still very deeply embedded and successful, a fact backed up a few weeks ago in these pages with statistics about just how many people per capita attend matches – as high as 20% of the entire population in towns like Leigh and Castleford.

The r/superleague channel, much like the r/nrl channel, represents these people: already convinced, endlessly authentic, highly engaged and very loyal.

IMG’s marketing success – and it has been a massive success – has been offering insights to help clubs engage more professionally with their own supporters, turning sometime attendees into season ticket holders, casual fans into regular viewers.

The attendances, TV ratings and, crucially for IMG at least, digital reach numbers, back this up too.

For all the doom and gloom that UK RL fans like to engage in, it’s accurate to suggest that there are more rugby league fans alive today, watching and attending games, than there ever have been.

Ironically enough, rugby league used to be very good at top funnel stuff – in the age of Grandstand, when Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah were household names – but horrendous at moving anyone down it.

Back in the late 1980s, there was no TV deal, so you couldn’t really follow the game on telly, and to attend in person, you had to a) be in the part of England that played rugby league and b) be willing to endure some of the worst stadia you can imagine.

I’m old enough to remember the Watersheddings, for example, and exhilarating as it was for a five-year-old me, it was less so if you were female or fancied using the toilet in any way more sophisticated than pissing on a wall.

Rugby league marketing in 2026 is, undeniably, a lot better than it was back then. The game, on both sides of the world, looks better, feels better and entices people to go along, probably more than once, and at the very least to watch on TV.

There is, in Australia at least, a lot of ancillary factors that have helped them to solidify that success beyond just the actions of the league itself – population growth, media landscapes, algorithmic sameness and you could go on.

In the UK, where that has flowed against rugby league, other digital marketing trends have worked the other way, with the game’s innate community, tribalism and tendency towards (mostly good-natured) debate allowing it to flourish online and, on the back of it, grow offline too.

But expanding beyond that base remains a circle that we can’t square.

The first and most obvious place to start would be to use the international game as the growth engine.

No, not making the NRL more international: making internationals more international.

A great man4 once said that the problem with rugby league is that someone in Castleford cares much more about beating Wakefield than they do about England beating Australia.

This is also true with Penrith, Parramatta, New South Wales, Queensland or any level of parochial squabble you choose to pick - it’s how rugby league is wired.

Rugby league’s great strength is the hyper-local tribalism that keeps the content engine pumping along, and that should always remain, but to interest people beyond our borders, we need to use Test footy as the gateway in.

Tonga v Samoa, for example, is a commercial property that fuses both the skill, speed, strength and smarts of rugby league as an on-field spectacle with the deep, authentic community aspects that we take for granted in footy but is pretty much unique to our sport.

Rugby union is the only other sport that has anything close to this fixture, but for them, it’s a second rate game between second rate sides – the last one was attended by just 3,000 people.

We have got a lot better at this since I wrote my first article, but it’s still mostly an afterthought rather than the major growth product.

If there’s any property that Peter V’Landys should be trying to take around the globe, this is it, because it is instantly understandable to non-footy people.

No, they don’t care that the players are all from Western Sydney and South Auckland, because they don’t know who they are – it’s just a mad new thing happening on telly, and they want to see more of it.

The second major marketing change that the NRL could make would be to democratise its content.

Currently, it’s borderline Pravda on messaging from HQ5 – and that’s the bits that don’t have to go through Channel 9 or Fox League before they reach the public.

Rights holders are terrified of unleashing their product to the world, because they are scared what the world will do with it – but if they want properly progressive marketing, the best thing they can do is let their stuff be free.

Formula 1, for example, is a world-leader in content freedom, which makes it one of the best for User Generated Content (UGC) – pretty much the best form of marketing you can get, and one of the cheapest, too.

UGC is exactly what it sounds like: punters using your intellectual property to do whatever they want with it.

On that podcast, for example, Dan Ayers spoke about an F1 stream that was literally just the telemetry data from the cars6, with fans watching and commenting along.

The NRL, to contrast, actively shuts down anyone who might want to use their statistics in any way to talk about the game, which is, of course, a form of content production that they can’t control.

If they let everything go wild instead of trying to police narrative, you’d see a proliferation of UGC in rugby league, telling the stories that other outlets won’t – creating a new level of engagement for fans.

While most fans aren’t interested in stats, plenty are, and plenty of people in rugby league adjacent sports like American Football can use the numbers as a gateway. After all, that level of insight is second nature to US sports fans.

PVL knows this, because he talks about it in gambling terms, so could easily enact this as a way of increasing digital footprint globally.

Super League, incidentally, should just get a website that works properly first, but maybe can take this on board for afterwards.

A third strategy should be active promotion and co-ordination of second screen content – the stuff you show people who are looking at their phone as well as watching a game.

Now, much as it is anathema to people like me who grew up before this and lament the age of attention spans, it is clear that a significant subsection of the viewership are simultaneously watching something else on their phone.

Currently the NRL offers a social media strategy geared around the content they already have – mostly match highlights – which, obviously, anyone second-screening already has on the first screen.

The point of second-screen content is to complement the first option, which means giving the person who is thinking about the game while looking at their phone the opportunity to engage.

Crucially, anyone new watching games will see something happen, then immediately wonder who this person is doing the thing – and they don’t need to see a replay, they need to see something else.

It’s in the stream of other content that the growth is found: BTS, mic’ed up, tactical explainers and individual-focused extras are the key here, because that’s the stuff you’re not getting from screen one.

Having an agile7 socials team whose job is to look at the trending topics, know their library and find the right piece of complementary content to post is how to capture the second screen, not by repeating what was just on the first.

It deepens experience, and most importantly, retains attention in an attention-deficit world. If you own both screens, you own the whole viewer. Otherwise, for a significant cohort, you’re only getting half.

It also feeds data back on what the new viewer wants and responds to, creating a feedback loop on people you don’t know. We all know what footy fans want from @NRL – they want footy. But what about those we haven’t touched?

r/nrl are doing this for free with their live chats, but the NRL’s Discord channel has just 4,500 members versus over 100,000 on the unofficial Reddit. Discord, for the main, remains a long-missed Steve Mascord column.

The league’s current live blog is a comparative afterthought to what punters are doing for themselves, unofficially and without any support.

Rugby league does have specialists who could put their collective minds to solving these problems. IMG are global experts in it, and the NRL could call upon any consultancy they like.

Experts are only as good, however, as the ability of the people they are paid to advise to listen to them.

The NRL might think they’re doing well – and to some extent, with the people they already know, they are. But there’s a whole world out there that remains, largely, untouched.

The best currency is word of mouth, so if you like this article and know someone who would be nodding along, share it with them via the button below.

Share

If you value independent analysis like this and have the means, there’s a paid option that helps keep it going.

Subscribe now

They’re old money, institutional wealth, all trainers with no socks and jumpers casually slung over shoulders. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

The Sydney Roosters, on the face of it, fit into this: a glamour club with political clout and a whiff of self-importance that doesn’t always suit the tall-poppy-chopping world of rugby league.

On the field, however, Easts profoundly counter-cultural, a team persisting with a style that harks back to an earlier era but which, if they can actually pull it together, presents the most viable threat to the Panthers dynasty.

Trent Robinson and Ivan Cleary sit at opposite ends of a spectrum as far as rugby league tactics are concerned.

Robbo loves the risk/reward balance, backing his side to take chances and have the skill to pull it off; Ivan is more about the strangulation, using repeatability to create perfect, unbeatable football.

Rugby league doesn’t have right answers philosophically, and there are plenty of ways to skin the cat.

Ivan’s way has worked of late – and against the Roosters specifically, with an 11-1 record in the Set Restart era – but all eras end, and he was taking over from Trent anyway, with Easts dominating the previous period.

That dynamic, in 2026, appears to be back - because the Roosters are flying under the radar and are the standout challengers to Penrith through seven rounds of footy.

After weirdness abounding over the last few years, not to mention a near-permanent injury crisis, the Chooks are back to something like their best.

This is the first clean bill of health that the Chooks have enjoyed since the 2019 Grand Final, and a 4-2 record so far has given Robbo’s men a much better platform than they have enjoyed in recent years.

Those niggles, combined with an above average amount of rep participation, have combined in recent years to hobble the Roosters from the start of the year, only for a late charge to put them in the finals but ultimately give the team too much to do.

They were, if you cast your mind back to my Tactical Preview of 2026, my pick for the title in 2026.

The spine is the best in the comp, the middles are the right mix of solid and chaotic, the backs have enough upside to cover the downside and, crucially, there is depth for days.

These are the requirements to finish in the top four.

Rugby league is the weakest of weak link sports in the regular season, but becomes less weak link as the year goes on.

In essence, you win week-to-week by having a higher floor than opponents, but once that floor is raised by bad teams getting eliminated, the strength of your best player becomes increasingly vital.

Easts’ problem has been the first part, not the second.

Robbo has almost always played the same expansive, attractive footy but with lesser participants, which led to dropped balls and games lost that should have been won.

The Roosters’ style is inherently risky, but it is designed to win at the back end of the year, when the best players come to the fore.

Robinson stands in the Brian Smith tradition of progressive football, but has probably now surpassed his predecessor, taking that philosophy and refining it yet further.

The core Smithian tenets of promoting the footy, getting men in support and looking to win by attacking superiority remain, elevated by Robinson’s control of message and power within his club.

That’s the philosophical analysis over a decade and more of coaching, and of course, there are nuances to everything, but as central guiding lights, they were true in 2013 and are still going strong.

It’s why Robbo persists with wingers who are liabilities in some ways but have enough upside to make it worthwhile.

It’s why someone as flamboyant as Sam Walker is able to exist in first grade, because every other coach would have coached all the joy out of him, rather than making it his greatest strength.

It’s why the coach continues to see everyone as they are on their best day, when it all works, and will never punish his blokes for trying something. He builds the system to survive errors, not to limit them.

This is not for everyone, but it is Robinson, who has built a roster to suit his style, implemented it at every level of the club and made it part of what the Roosters are as a club.

In 2026, that commitment to philosophy will either be what wins this side the Premiership or sees the Roosters sacrificed on the altar of bad rules.

In the interim between 2021’s statsflation and 2026’s restartathon, the NRL did look like it was moving towards rewarding footy that embraces risk, but with so much interference from the officials, it’s currently better to do nothing with the ball until the ref tires your opponent out enough for you to score.

If and when Peter V’Landys realises this is a rubbish product – and, given the last two weeks, this might have already happened – we might see a return to a more attractive, open style of play.

Should that occur, then the Chooks will be best placed to take advantage, because they are the best at that game.

They’re first for Shifts, Combined Supports, Good Ball Set Conversion. This is a team that promotes the footy, gets men in support and looking to win by attacking superiority just like it always has.

They’re also first for Errors per Play the Ball and Errors in their own half, because Easts continue to play the risk/reward with the dial set way further towards risk than anyone else.

Should the rules stay as they are, that will likely bite them on the backside enough to be a problem.

In the two games they have lost, they have completed at 68% and 71%, and while completion rate is generally not a useful stat – repeat after me: the Roosters won two comps with the lowest completions in the NRL – there is a floor of about 74% beneath which it becomes borderline impossible to win.

Notably, their defeats were against the Panthers, the ur-example of the other type of footy, and the Warriors, who ape the Panthers as much as possible.

Even then, Easts were thrashed on the scoreboard against Penrith but had similar Total Sets, only 150m fewer runs and more post-contact metres, good ball sets and tackle breaks.

Stats don’t tell you everything about a game, but those numbers do suggest two sides that aren’t that far apart, especially if one of them could hang onto the ball a little bit more.

Penrith had their first incomplete set after 51 minutes, by which point it was 28-4. Good luck anyone beating them if they do that.

Then again, Easts did that exact same thing to Manly, completing at 100% well into the second half, so it is something they can do – albeit with the caveat that every piece of analysis they will have done on the late-Seibold Sea Eagles would have identified that they were experts at beating themselves, and that was before a month’s rain fell in 15 minutes ahead of kick off.

All of this is a whole lot of numbers to tell you that the Roosters can be really good, which you knew, but have a tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, which you likely also knew.

As far as 2026 is concerned, things are looking up.

Remember that 74% completion rate floor? Easts have managed that just twice in six games so far and won anyway.

As cohesion grows, you’d expect that to tick upwards and if it does, they’re as big a threat as anyone.

They also likely won’t lose James Tedesco to Origin, and neither of their halves are likely to play it either, which should give Easts the opportunity to bank wins and, late in the year, rest bodies.

Easts are best when their ceiling, which is always high, is not limited by their floor.

You’d rather be them than the Warriors, Bulldogs or Sharks, who have a high floor but low ceiling, and the Storm or Broncos, who can compete in the finals might give themselves too much to do in the finals.

That leaves the Panthers, as it always does. That 1-11 record has to end at some point, right?

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

The Panthers and Rabbitohs are now our standout improvers, a clear three victories better off against comparative opponents than they were last year.

Souths, in particular, have managed that despite only winning four games, so they’ve avenged three defeats while still losing to the Roosters and Raiders. This is the sort of improvement Jeff is designed to track.

At the other end, we continue not to learn much, as the top four from last year can only go one way, though it is surprising that the Bulldogs are just as bad as the Storm in this metric - certainly one to watch fixture-wise.

Easts are two up now, which should be ominous, and the Wahs, who people seem to think are great, are just one better off than last year. Again, don’t get ahead of yourselves, Kiwi pals.

Denis Betts

Walking into The Mercantile Hotel on Sunday at about half past two, the head was in the proverbial hands.

The Sydney Roosters, whom I always intended to write a hype-up column about, and on whom I had a 13+ bet, were losing 24-12 to the Knights.

If there was one team, I thought as I waited for my Guinness to settle, who could sort this - well, that’d be Easts.

They did, and as a result, we’re piling in all over again. The Anzac Day Game will either see the Dragons do the new-coach-bounce thing and be decent, or completely lose whatever shred of decency was left.

Me, I suspect the latter so I’m taking the Chooks at a 20 point start.

Our 13+ went so well last week1 that we’ll do it again, this time with the Wahs over the Phins.

Redcliffe played in ridiculous humidity last week in Darwin, and now have to fly to Wellington, over 5,000kms away.

For our European readers, that’s the same as Manchester to Dubai, New York or Tashkent - so a very, very long way.

The Phins can’t defend at the best of times, and that’s when they’re not knackered, so all about the Wahs train.

Lastly, one of the enduring features of this column has been betting against Manly - and after playing three opponents who did their level best to beat themselves, I’m not entirely aboard the Foz Train just yet.

At over $3, Parramatta are a decent shout, and as ever with my Sea Eagles, I’ll be happy to lose my cash if they win.

This Substack is free, but if you value this kind of analysis and have the means, paid subscriptions keep it going.

Subscribe now

As good as an upgrade is a share - if you know someone who would enjoy footy writing like this, then send them this via the Share button below.

Share

Rugby league has long marketed itself as not just a contact sport, but a collision sport, the toughest game for the toughest athletes. A certain attrition rate is to be expected.

There’s a rough estimation that a number of players will be out at any one time, and that is just the cost of doing business.

But the rise in rugby league injuries since the advent of the Six Again is well beyond that. Super League topped a hundred players out in just five weeks, a number the NRL is now fast approaching.

The Oracle of Injuries, Brien Seeney of The NRL Physio, informs me that 78 players are currently out injured, which means of the 388 players who have taken to the field so far in 2026, around 20% are currently listed as injured1.

If you don’t like the quantitative approach, how about qualitative?

That list includes Reece Walsh, Xavier Coates, Bradman Best, Stephen Crichton, Kalyn Ponga, Ben Hunt, Clint Gutherson, Liam Martin, Jai Arrow, Tom Trbojevic, Payne Haas and David Fifita, and that’s just the ones who’ve played State of Origin relatively recently.

That’s just seven rounds in, too. It’ll get worse before it gets better, especially for clubs like the Broncos and Eels where there are potentially season-defining crises building.

Injuries in footy are not new, but injuries at this rate are.

Combine them with a penalty rate that is one every two and a half sets and ever-widening margins and you have the troika of trash footy that currently characterises the 2026 NRL.

Sport is a business, athletes are workers, and workplace injuries are, in essence, industrial accidents.

Like all industrial accidents, many of them aren’t really accidents at all. The most dangerous job in Australia, for example, plant machinery operator, which essentially means forklifts.

Ask anyone in the forklift space and they’ll tell you that there are very, very few accidents, at least in the traditional sense of the word.

That’s because they’re not really accidents: they’re process breakdowns.

‘Accidental’ implies random, when in fact, it’s someone somewhere not doing the thing that they’re meant to be doing, largely while knowing precisely how to avoid such things occurring.

There are better barriers, more technology, AI-enabled risk management systems and training courses upon training courses, but the simple human reasons persist: people cutting corners, people being tired and, above all, people moving faster than they need to in order to produce more profits for their company.

This is what we are seeing in rugby league in 2026.

If you ask players to do more, which is what is happening, then you get more actions under fatigue, more ‘accidents’ and more injuries. It’s a fairly linear equation.

It’s not a surprise, either, because there’s more rugby league than there used to be.

Peter V’landys could doubtless tell you the ball-in-play stats but that lies a little, as standing around is certainly up as well, so instead, let’s talk about play-the-balls, which are now over 300 per game, a full 45 more than in 2018, or 17% more contact points.

The Rugby League Players Association (RLPA) would certainly baulk at the idea of adding four extra fixtures to the calendar every year, but they have added that by stealth via the increase in game time caused by the Six Again.

And make no mistake, that’s it: there is more footy now, that footy is faster and thus the players are more tired. This is not complicated.

If you asked most people to do more in their work in the same time frame, you could reasonably expect the quality of that work to drop.

Me, I know that the two articles a week I write for this here Substack are better than the four per week I wrote last year for LoveRugbyLeague, which are in turn probably better than the twelve or so I wrote for The Roar during footy season.

Alternatively, we could go and ask forklift drivers if they’ve got any better at driving the trucks by having to fulfil more orders in less time to turn a profit.

There’s a theory for this, and naturally in the field of industrial relations, it’s a Marxist behind it.

Hungarian theorist György Lukács called it reification, the process by which human activity becomes subordinate to the system that organises it, while appearing independent of it.

If we drive our forklifts faster, there will be more accidents in the factory, but the product will move faster and the profits will be higher.

It won’t be the bosses who suffer, and the workers see the accidents as unfortunate, unconnected incidents.

In rugby league terms, Lukács would point out that it isn’t just that the system produces injuries, it’s that everyone involved experiences those injuries as unavoidable, as if the system had nothing to do with them at all.

Players, collectively, create the NRL product — but we act as if that product exists independently of them, and act as if it isn’t the product itself that is causing the injuries.

We know that if Reece Walsh is out and Jesse Arthars is in, the Broncos aren’t the same, but it won’t stop Channel 9, Fox League and the NRL telling you that it’s the reigning Premiers.

In that sense the fans are as shortchanged as the players. They’re getting paid well, but hurt more often, which means we’re paying the same but getting a worse product.

Unless you follow rugby league exclusively through the medium of ten-second highlights, you probably appreciate the sport as a contest of brains and brawn, skill and strategy, played out by the best players in roughly matched teams, with the refs largely letting them get on with it.

This year, you get unbalanced contests, where physicality is punished, skills are secondary, boring strategy is rewarded, speed is overvalued and refs are right at the bloody centre of everything.

Oh, and now, a fifth of the league is out injured, including a lot of the elite players.

Lukács wrote a lot about systems separating themselves from their participants, while those same participants look around helplessly.

We complain about injuries, but we accept the rules that produce them. Yes, footballers get hurt, but not like this, not as often, not in the same way. That’s new, and it’s someone’s fault.

It makes you wonder who the game is for at the moment.

It’s not for the participants, who are playing four games a year more in real terms than their union agreed to. It’s not for the fans, who are watching worse players play worse footy.

Much as the broadcasters like the extra ad breaks, they too suffer from having a significant slice of the talent pool off the field, as do the advertisers who buy the slots.

That leaves the NRL themselves, the owners of the product, the bosses of the players and the ultimate arbiters.

Do they enjoy this? They might be the only ones.

The best currency in this game is word-of-mouth, so if you nodded your head along to this, then there’s a decent chance you know people who would like it too. Send them a copy using the button below.

Share

If this made sense to you, you’ll probably enjoy the rest - I write about the game this way every week.

Subscribe below to get it in your inbox. If you value this kind of analysis and have the means, paid subscriptions keep it going.

Subscribe now

That’s it then: Craig Bellamy done, dynasty over. I’ll tell the children.

Err…probably not. The Storm are still an elite team, with the best spine in the comp and one of the best coaches around, someone who knows more about winning games of footy than just about anyone else.

Bellamy’s philosophy is based on an innate understanding of how rugby league structurally works, allied to the best in psychology, learned at the feet of Wayne Bennett, and a preternatural embrace of analysis that has given the Storm a head start that they are yet to relinquish.

Tactically, no team has embraced the idea of the weak-link sport as much as Bellamy’s Storm.

For all that their lore is about the Big Three of Billy Slater, Cameron Smith and Cooper Cronk, then the second Big Three of Cameron Munster, Harry Grant and Jahrome Hughes, it’s actually all about the other blokes, the Aaron Moules and Bryan Norries and Sisi Waqas who gained an extra leg in the purple jersey.

They’re your weak links - but of course, they weren’t weak at all, thanks to pure tactics and coaching.

Bellamy can define roles and distill instructions like nobody else in the business. Give detail to those that need it, don’t give it to those that don’t. You raise the floor by making your worst player better, then let the high ceiling players win you the game.

We think of Bellamy as the progenitor of wrestling in rugby league, but I must have missed him stood in the corner when Royton Tigers u-14s were training at Rochdale Judo Club in the early 2000s, because we were already doing it then, long before anyone said it was ruining the game.

What he did was perfect it, then manipulate it as far as the rules allowed until they changed the rules. That sounds like brilliant coaching to me.

Latterly, the Storm have been an all-action attacking side, adapting as the game changed around them to play wider earlier, with two run-first halves operating in tandem, both 6.5s rather than a 6 and 7.

Nobody else has managed to make anything quite so unconventional work, but with Grant doing the organisational heavy lifting, the Storm managed it.

That Bellamy is tarred with the Wrestlemania brush, and that of the coaches box ranter, really speaks to the level of discourse around rugby league, because the bloke has basically solved the sport in plain sight for two decades without anyone ever really investigating how.

Anyway, the 2026 version don’t seem to be as good as their predecessors - so why?

It probably isn’t the psychology and culture bits that people love to laud Melbourne for, because they’re still doing all those bits, from sending guys to building sites to the (less talked about but still relevant) advantage that comes from having zero day-to-day noise like Sydney and Queensland-based teams.

It’s not the analysis, because the Storm still do all that too, and the best you can say on that front is that other teams might have got better at it, removing a relative advantage Melbourne previously enjoyed due to the incompetence of others.

That leaves, then, either tactics or cattle - and in Melbourne’s case, they are often more intertwined than other teams.

They base their whole model on improving the worst guy, so if that standard drops a lot, they’re in trouble.

Similarly, if the cash they have sunk at the top of the squad is underperforming, then it’s a big issue too.

Undeniably, that has happened to some extent.

Hughes and Grant are still among the best, but while Su’a Fa’alogo might eventually surpass Ryan Papenhuyzen, he’s not there yet as a week-to-week star and Munster is in the middle of what is now quite a prolonged, potentially permanent decline in form.

The Storm are actually making more line breaks and getting more good ball sets than in any of the previous five years, which does suggest that execution more than theory is the problem.

In 2025, it was rescued by exceptional kicking, which led the league in terms of tries off the boot, but that number has halved this year, almost as if the best two targets they had for kicks - Xavier Coates and Eliesa Katoa - aren’t on the field.

Kicking is a totally legitimate way to score and more teams should practice it as much as Melbourne do, but it is inherently prone to variance. That rugby league ball bounces in mysterious ways.

Off the ball, however, things are not great.

The weak link part of the sport is much more about defence than attack, and on top of that, new players take far longer to cohere without the ball than with it.

Moses Leo, Siulagi Tuimalatu-Brown and Manaia Waitere are all inexperienced, and when you’re playing three of them at the same time, as has been the case of late, it’s going to present problems.

The Storm are worth a line break and a half more per game against than last year, are conceding twice as many tries on their own goalline and a fair whack more metres per run as well.

The attacking failings are a little bit of top end struggles from their best players, but the defensive ones are very much about the lowest level of the squad not being as elevated as in previous iterations of the Storm. The ceiling has dropped a little, but the floor has fallen out.

This is all not great stuff, but it also comes with a huge caveat. It’s early, and the Storm have lost to three of the current top four, plus the reigning Premiers, Brisbane. There have been easier starts to the year.

Bellamy will know that the season is long, combinations take time and you win nothing in April.

As much as it’s a bit of a line item of news for us that Tui Kamikamica had an actual stroke, it is likely a lot more disruptive if you know and play with him.

That, on the back of watching Katoa suffer a shocking injury playing for Tonga, will have been harder internally than they’re letting on.

All this compounds, like all risk does, but the coach will be planning this out. You can expect a siege mentality around it to be in full effect by the end of the year.

On the longest lens, this is actually a fairly significant slump for the Storm, in that they haven’t actually won a Premiership in five years and, for the first time, Bellamy’s plan to win the whole lot does seem to be fraying.

But by anyone else’s standards, this is a great club with a strong roster and a proven way of winning developed over decades.

There’s a reason they’re so consistent. Melbourne won’t let a few losses derail what works.

When they go to face Canberra on Friday, they’ll approach it the way they always have, and will expect to win.

Even if they don’t - and with the team they’ve listed, they might well not - it won’t change a thing. Bellamy knows how this works.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

Let’s stick with the Storm to start, because they are now clearly bottom of the MMJ Table with -3.

As with all good teams on this metric, there’s limited improvement can ever be made as it is relative to where you were last year, so if you were good last year, you can only fall.

That said, three wins down in six games is quite bad and probably a source of some concern.

Souths and the Tigers are our big improvers, but perhaps most interestingly, the Titans are now very close to them, two wins better than last year based on opponents played.

We are still not interested in the Cowboys’ improvement, as they are a flat zero, though perhaps not being any worse might actually constitute growth in 2026. We shall see, and Jeff will be here to report on it all.

Denis Betts

Your weekly guide on how to punt remains up for the year - 11%, since you’re asking - and that without any stats at all, just pure vibes.

Anyone who read this column last week could have filled their proverbial boots on the Bulldogs, and anyone who read Tuesday’s edition can understand why $5+ and a 16.5+ start was a ludicrous price.

We don’t delve too much into controversy on this channel, but the beat copped as a result of Gehamat Shibasaki’s disallowed try was very annoying, as that Broncos +2.5 was home and hosed had that try stood. Ah, and indeed, well.

This week, we return to the well of tipping against Manly with a juicy 4.5+ start on the Cowboys. Remember, there are few close finishes this year, so that is as good as on the nose.

Friday night is our big night of value - I got the Raiders into Panthers at $2.60 with a boost, and if you think the Storm are as bad as the mainstream media seems to, then have a crack.

Me, I’m less confident, but it’s probably a toss up and the Raiders as home outsiders looks like the better punt.

Friend of the column Gerard Condon of Reading the Play has been talking a lot about the proliferation of 13+ results this year, so in his honours, let’s pick one.

There’s not much value in singles, but with a few lop-siders out there, I’ll take the Roosters over Knights - the straight up line is 11.5+, so 13+ is nothing on that.

That’s yer Thursday column for the week - just from me directly1, the numbers on this page continue to go up and up, so if you have subscribed - thanks.

If you have subscribed and paid, thanks even more. If you have subscribed and not paid - what’s stopping you? Well, apart from the obvious bits.

I write this for free and there’s no paid tier, so you don’t get anything beyond my gratitude, but I just moved house and schooners continue to be more expensive than ever. If you think this is worth the price of one, chuck in a monthly $102 and I’ll raise the glass to you.

Subscribe now

The Bulldogs proved it last week - and the data shows exactly how.

Speaking on last week’s edition of The Bye Round podcast, guest pundit Luke Keary made a stunning admission.

Host James Graham asked him how much a halfback changes their gameplan based on their opponent, referencing Penrith’s strong start to the season and questioning how much they were forcing opponents to adapt.

“You don’t change,” said the three-time Premier and 2018 Clive Churchill Medallist.

“But in my whole career in the NRL, they were the only team where we (Easts) thought: ‘we need to mix it up a bit here’. Subconsciously, you get that.

“It’s what a great team does. We saw it when we had a great run (in 2018 and 2019), you saw teams change, because they thought they couldn’t (win). Penrith have that.”

This was a player who was at the Roosters during the Panthers’ previous peak, admitting that the NRL’s most glamourous club, under Trent Robinson, one of its most philosophical coaches, essentially admitted that their regular tactical plan wasn’t going to be good enough.

Or maybe it wasn’t. Was it, instead, that the halfback of the Roosters, one of the elite players of his generation, was saying that he personally didn’t believe in himself enough?

At the very least, Keary’s comments go a long way to explaining why Easts’ record against Penrith in the Six Again era is 1-11.

Rugby league is a strange game, so macho that you can’t ever accept defeat, but filled with characters humble enough to know and recognise the greatness in front of them.

It’s something Cameron Ciraldo would have been pondering last week, before pulling off the biggest upset of the season to defeat his old club, Penrith, and in style too.

If he looked at the numbers – and given the Bulldogs’ structure, he might well have done – then he would have seen a clear route to give his boys the best chance of victory.

He knows what the data shows: if you play normally, you normally lose.

As will be proven in this article – through brand-new, exclusive data – knowing where you are relative to your opponent and adapting accordingly, can have huge upsides – even if it is counterintuitive.

The data is quite clear on this: while throwing the baby out with the tactical bathwater is anathema to coaches, in specific match-ups against well-favoured opponents, it is a demonstrably better thing to do.

But first, the principles - because there’s a reason most coaches won’t do this.

Tactically, rugby league is more highly periodised than other sports. The physical, mental, strategic and emotional are all combined into one overarching system that, broadly, is not altered week-to-week.

You can see in how reticent clubs are to sack coaches, because doing so is, as everyone knows, essentially setting fire to a season.

As a weak-link sport, the systematic aspects have to come first: the what, the how and the why have to come together and not really change.

In a salary-capped league with a limited player pool, that is where the efficiencies lie, because you can’t readily change the who.

In another weak-link sport, soccer, you can swap coaches and thus styles more readily, and if that doesn’t work, there’s also a transfer window twice a year. In the NRL, that doesn’t work.

Coaches must conceptualise something that begins in December on the first day of pre-season, a game model designed to get the most out of the roster they have, knowing that the way we played on day one is the way we win the Grand Final.

So what happens when, like in the week you’re going to play the Panthers, you know the plan will almost certainly fail?

Most coaches will continue anyway, because if it goes wrong, then at least it went wrong their way. What does it say to about Plan A if you won’t run it against your toughest opponent, right?

The Bulldogs just showed, however, that there might be some hard reasoning to support chucking the infant from the tub, at least in occasions such as this.

Ciraldo, having been there when the Panthers system was designed, knows it inside out. He can see the writing on the wall.

We’ve discussed in the past how Ciraldo is highly ideological in how he sees rugby league, which in itself is a product of having worked so closely with the uber-tactician Ivan Cleary.

If you want a concrete example of how this worked, there was a week in 2022 where Ivan had a knee operation, then Ciraldo got sick, leaving Andrew Webster to coach the team.

Someone very high up in the Panthers told me that it actually didn’t really matter, because in practice, everyone always knew what they were doing, down to the level that (barring injuries) they could tell you the exact times of the interchanges. That’s how systematic it all was.

Ciraldo also has the Dogs’ data behind him, which is one of the best in the business. Their CEO, Adam Druissi, literally owns an AI company, Quantium.

What You Get Is What You See isn’t quite at that level, but I also have a proprietary model that not only mass-analyses games but can also be used to form data-back game model analysis to strategise how teams can adapt in different circumstances.

I ran it a few weeks ago for a pitch I was working on, in a similar context to what Ciraldo faced last week - and what it suggested is almost exactly what the Doggies did.

The full release of the model is coming soon – like, subscribe, etc – but for now, what you need to know is that the raw dataset is one of the most extensive in rugby league1 and is designed to identify the key correlating factors in rugby league wins, from the intuitive ones that the average footy fan would guess, like run metres, line breaks and total sets, to others which are brand new and exclusive to me.

There’s a lot, lot more to this now, and you can expect that later, but what is interesting for this article is that it is possible to filter out every upset victory and work out which stats correlate specifically with winning as an underdog relative to regular old victories.

To win any game, you have to do the basics like make your tackles, not drop the ball that much, have some creativity - all the stuff you might expect.

But for underdogs, there are a fair few things you can do that are counterintuitive to regular game models, which would help build an optimised plan to pull off an upset.

We can filter the NRL part of the dataset to just include games where one team was more than $5 with the bookies2 – which is where the Dogs were last Thursday3.

This exercise is about discerning what statistics, beyond the obvious ones like metres and breaks, are commonalities across teams that win upsets, and analysing if there is a style of footy that would help outsiders to improve their chances of causing one.

The data is pretty clear on this – there is – and most interestingly, Canterbury appear to know it too, because they abandoned a lot of what they usually do against Penrith to secure the biggest upset of the season so far.

What stands out most is that, contrary to conventional logic, ambushes reward the brave.

Key attacking indicators, such as Evasion Runs and Metres, Line Engagements, Offloads and Metres per Set drastically increase the chances of an underdog win.

Line engagements, for example, are near meaningless in regular wins, but get more important the less favoured a team is. You’re going to need luck to win, so you have to chance your arm as often as possible.

Defensively, yardage errors are usually fatal to your chances in a regular game.

In upsets, however making mistakes in your own half is a statistically positive thing, because underdogs who win do so by playing the sort of expansive footy that involves dropping the ball occasionally. They are pushing the envelope to achieve the attacking benefits.

These stats are tested against winning in general, remember, which is to say that they are more prominent in underdog victories than in regular victories.

Moreover, the model is trained against a dataset that involves Penrith, and teams that attempt to play like Penrith, winning a lot – including Canterbury themselves, who have adopted many of their tactical hallmarks.

If you win a lot, you end up as heavy favourites a lot, so it could almost perfectly describe how to beat a team that plays like the Panthers – and, obviously, the best team at playing like the Panthers is the Panthers.

Remember our mantra here: if you play normally, you normally lose.

The most spectacular upsets in the Panthers era have been in-line with this.

Parra made an artform of it under Brad Arthur, because they were the last men standing who played the forward-heavy, second-phase, wide fours style.

It was a bit back to the future, but was so weird that worked against Penrith. Offloads, playing close to the line and spreading attack was what BA’s Eels did best.

Manly famously tried it, Reuben Garrick kicking duel and all, and though it didn’t work on that occasion, the Sea Eagles have won two of their three meetings with the Panthers since that night.

Seibold often embraced this style of footy anyway, and regardless of what you think of that, in these specific matchups it worked a treat.

The best example is Wigan, who nicked a World Club Challenge with a policy of playing fast and direct until halfway, then making every single set count thereafter.

Kick chases, long shifts, ruthlessly targeting edge defenders, the lot. It was chaosball, but Penrith couldn’t cope with it.

Notably, AI-driven analytics provider Oval Insights that lists many, many rugby union clients on their website, but just one rugby league team. Guess who?

Seibold, once of Oval client England RU, was a fan as well, and the Broncos, who nearly knocked off the Panthers playing exactly like this in the 2023 Grand Final before Nathan Cleary happened, had former Wigan assistant Lee Briers in their box.

The Bulldogs were probably unfairly priced at $5 outsiders4 but they were undoubtedly underdogs against an all-conquering, Keary-intimidating Panthers.

But, as the data suggested they should, they rolled the dice, then rolled it again.

Usually this team is rubbish in attack: zero kicking, too many settlers, too run-heavy from the halves.

For one week only, they altered their style entirely to target the seams5, bringing runners in on that line, with others floating around the back.

Lachlan Galvin, for example, had twice the Pass per Run ratio he did in the disaster against Newcastle, and across both him and Burton, there is a direct correlation between how often they run and how badly Canterbury attack.

Having a run first mentality is increasingly nonsense where these two are concerned.

Instead, they threw more out-the-back plays to Connor Tracey, and more crash balls to backrowers, constantly forcing seam defenders (notably Blaize Talagi) to make decisions.

Evasion Metres, which reward much more sideways running than up-and-down, are a key indicator of upset wins – and Canterbury also honed in on it.

Typically, 75% of Bulldogs runs are in the middle of the field – almost bang on league average - but on Thursday, it was only 66% - and they spotted up the right edge more than any other opponent so far in 2026.

The top five players for tackle breaks were both centres, both backrowers and Sitili Tupouniua, who was clearly told to play like he used to when he was an edge forward.

To reiterate: a lot of teams try to play like this, but not often the Bulldogs.

They are about camping in one end and strangling opponents, and for a long time have had the worst conversion rate in terms of good ball sets that end in tries.

But on this occasion, they threw the ball, took chances and were paid off.

We can only speculate on how much this was Ciraldo’s inside knowledge – targeting Blaize Talagi, for example, or knowing Penrith’s weakness in seam defence – and how much was the data that clearly they have access to which points out that, when you’re underdogs, this is how you should play footy to give yourself the best chance.

It could even be (and a mea culpa from me on this) that Adam O’Brien, the much-maligned attack coach, set this one up perfectly. Kudos if so.

What we can be sure of is that, if you were setting up a gameplan based on data-driven insight of how to throw the Panthers off their game, then this was that.

You still require them to be subpar. This is a team that can complete at 100% for long periods, and has some of the best players in the world. Canterbury got a bit lucky, as all underdogs have to, but also made their own luck.

Last week, Melbourne went to Sydney priced at above $3, tried to get into an arm wrestle, completed at 94% and got 50 put on them. Play normally, lose normally.

This time, the Bulldogs did the opposite. There’s a lesson in there for someone.

As mentioned above, this is the first time I’ve ever asked for chas because this model cost me cash to make. All subscribers get everything for free, but if you want to kick me a quid, then it all helps.

Subscribe now

If you’re reading my Substack for the first time - I publish long-form stuff like this every Tuesday and more team-specific tactical stuff on Thursdays. Smash that button above for all that direct to your inbox.

That was Shane Flanagan in early 2024, before he’d even taken a competitive game as coach of the St George Illawarra Dragons.

“We probably know that we’re not going to win the comp this year, but our endeavours are to win a lot of football games.”

That’s him again, only this time it was 2026. In a world of media bluster from coaches, one has to appreciate the honesty - the Dragons are crap and he knows it.

That said, as an exercise in expectation management, Flanno set the bar very low and yet still failed to meet it.

At 0-5 going into what might be the NRL’s earliest Spoonbowl with Manly this weekend, those comments aren’t so much being held against the Dragons coach as rearing up, cobra-like, and biting him on the behind.

Across all sports, coaches like to come in and talk about how bad the team was before they arrived, because that way it’s all up and up for the new guy.

Often they’re not wrong either – after all, most coaches get a job because the bloke before them got sacked, typically not something that happens to teams that can’t improve.

But when you say very publicly that the team are bad and you have to set a longer timeframe on improving them, you have set yourself a deadline on when that has to occur. 2026 was it – and the Dragons, if anything, look worse.

What are they now that they weren’t under Anthony Griffin?

They’re still crap, with Hook managing a 38% win percentage to Flanno’s 39% after almost exactly the same number of games in charge.

They’re still deathly dull, by a distance the worst team to watch in the competition with a commitment to making every game turgid and hoping that they can out-grind their opponents. I’ll refer you back to the stat above to see how well that’s going.

It was at the end of March 2023 that Griffin was told to reapply for his job, before being eventually sacked in May.

They went 2-3 to start the year, beating the brand new Dolphins and the terrible Titans losing to Brisbane, Cronulla and, because of the quirks of scheduling, the Titans again. That 2-3 start became a 2-8, and that was that for Hook.

Flanagan’s impact in early 2024 was in vastly improving the resilience of the team, though plenty of that could be put down to a new coach with a new cycle as much as anything.

Though coverage was initially positive – including from yours truly in The Roar at the time – the start was only 3-2 rather than 2-3, and ended 11-13 for the year, so actually worse than Griffin’s last completed season in 2022.

2025 was worse still as the Dragons went 8-16 across the whole year, the same as the worst Griffin season (2021).

In pure results, then, there’s really no difference. Flanno, Griffin, whatever. Both terrible.

What about the style?

Let’s take the first five games of both the 2023 and 2026 Dragons, fire in the most important stats and see where we end up.

First and most obviously, the 2026 edition are nine tries down on 2023, which never helps, and that gets even worse when you drill down to the goal line.

An early sign of improvement in Flanagan’s 2024 Dragons was an uptick in goal line D, but they’re now comfortably worse in both red zones in 2026 than they were under Griffin.

They also make fewer metres per set while conceding more, break fewer tackles and play further from the line.

In fact, despite making more passes per set, the 2026 Red V are playing no wider, despite Griffin’s aversion to ever giving the ball to a winger.

Their passes per run is basically the same, bonkers when you know that Tariq Sims managed to go almost half a season without making a single pass1 under Griffin.

Naturally, there are considerably fewer line breaks too – so somehow, the Dragons fired the most conservative coach in recent memory and became more conservative.

At least the 2023 Dragons had Ben Hunt (Griffin’s central tactic, such as it was one, was ‘Give it to Dozer’) but now without him, there’s not much by way of a plan at all.

In fact, one of the numbers that stood out the most was the kicking strategy, or lack thereof: Flanno’s halves are far more likely to bomb up in the air, far more likely to kick directly to the opposition and more likely to have that opposition catch the ball under no pressure.

What we’re seeing, then, is that the Dragons didn’t change. They just changed coaches. If anything, they actually got worse.

If you remember 2023, Griffin was getting hammered from every angle before eventually losing his job, and that’s without the litany of strange things that Shane has said.

He is, as we all know, a very protected man in media circles.

They spent most of the time he wasn’t working in the NRL touting him for jobs, and now that he has one, the attack dogs usually trained on failing coaches at big Sydney clubs are surprisingly quiet.

For what it’s worth, I always respected him as an analyst on Fox League, and the other ex-coaches they’ve brought in since have really only underlined how good at it he was2.

Flanagan is clearly well-liked by the people he used to work with, and lacking any first-hand interactions with him, I can only assume he’s a top bloke, because this being rugby league, you absolutely would have heard about it were he not.

This, to quote another famed show featuring a load of divas shouting at each other, is not RuPaul’s Best Friends Race. Being a great bloke around the studio works for NRL360, but not in the actual NRL.

Now, it does look a lot like Flanagan is learning his lip sync, ready for a final showdown.

Anthony Seibold has already sashay-ed away this year, and with a rejuvenated Manly rolling into the Gong, the message is simple: don’t fuck it up.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

Newcastle and South Sydney improve yet again, hoisting themselves up to +3 wins compared to last year, consolidating what we can all see are solid starts.

The Tigers, too, look great, and you don’t need me to tell you about the Panthers.

On the other side of the ledger, the Wahs are now officially under water, as are the Bulldogs, Raiders and Storm.

There is a danger of over-stating this, as teams who did well in 2025 can only really go one way, but it is noticeable that all of last year’s top three are well down. It shows the flux the NRL is clearly in to start the year.

Parramatta, galling as that Easter Monday defeat was, are still level and the Titans, the poor old Titans, are in the black. They face each other this weekend, too.

Denis Betts

After lamenting impulsive punting, a colleague pumped up the tyres on Manly last week and, breaking the habit of a lifetime, I actually backed my own team to win.

It’s another $3.10 win for the kitty, and despite some rough luck in between – seriously, Wigan, you chumps – we ended on a high with the Tigers doing the business to turn a profit through Round 5.

Manly winning will not budge my strategy, so I’ll renounce everything above and take the $2.46 going on Tuesday arvo on the Dragons – they’re bad, but so are the Sea Eagles, and at this time of year, it’s all a toss-up between bad teams.

The Panthers are great but they’re not 16 point head start great against a Bulldogs team that, while they don’t score well, are still very good defensively. For the record, I still think Penrith will win, but that start is way too big.

Brisbane only get a moderate push to beat the Cowboys – 2.5+ - and very, very few games in 2026 are decided by that small a margin. Take the start and you’re getting a home favourite at $2.10 against a North Queensland side with more Fools Gold than a Stone Roses tribute band.

It’s been a huge week for me, with subscriptions likely to tip over 300 by the time you read this. From the bottom of my heart, thanks to everyone who has supported this idea. If you haven’t - now’s your chance - smash the button below.

Subscribe now

If you know a Dragons fan who’d be nodding along, or someone who would appreciate more footy journalism with RuPaul references, then send this to them via the Share button.

Share

If only there were two towns, with two teams, with trackable histories. If only they had played each other before. If only…

Two rugby league towns. Similar demographics, very different economics.

When the Panthers entered the New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) in 1967, the town of Penrith contained fewer than 40,000 people.

It had only become an official city eight years earlier, having grown in the Second World War and its aftermath as a location for munitions factories, which blossomed into greater industrial prominence as first jobs, then people – spurred by slum clearances in Sydney’s inner city – moved to the Golden West.

At the same time, Wigan was about twice the size of Penrith, but was travelling in the opposite direction.

It had flourished both as a manufacturing and mining town in the 19^th century, exploiting its resource-rich ground to power the Industrial Revolution through coal and its location between the import hub of Liverpool and the world’s first industrial city, Manchester, to turn cotton into cloth, which was then trafficked through Britain’s empire to captive markets in India and beyond.

By the late Sixties, however, things had changed.

To take just one example of many, Trencherfield Mill, once a jewel in Wigan’s industrial crown, was shuttered in 1968 and the area around it was turned into a heritage site in 1986.

What had been one of the most important industrial settlements on Earth was now a museum to it.

Wigan, then as now, was a rugby league town, with support for the sport every bit as strong as Penrith or anywhere else.

What has happened in the interim, however, has been two comparable economic paths that have played out in both the real world and on the footy field.

As Peter V’Landys and the NRL plot their takeover of the Super League, it is worth factoring in these disparities and divergences.

For as much British rugby league has rarely helped itself economically – “it never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to quote historian Tony Collins – it does not exist outwith the places in which it is played and their positions in the world.

To ignore this is to ignore reality. What You Get Is What You See has delved into base and superstructure before, and in this week’s column, we are focusing firmly on the superstructure, an economic analysis of what and where the Super League is relative to the NRL, and what PVL and Andrew Abdo should expect if they decide to invest.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Karl Marx

Marx knew a bit about economics, and his partner, Friedrich Engels, knew a lot about the North of England.

He had an office on Southgate in central Manchester1 and his family owned the Ermin & Engels Mill, located on almost the exact strip of earth that would later become The Willows, the traditional home of Salford RLFC.

Suffice to say, neither were much impressed by the conditions of the working class in England, and when Engels wrote a book of the same name, it became one of the foundational texts of analysis of working class economics.

Up the road, and heavily inspired by Engels, George Orwell’s 1937 study The Road to Wigan Pier turned the area around Trencherfield Mill into a byword for industrial gloom.

Little did either know that, in terms of economic prominence, that era was about as good as it got for Wigan.

Economically speaking, it’s hard to judge how wealthy people were versus their likelihood of dying from black lung, and it’s pointless really to attempt it.

Money in your pocket isn’t worth much if your ability to spend it is limited, and a stable job for life isn’t that great if that same job kills you by the time you’re 50.

The point, as far as this article is concerned at least, is to try and extract the economic factors that impact rugby league towns like Wigan and compare them to their Australian equivalents.

Because back in Penrith, it’s been an up-and-up since they joined the comp.

The population doubled in a decade in the 1970s, surpassing Wigan in the process2, and economically, the area has become Sydney’s centre of manufacturing. When Western Sydney Airport opens in the next year or so, we can expect that to grow yet further.

In 2026, the average Panthers fan enjoys a far higher standard of living and a greater amount of disposable income than their pie-eating cousins in Wigan.

Parsing exact figures is hard, because both are part of wider wholes and judged accordingly.

Taken at a national level, the average Australian is richer than the average Brit, a gap that narrows when you take in living costs, but not by that much.

The Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) metric that tries to equate these things has Australia sitting in fourth globally, while the UK is 12^th.

Britain, however, is wildly more unequal in distribution than Australia.

The Gini Coefficient, which seeks to measure this, clearly ranks Australia as more equal than the UK in general, and that doesn’t factor in the massive, well-documented regional wealth disparities within the UK.

NSW is richer still than the North West of England, but again not markedly so, especially if housing costs are included. For the price of a Sydney semi, you’d get a Manchester mansion.

Neither Penrith nor Wigan are central settlements however, and both are defined by their distance from the metropole.

Penrith sits about average for NSW whereas Wigan is lower than the North West England average3.

When you factor in that Australia is richer than the UK, NSW is richer than the North West and Penrith is richer within that than Wigan is within their own statistical jurisdiction, the point is quite clear.

It’s a lot of economics, that, so here’s so the real world translation: the average Panthers fan earns between 20-30% more relative to the average Wigan supporter.

This should not be news to Peter V’Landys, of course.

But for all analysis of the NRL, Super League and any economic relationship between the two, it is a starting point.

As a follow on, there has to be a consideration of the competitive environment, because that is the secondary economic constraint.

There’s a great tool that can help us with this4, Tom Forth’s population around a point metric.

It will allow you to pin a location and judge how many people live in the area at a radius of your choosing.

Pick 20km from Wigan’s Brick Community Stadium and there are just over 1.5 million people. Expand that to 50km and you’re all the way up to 6.76m, a huge number.

In that 50km radius of Wigan, you get four professional rugby league clubs, whereas in Penrith’s, you get all the Sydney ones except for the Roosters, Sharks and Sea Eagles.

But in terms of major sporting clubs, you can add (at most) two to the Panthers’ circle, the Sydney Swans and Greater Western Sydney Giants of the AFL5, whereas in Wigan’s you’re including some of the biggest sports organisations on the planet – Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool and Everton – plus a raft of other soccer clubs.

There’s an argument that the North West of England is the world’s most crowded sporting market.

Throw in the secondary structural issue – excessive competition – and Wigan’s attendances of 17,000 on average suddenly look great.

In fact, if you’re taking Wigan town, about one in six of the population regularly attend games and in Leigh, a separate town within Wigan borough, it’s actually one in five.

Castleford manage one in five as well, St Helens are one in eight, both Hull clubs combined are one in ten of residents in the stadium on average.

Warrington, Wakefield and Catalans reach about one in 20 of their respective populations, very high by global sporting standards.

For comparison, Scotland has the most attended per capita soccer league in the world at 5% of population – rising to around 10% in Glasgow – and even massively over-represented cities like Dortmund in Germany (or, whisper it quietly, AFL in Melbourne) struggle to hit these levels.

In that context, a better question might be why these places are still so into rugby league, rather than why they’re dying on their arse.

V’Landys probably looks at this part rather than the economic challenges.

His question will be whether that can be extended to other areas than where it is already popular.

Knowing what we do of the structure – and we haven’t even touched on the pathways issues that come with soccer’s economic pull – then the potential to add a TV-first audience to rugby league along with the matchday attendance is there.

Sky, who currently own the broadcast rights and have done since the 1990s, are suffering the same decline that all mainstream broadcasters are.

Once locally-owned, they now defer to Comcast for business decisions, which dilutes any influence Super League might have had in the process. It’s numbers on a balance sheet, not long-standing relationships.

This is the opposite problem to what PVL et al have in Australia, where the appointment viewing aspect of the NRL is about the only thing, bar the news and Married at First Sight, keeping advertisers sticking around.

In the UK, this is not a rugby league problem – ask TNT Sports what they got out of the UEFA Champions League rights – rather a structural media issue.

It’s why a combined force of rugby league makes sense, both for the NRL and Super League. Together they are stronger, especially with a united sense of purpose and dual marketing strategy.

The problems that the rugby league heartlands of England suffer from are much deeper than anything to do with the sport, and likely aren’t going anywhere, unless soccer collapses or the economic revival that has been promised for the last half century kicks in.

As much as you’ll hear that the sport is terribly run – and I make no judgements on that in this piece – the administrators do not make their circumstances. V’Landys is making a conscious decision to enter those circumstances as well.

What they can control is their ability to deal with them. The NRL would not be buying in if they didn’t think there was potential there.

The supporter data suggests a strong base, not a weak one, and from that, the potential for growth.

The historical context shows the operating conditions. The hope has to be that Wigan can become Penrith again – at least on the footy field, if not the factory.

I write pieces like this because I love rugby league - in both Wigan and Penrith. For the record, Wigan’s pies are a lot better but you can get a malatang in Penrith shopping centre now, so that’s quite good as well.

If you like this and think the world needs more of it - share it widely and, please, comment. I read and answer them all.

Share

If you haven’t already, smash the subscribe button now to get the best whole-of-game writing, plus my usual stats and tactics nonsense, delivered straight to your inbox twice a week.

Subscribe now

The two coaches represent young v old, the system v the stars, the tactician v the man manager. It’s a proper clash of what coaching rugby league is about.

Before we get started, a reminder that, if you like what you see and want to support this kind of footy writing, then the subscribe button is right here.

Subscribe now

Wayne Bennett does not care much for tactical philosophy.

In fact, you can separate those two things and he’s not really a big guy for either of them: his teams have tactics, but they’re often done by someone else, and there’s not really been any philosophical underpinning of any of his teams beyond proximity to Uncle Wayne.

At the risk of comparing Bennett to Vladimir Putin1, the man is the ideology and there’s not much more to it than that.

As you may or may not know, I was tasked by the Tom Brock Bequest Committee with writing the first tactical history of rugby league, and thus spent a lot of time discussing Bennettology with people who have worked with the great man.

One former colleague told me that his philosophy, such as it was, was to let every person beneath him in the hierarchy coach in their own way.

By the time they reached him in first grade, the theory went, they would have experienced multiple ways of playing and thus would be good at solving tactical problems themselves, and Wayne could then add the secret sauce of motivation, man-management and general woo-woo that made all the difference.

At Brisbane in the 1990s, when the coaching string included the likes of Craig Bellamy and Ivan Henjak, that was a brilliant plan and the record stands for itself.

If you don’t like that theory, another example might be found in Andrew Webster’s biography of Bennett, The Wolf You Feed, which manages to be 450 pages long and barely mention tactics at all.

He likes to pretend these things don’t matter, but has consistently accompanied himself with assistants who love tactics.

Bellamy is an obvious genius in this regard, as no coach has so completely solved rugby league as a weak link sport.

Jason Demetriou, though it ended in tears at Souths, was hugely effective in designing an attack that it took everyone else years to figure out, and indeed, went a long way to sending Alex Johnston right to the top of the NRL’s try scoring list (with Cody Walker’s assist tally not far behind) while Wayne, basically, got out of the way.

In fact, the best example of what Bennett is so exceptional at is that a Souths with Demetriou’s philosophy and the supercoach secret sauce made a Grand Final, but sans Bennett, got progressively further away from one despite having the same personnel and, largely, tactics, before JD got the chop.

Bennett has a reputation for being a difficult act to follow, and a lot of that is him being the master at making everyone get 10% better through man-management, something that doesn’t seem obvious until it’s not there anymore.

This ideological difference makes the Good Friday meeting with the Bulldogs very interesting, because while Bennett coaches his players, Cameron Ciraldo coaches the system.

The Doggies’ boss is basically an ur-tactician, like anyone in the Ivan Cleary lineage, a coach minded to solve rugby league’s complexities in the aggregate.

He’s less interested in getting the players to be better, rather trusting the system to produce something that is better than the sum of its parts and then finding individuals willing to submit themselves to it.

Ciraldo will obsess over statistical indicators, rapidly evaluating players based on their commitment to the cause as displayed through numbers like pre-contact metres and push supports, the sort of thing that any idiot can do with sufficient effort.

Cleary’s ability to devise a structure that nobody can beat is self-evident – count the Premierships – and his principal disciples, Ciraldo and Andrew Webster (the other one), are true believers too.

As much as there has been a furore about the Panthers’ commitment to deliberately giving away set restarts, it was actually Webster’s Wahs who topped that metric in 2025, while Ciraldo’s Doggies were second top for Inside 10m offsides, almost like they were trying to steal an edge in linespeed.

Ivan’s ability to keep winning while shedding players is testament to anyone’s replaceability within the system.

Nathan Cleary and Isaah Yeo might sit apart from that, but they are arguably the two best players in the world – they’re certainly the smartest pair – and everyone else is dispensable.

Both Webster and Ciraldo are recreating the Panthers blueprint, but with lesser components.

Dylan Edwards is elevated massively by the system2, which both the disciples have tried to imitate in Connor Tracey and Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad: high effort, low error, repeatable contribution guys.

As a result, the Dogs and Wahs have created very high floor teams, but – perhaps due to lack of a Nathan or Isaah – are as yet unable to raise the ceiling too.

We leave the Warriors for another day, but as far as Canterbury are concerned, the system works in delivering the conditions for success, even if it is not yet manifesting at the back end of the year.

Are systems more important than individuals?

This all brings us to Good Friday and the clash between the Dogs and Bunnies at Accor Stadium.

The Bunnies and Bulldogs, as we have discussed, have ended up at diametrically opposed ends of the tactical spectrum.

On a roster construction level, however, they are actually quite similar, in that they have all their cap in the wrong places.

The Dogs’ best players are Stephen Crichton, a centre who should probably be playing fullback; Viliame Kikau, a backrower; Matt Burton, centre stuck at five-eighth; and Lachlan Galvin, a five eighth shoehorned into halfback.

Souths’ best are Latrell Mitchell, a centre who should probably be playing fullback; Cameron Murray, a backrower; Jack Wighton, a centre; and Cody Walker, a five eighth.

You’ll note that neither of these teams has a proper halfback, neither has a proper front rower and neither has a proper fullback, and if you were applying Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to a rugby league team, those three are the positions you’d pick first.

I’ve often repeated the joke3 that rugby league really only has three positions: halfback, prop and everyone else. These are two teams with a lot of everyone else.

Bennett’s gambit that if you get enough good players they will solve these problems themselves is supercharged this year, as he’s throwing Latrell, Cody, Wighton, Murray and now David Fifita at the issue.

All five, with the possible exception of Murray, are big dogs who do big dog things, albeit not regularly in concert with each other.

In my tactical preview of Souths, I described their roster as “a Ferrari with a turbocharger, a roofrack, a caravan and a 15 year old driver”, but that was with the baby-faced Ashton Ward at the wheel. Now, I suppose, it’s the P-plater Jamie Humphreys.

Ciraldo’s counter that the system will sort it all out is also in overdrive, banishing Bronson Xerri for lack of sublimation and replacing him with the average4 Enari Tuala while still keeping the likes of Jaeman Salmon and Bailey Hayward not only in the squad but in the spine.

In the Dogs’ tactical preview, I offered the thought experiment of where their four spine members would rank relative to other finals contenders, with the implication that it would not be very highly.

In 2025, they scored the fewest number of tries from kicks and had the worst conversion rate of field position into points.

In 2026, they’re even worse, as teams have worked out to just stand outside Galvin and watch him hog the ball - in last week’s defeat to Newcastle, he had more runs in a single game than any half in the last year.

All this makes the Good Friday clash something of a clash of ideologies.

Will the Dogs’ system beat the Bunnies’ individuals? Does having a lot of firepower in attack overcome the ability to shut games down collectively through defence? Will it matter, as in 2026, all we care about is set restarts anyway?

It’s all a lot to look out for, and if the ref can get out of the way, there’s danger of a game of footy breaking out.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

A clear pack is emerging now, with the Knights and Tigers joining the Bunnies on two wins better through four rounds of footy – and, notably, both Wests and Souths have also had a bye, so are doing about as well as they could have expected to be by this point.

The Panthers’ hot start continues in the real ladder, but they are just about meeting Jeff expectations with only one plus win from their four real ones, and that’s based off the lower end of the scale given that 2025 was, by their lofty standards, not that great.

Remember, this is a team who always beat the Roosters and Sharks – a combined 13-1 in the Six Again era in the same venue circumstances – and who, despite a patchier record against Parra in general, have now won five straight in the Western Sydney derby.

The Broncos game counts as an improvement, though Penrith also have a 10-2 record against them more generally and only got a point in the Jeff Table by having lost there in the Finals – their win at Suncorp in 2025 was technically their home game, at Magic Round.

Obviously, in a metric like this, the Panthers have little scope to grow given they already win a lot, but it’s worth checking expectations somewhat as well.

That same alarm also works the other way for the Cowboys, who have now won twice but are -1 down based on previous opponents. They are a long way from the woods yet.

Denis Betts

Last week saw a total heads gone from my good self – thankfully not shared with you lot, but we own our mistakes here at WYSIWYG – in that I was sat at home, minding a child, punting while bored.

Readers, do not punt while bored, on whims and, in particularly, do not punt against Nathan Cleary.

My feeling was that there would be an upset in either the Panthers or Cowboys games – I missed kick off in the Bulldogs’ defeat to Newcastle – so went the wrong way and lost myself some cash.

The Gold Coast Titans rescued the weekend, capitalising on the Roosters’ expected defeat of Manly. Thoughts and prayers for everyone who took the Points Unders line before the storm, as Sam Walker’s late field goal caused an all-timer of a bad beat.

Onto this week and, given the treatise above, it would be remiss not to pick a side in the Good Friday game, and my general theory of rugby league relativity is that systems beat players most of the time, and thus I’ll be taking the Doggies.

They were slight favourites when I last looked, but with tight finishes in short supply, I’ll take them at the line to boost the odds.

The other showpiece is the Easter Monday match - I have close to zero faith in Parra and don’t really understand why the Wests Tigers are over $2 in what is essentially a coin toss, so I’m all over them.

With a festival of footy beginning in the evening on Friday and running all night for the true delinquents, I’ll have a shy at all four winners – multis are rubbish, but this one is more fun than analysis – with the Panthers, Rovers, Wigan and Leeds together making $3.39.

If we throw a tenner at that, it leaves just $2.28 to break even for the season and take us back to zero – so let’s have a shy at the stumps with a full slate all eight acca – Phins, Dogs, Panthers, Dragons, Bronx, Sharks, Raiders, Eels – just to be different. By Monday, we could be quids in either way.

Thanks for making it to the end of this week’s preview column - if you know someone who complains that there’s not enough analysis in footy (and appreciates dubious tipping), then this is the point where you can share it with them.

Share

Don’t forget that you can subscribe by clicking here - if you like these columns, they drop every Thursday morning in footy season, with a more analytical article on Tuesdays.

Subscribe now

Who should they target? What philosophy should they adopt? And could a 19^th century Russian novel provide guidance?

In Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 picaresque Dead Souls, the enigmatic Chichikov travels around the Russian countryside, trying to convince eccentric local bigwigs to sell him dead people.

His gambit is that he is doing these country bumpkins a good deed, in that he takes over the property rights of their deceased serf slaves - on which they are still paying tax - and pays them for the privilege.

Surely, he repeatedly thinks, this is a win-win - and who are they to ask why he is rounding up the ownership of long-gone serfs?

Each slaveholder in turn questions his motives, unable to understand why someone would want to buy a taxable but non-productive asset. Some take him up anyway, others, with their own foibles, don’t.

One, the animalistic Sobakevich, gets into a protracted negotiation, extolling the virtues of each serf in turn – “And what about this bloke, he was a master bootmaker!” - before Chichikov points out that, great at that all is, they’re all dead now.

Miles apart on price, the purchaser questions why the seller is bargaining so hard to keep these serfs, who are actually costing him money in tax when there is someone offering to pay good rubles for them right now.

“There, now,” he says.

“You’re buying it, therefore there must be a need of it. You had need of souls, and so I am selling them to you, and you will regret not having bought them.”

Ironically, as Sobakevich is referred to in ursine terms repeatedly by Gogol, Mal Meninga and the Perth Bears are Chichikov in this analogy.

He is there, travelling through the property holders of the NRL, forced to bargain knowing that everyone is in a position of strength and he has little option but to fight tooth and nail in every negotiation.

Perth have to put a team on the field in 12 months’ time.

They must make 30 signings to do that. Nobody, really, wants to move to Western Australia unless they are paying overs or they can’t get a gig elsewhere1.

Mal will be hearing a lot of talk about master bootmakers, and would do well to remember the Russian’s message: “If he was so good, you wouldn’t be selling him to me.”

It’s at this point that more contemporary metaphor might come in.

There’s an anecdote in hockey analytics2 that if a recruitment analyst can tell their coach when to say no twice a year, they’ve done their job.

The NHL, like the NRL, is largely a closed shop market, in that the bulk of its talent comes from within: as much as they love a Russian, around 70% of talent is produced through North American farm teams and college hockey.

Moreover, it operates a hard salary cap and an internal trading model, with no transfer fees. It, too, is a zero-sum game.

With that in mind, Mal should be questioning every player offered to him through the lens of ‘why shouldn’t I sign this bloke?’

Matt Burton is a great example.

He was a marquee when Canterbury were rubbish but has never been as good in their colours as he was at Penrith, and is now available. There’s a superboot/bootmaker joke available here, but you might have to write it yourself.

Hockey, like rugby league, is a weak-link sport, where your worst player is of far more importance than your best.

The NHL season is long, injuries are common, and just like in rugby league, it is the guy who can come in when others are out who is of paramount value.

Again, Mal should take heed. Sign the bottom end before the top, because come July 2027, they’ll be the ones you’re relying on.

He needn’t go to Canada for advice, too. He can also look to Redcliffe.

Wayne Bennett and the Dolphins signed an awful lot of brickies in making success of their first dig at the NRL.

Their recruitment policy was two-fold: there was scope for some guys who were undervalued to express themselves more fully, and for others who weren’t getting a game at all to play more first grade.

Exhibit A is Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow, who was coming off the bench at the Cowboys and was allowed to leave, but flourished when given space.

Exhibit B would be Ray Stone, a lower half replacement level player prior to 2023 who is now sixth on Redcliffe’s most capped-list.

Had they been successful in signing Kalyn Ponga or Brandon Smith, both of whom were targets, they might have gained prestige but also added blokes who have spent bulk time off the field.

Had they signed Cameron Munster, they would have had a marquee but less value down the list, likely meaning worse players down the list, whom they ultimately relied upon.

The Bears appear to be leaning into functional over fantasy, but whether that is luck or judgement is largely unknown.

With a new club in a major market, drawing players that casual fans have heard of is a strong marketing tactic, and one that the Dolphins didn’t have to deal with.

Their fans were largely already rugby league fans who knew who Felise Kaufusi and the Bromwich brothers were.

A smart recruitment department for the Bears would do well to ensure that the outside noise is kept exactly there, and instead focus on what will make the team win.

And let’s be clear - this is eminently achievable.

One of the least palatable facts about the NRL, to headquarters at least, is that it really isn’t that good.

It might be the best rugby league competition in the world, but that’s only by dint of the Super League acting against its own self-interest for decades and having the world’s premier sporting competition in, around and above it.

It’s hard to work in comparatives, and Australians often like to tell themselves that their version of things is best, but the legion of players who come into the NRL from lower levels and perform well proves repeatedly that the gap isn’t as large as people think, and will in all likelihood shrink further as the competition expands.

Trai Fuller played almost a hundred games of QLD Cup before he got a chance at age 27, and looked to the manor born.

Gehamat Shibasaki has done something similar more recently, as did Billy Walters before that.

Obviously, playing in the NRL at a high level is very hard, but there are a lot of very good players out there, and the evidence would suggest that, currently, there’s plenty of blokes champing at the proverbial bit for an opportunity.

In a sport where your worst player is of much greater importance than your best, it makes all the sense in the world to go out and sign a roster of 30 competent players, to a decent level of depth, than to bet the farm on superstars that Western Australians might have heard of.

A smart marketing department would, of course, say the opposite.

We love a comparison from another sport on this channel, and there’s a clear one here: cricket, and in Perth too.

T20 franchises rarely have an embedded fanbase and are asked to both get bums on seats and to win. Invariably, both are not possible.

In the Big Bash League draft, Perth ignored some of the world’s most prominent players – surefire drawcards like Jofra Archer, Kane Williamson and Shamar Joseph – in favour of David Payne, a solid operator but hardly known outside of T20 purists.

It’s unlikely that anyone turned up specifically to see Payne, but if you’re running the Perth Scorchers, your job is to win the BBL - and he won Player of the Match in the final.

The problem for Perth in the NRL might be that they’ve already gone all in on the marketing angle by picking a guy as coach that even the most casual Western Australian sports fan will know, but who has little club-level coaching record to fall back on.

Meninga is great PR, but he’s as-yet unproven as a value-add to a team on the field – as Bennett was to Redcliffe, for example – or sufficiently marketable to overcome the myriad other reasons why players who exclusively grew up 5,000 kilometres away might want to relocate to the other side of the Nullabor.

If the Bears were to populate a team with similar blokes to the Dolphins, budget battlers with a point to prove, then they can make it work.

At the very least, they can fail sustainably and, as everyone who has read the documents knows, that is something the NRL will put up with.

Perth’s cricket team thrive because they are a) local and b) successful.

Given that a) isn’t possible in the NRL (at least not in the near-term), they should target b), which is all relative anyway.

The Phins have finished 13^th, tenth and ninth, which most people think is quite good, with far fewer obstacles in front of them and expectations set accordingly.

Perth have to be better than last place, before PNG arrive to take all the strain in year two - not to mention the perennially rubbish NRL clubs like the Titans.

The local bar isn’t even that high, with the West Coast Eagles in a major slump and the Fremantle Dockers not much better. Perth Glory are the A-League’s whipping boys, so it’s really just in cricket that Western Australia does well.

The end of Sobakevich and Chichikov’s negotiation sees the seller, unable to meet on a price, give his dead serfs away for free anyway. After all, they’re costing him money, and here’s a man who wants them.

Mal, by hook or by crook, will assemble a team. If he applies Chichikov’s principles, by playing the long game and being judicious, he might get a good one. If he lets the marketing department have their way, he probably won’t.

If you enjoy long-form articles like this, then you can encourage me to write more of them by subscribing to this Substack.

Subscribe now

If you really like it, drop me a few bucks - this Tuesday column will always be free whatever you do, but I do appreciate it and schooners are getting increasingly expensive these days.

Even better is a share, as it introduces new people to my channel.

Share

“Where are you from?” I asked a woman I’d just met.

“Australia,” she answered.

“Whereabouts?”

“Sydney”

“Whereabouts?”

“Manly”

“Oh, like the Sea Eagles!”

It was at this point that my partner should probably have cut her losses, but ten years, three countries, one dog and one baby later, she is still stuck with me, and the Manly bloody Warringah bloody Sea Eagles.

She is the rarest of beasts, a person who lives in Manly who is actually from there. She has a relative on the Corso War Memorial. Family on the flat. Our son will be the fifth generation of his family to go to the school on Darley Road.

I mention all of this because I, if you haven’t guessed from years of content, am also a Sea Eagles fan – in fact I adopted them before we were even officially going out – and entered my tenth year in the maroon and white at the start of 2026.

That coincides with probably the worst decade in the history of the club: four finals appearances total, with just one Preliminary final and one top four ladder finish.

Nevertheless, the club chose me (or at least, its least-interested semi-supporter did) so they are mine, whether I like it or not.

One tries to be impartial when judging footy teams, and if anything, my knack of falling out with Des Hasler (as happened several times, on and off camera) was largely to do with wanting Manly to win too much.

After all, I couldn’t care less if the Dolphins or Dragons were any good, whereas I was emotionally invested in the Sea Eagles.

That slight detachment made me, initially at least, quite a fan of Anthony Seibold.

I always found the ‘Manly needs a Manly man’ bit quite cringe1 and his footy was very, very interesting. This was a guy I could get behind.

Long-time readers of my work will know the maxim I use about coaching: you either have to win, or at least give the impression that what you are doing will lead to wins in the future.

For Seibs, the first two years offered a fair bit of that.

In 2023, it was quite a bad roster that suffered injuries, but the style of play grew week-on-week and, by the end, was quite distinctive.

In 2024, it got even better – a few statement wins, some really good footy to watch and younger blokes appearing. We were on the up and up.

In 2025? Less so.

Now, in 2026, the club is in crisis after just two games.

That, as all things on the Beaches, is half politics.

Seibold has a contract until the end of 2027, but nobody believes he’ll get anywhere near that and, at this stage, it looks like he’ll be lucky to see Magic Round, let alone the end of his contract.

That stuff is widely litigated elsewhere, so instead, I’ll focus on the stats that can tell where Manly went right, and where they are now going wrong.

As much as lots of people didn’t like Seibold from day dot, the data doesn’t care about that and could clearly demonstrate that something was happening that was massively unlike everyone else.

Across the Seibold era, Manly are always among the highest, if not the outright highest, for Early Shifts2, Passes per Run and Combined Supports per PTB.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has watched them play. It’s a side throwing all the attack, all the time, from everywhere.

But in recent years, we’ve seen that morph from successful to unsuccessful.

When they were good, the early shifts became breaks, with Manly ranking very well for both line breaks per set and Deep Breaks3. That pushed them into the upper echelons of Metres per Set, too.

But (and it’s a Sir Mixalot-sized one) that was based on one key factor, which has fallen away big time.

Back in 2023, they were winning 75% of their play the balls, which in turn enabled the shift plays, ball movement and off-ball action that made them such a good team to watch.

That dropped to 63% in 2024 – still better than two-thirds of the league – before dropping again to 21% in 2025 and, in the two matches of 2026, just 7%.

On top of that, the possession itself has plummeted. They were upper third for Total Sets in 2023 and 2025 and upper quarter in 2024, when the Sea Eagles were properly good. Give this team ball and a quick ruck and they will kill you on the edges with that speed.

You could chart the moment that fell away to Taniela Paseka’s injury, which removed the go-forward, leaving Manly to play sideways instead.

Now, and with Jake Trbojevic fading in effectiveness and the rest of the pack not up to Paseka’s level, the first bit of the process that made Manly weird has gone.

This team, as mentioned in our previews, gets worse the closer they get to the line4, so the opponents could largely let Manly play in front of them before they inevitably dropped the ball.

Have Manly changed, or has the league?

In the possession-dominant NRL of 2026, this type of football is not rewarded at all.

It’s not Manly’s fault that the rules now benefit the boring above the brave, but it is terminal for Seibold’s playstyle.

The Sea Eagles are one of the worst teams so far at Errors per Play the Ball, meaning they often give the footy away under little pressure.

As a result, they’re last in Total Sets after two games, which is a small sample size, but also somewhat telling.

Reading this whole dataset, it does suggest that the Sea Eagles are stuck in the death spiral, wanting to play Seibold’s way but unable to do so, based on losing the ruck and then, as a consequence, dropping the ball.

It’s grim reading for the coach, because if the style is failing then the guy who implemented it will be the one to blame.

That’s the lot of the philosopher, because once you start to deviate you lose all respect that you might have once gained.

It doesn’t help that Seibs’ association with the previous CEO means he’ll likely depart anyway, so senior players can simply punch their tickets and wait until the new guy comes in.

Discretionary effort, buy-in, belief – whatever you call it, it is now in short supply on the Beaches.

One does not need to watch much Tom Trbojevic this year to see that he is still trying his heart out, but he is looking around and wondering if anyone is going to come with him.

The upside, such as it is for Sea Eagles supporters, is that there is a lot of scope for a swift turnaround.

A new coach would likely get an instant improvement just by not being Seibold and thus an enticement for everyone else to be a bit more discretionary with that effort.

On a roster level, the big ticket players – Tolu Koula, Haumole Olakau’atu, Taniela Paseka – are all locked in long term, and when the coach departs, Tommy Turbo will join them, because Seibold is the major stumbling block on him currently extending.

A new guy will have 19 players off contract this year or next, including Jurbo, who will surely retire and free up a lot of salary cap, and Rueben Garrick, who is already going to Easts.

Well-paid disappointment Luke Brooks has a move to the Super League written all over him, and my hottest not-that-hot take is that the last dying light of the Seibold regime will see him dropped for Joey Walsh.

Manly face the Roosters on Thursday and will lose, then the Dolphins in Redcliffe, the Dragons in Wollongong and the Cowboys in Townsville.

By the time of their next home game – Parra on a Sunday in Anzac Round – you can expect them to be 0-6, with Matt Ballin in charge, Walsh in the 6 jumper and Brooks in reggies.

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but the earlier they move on the coach, the quicker the next phase can start.

I was Seibold’s greatest defender, and I loved his style of play - but it’s done now.

My Mate Jeff

Our weekly tracker of who is improving and declining is fully explained here, but in short, we compare direct results year-on-year to follow progress independent of the draw – i.e Canberra beat Manly at Brookvale in 2026, a game they lost in 2025, so the Raiders gain a point and the Sea Eagles lose one.

Jeff is very keen on the South Sydney Rabbitohs this year, who added to their point gained in Round 1 against the Dolphins by defeating the Tigers – who they didn’t play at home last year, meaning their stand-in was the most adjacent team (the Cowboys), a match they lost in Round 6 2025.

Those self-same Cowboys remain last by dint of their previous defeats, as a victory over the Titans does nothing for their score, as they also beat them last year.

In fact, the Gold Coast remain neutral so far, losing all their games equivalent to 2025, but could put themselves in the red (and consign the Dragons yet deeper) by downing St George Illawarra this coming weekend.

In between, we have a lot of zeros, as befitting the limited opportunities so far, but perhaps most interesting is the Warriors and Panthers, who are only one win better off given who and where they have played.

That’s the value here – 3-0 is great, but also misleading. My Mate Jeff can counteract that.

Denis Betts

Last weekend was a washout as the cold winds of regression ran through the betting accounts of Australia, even if two of those beats were very, very bad.

The Raiders deserved to win, at least in my opinion, but were slammed by the refereeing in the first half – this being Canberra, some of that is entirely their plan working as it might, but a 9-4 infringement split in the first half gave them ultimately too much to do.

The Dragons, on the other hand, did it all by themselves. They managed more metres, more linebreaks and more sets – aka all the things that correlate with victory – but have such a moronic attack that it didn’t matter anyway.

Partly as vengeance, I shall be tipping the Titans to get off the mark against them this weekend – and at a Choose Your Own Line of -5.5, because this is more likely than not going to be a comfortable win, if it is any win at all. The Gold Coast are bad, but St George Illawarra are worse.

Last year I never believed in the Broncos – mea culpa – and at the risk of looking like an idiot again, I very much like the $2.35 price that was available on Redcliffe. This is probably a toss-up game, especially in the 2026 toss-up NRL, so I’ll take those odds.

Finally, my Sea Eagles are back and are still rubbish, so the Roosters at the initially offered +6.5 line is one I shan’t be passing up. If you want to know why, you’ve just read it above.

As ever with my boys, I live in the hope that I am wrong, and will happily lose my cash, but I heavily suspect I shall be correct.

Thanks for making it to the end of this week’s Thursday preview column - if you like it, share it with someone who loves the Sea Eagles and wants to see them get better, or (more likely) enjoys laughing at their demis.

Share

For more, subscribe. I love a comment and always respond to them, so let me know what you think below.

Subscribe now

A polemic on the crap start to the NRL in 2026, with all the caveats in the world that it will, hopefully, eventually, change.

It was during the early second half of the North Queensland Cowboys’ nondescript victory over the Gold Coast Titans at the end of Round 3 that it struck me.

This is rubbish.

Maybe it was the Cowboys, who are rubbish, or the Titans, who are worse. Maybe it was Blocker Roach on the commentary. Maybe it was following this on from the Eels v Dragons, which was just as bad.

Most of all, though, one word came to mind: enshittification.

Enshittification is a neologism coined by science fiction author Cory Doctorow to describe how the internet used to be good but isn’t anymore.

It’s the deliberate, slow decline in quality, starting with attempts to extract more value and ending with a product that nobody likes, but can’t leave.

Think of it this way.

Social media went from connecting people to a shitfight of AI slop and fake argument. Services that were once cheap or free now cost money while offering worse experiences.

You don’t have to watch much footy in 2026 to see the parallels here.

It’s like it used to be, but gradually degraded, ostensibly the same but also worse for a lot of very small, compounding reasons.

The process by which that word popped into my mind was as follows.

Tom Dearden was penalised for a high tackle in which his opponent fell into him, wasn’t actually hit in the head but rather on the shoulder, which then rode up into the illegal contact.

Then, the Titans forced a dropout which Scott Drinkwater attempted to play short, but missed by miles and gave the ball away on the ten.

Then, the Cowboys gave away a deliberate set restart on their own line, and were rewarded for doing so by Tukimihia Simpkins dropping the ball.

The point of this granular detail is not that footy is messy and sometimes crime pays, but that all three of these rules were created, in the last five years, without anyone asking for them.

The high tackle rule is most understandable, as concussion was and remains a scourge, but the application of it made both no sense and zero impact on player safety.

Dearden had been making a perfectly normal tackle - and even despite his opponent tripping, continued to do so – only to be pinged, almost apologetically, even though nobody in their right mind thought it deliberate, dangerous or really anything at all.

Taken in the context of a game that later included a clear send off that wasn’t enacted (the ref even asked the Bunker why he wasn’t being told to punt the player), it made even less sense from a player safety standpoint.

The dropout was senseless, a rule confected without reasoning. Creating pressure through control of territory is a key part of the game, a legitimate tactic that should be rewarded.

Now that is undervalued because someone, somewhere liked to see wingers jump for the ball – except they don’t, as mostly it’s just crap kicks that waste everyone’s time before we start with a play the ball on the ten anyway.

For what it’s worth, about 30% of shot dropouts are retained, so the incentive is certainly there to do them (especially as there’s essentially no punishment now for getting one wrong), but 2026 is tracking as the worst year for the dropout since 2022, with only 12% of all dropouts retained.

The set restarts have been litigated to death both on this channel and others, so you can read that elsewhere.

I’ll only add that the current rate of infringements is one every 14.45 tackles or one every four minutes, and that there have been 78 more infringements (three per game) more than this time last year, which itself was 33 more than the year before that.

Another thought that went through the mind, as I contemplated the gap in discourse between people I interact with and the narrative that is perpetuated in the mainstream media was a quote from Joan Didion, reflecting on the day after the Manson murders in 1969.

This was probably fresh in my mind after the exceptional piece of trivia1 that Ken Irvine broke the previous Australian first grade try-scoring record the day of the Tate-LaBianca murders, but it seemed appropriate.

There is a much, much lower standard set for public information in 2026 than in 1969, but the lack of discussion in legacy channels surrounding the single most defining factor in the NRL in 2026 is baffling.

They must be watching the constant shots of the referee and noticing that something that previously didn’t happen all that often is suddenly ubiquitous, and with great effect on the game in front of them.

It does spark thoughts that they are being told not to write about it, because these are not stupid or unobservant people – indeed, mostly the opposite, given my experiences as a member of the press pack and the basic skills required to make it as a journalist.

Like many people, I tuned into Round 3 with a clear idea of what the games would look like, and yet was somehow still underwhelmed. I certainly was not surprised.

There’s been 24 games now and, if we’re being generous, maybe one has been properly good – that Roosters v Souths game with the Alex Johnston try. At a push, the second half in Melbourne was decent, but beyond that, it’s slim pickings.

There’s been a few that have been close, but only through mutual incompetence or momentum-swinging refereeing than genuine quality.

Closeness and goodness are not the same thing, and if they were, soccer fans would lament the paucity of 0-0 draws.

Nobody is expecting the best footy of the year at the start, but what we do expect is the general flow of the game to be of a standard, and the best players to come to the fore.

One only needs to watch the Super League to see that this is possible: under the same ruleset, with worse teams, in a more equal competition, there has been far better footy.

At the moment, the best rugby league you can watch is being played at 7am Australian time, which is anathema to the average NRL fan.

A positive is that this is not a structural problem per se, but an interpretation problem, as the Super League seems to bumble along fine without any of the interventionism that we are currently seeing.

If Peter V’Landys’ usual conduct is observed, he’ll back down in a few weeks, the set restarts will go back to normal and then claim victory.

Causing a big problem and then taking credit for solving it is one of his MOs – just ask the RLPA, who had to sit through a prolonged industrial dispute to get the same deal they proposed and would have agreed to a year before, or the broadcaster, who got the women’s and international footy broadcast rights for a song.

Look, you’d have to be a sicko to watch all eight NRL matches and the Super League too2, and most people really won’t care if they’re not as good as they used to be.

But it’s clear from the public commentary that a significant subset of punters will be reading this and nodding their heads, while the reams of media output on the game will barely mention it.

That’s an unsustainable situation, because hardcore fans are the ones that set agendas, not newcomers. You need to play to your base before you can play elsewhere.

Remember, the coaches and players are hardcore fans too, and they’re obviously pissed off about this as well. The press conferences are getting increasingly testy.

When the injuries start to pile up, watch the mood music change.

Newcastle have lost both of their halves, and so have the Wests Tigers, depriving (with apologies to Adam Doueihi) the marketing departments at Channel Nine and Fox League three of their most recognisable names.

If a few more drop - and they will, as Super League are a few weeks ahead and have already topped 100 players out – then this will become a big issue for anyone with an interest in advertising on those same channels to a falling viewership.

Doctorow’s definition of enshittification went further, describing how platforms perish first by prioritising business consumers over regular punters, then by trying to take that value back for themselves, leaving a product that nobody likes.

When the broadcasters, advertisers or gambling companies cop on, you will see this in real time.

Joan Didion wasn’t surprised when it all came crashing down because she’d seen the gradual decline.

If it happens in the NRL, nobody who has been paying attention will be surprised either.

Obviously, the NRL is not going to die, and the point of polemics is to go in hard to make the point. Us diehards will continue to watch the game and love it, and likely be ignored because the powers-that-be know that.

That said, if you agree, share widely using the button below. Who knows who might read it?

Share

Of course, if you like things like this, written from the heart and with an analytical eye on the game, then click the subscribe button for more. Over 200 people have so far, and I appreciate every one of you.

Subscribe now

Canterbury travel to Canberra and, if last season is anything to go by, we’re in for more overhead hand-waving than one of those inflatable things you get outside of car dealerships.

The Raiders and Dogs dominated this metric last year, with Canberra one of the worst1 offenders and Canterbury one of the most offended against, showing just how vital the refereeing could be as these two clash at the artist formerly known as Bruce Stadium.

Canberra’s willingness to push this particular envelope is both completely obvious and completely genius. Nobody understands how dumb this rule is more than them, and fair play for making it look absolutely stupid.

The Raiders conceded 90 total set restarts in 2025, the third most in the comp, behind the Broncos and Warriors. Since we’re here, the Storm were also in the top five, because in the Peter V’Landys era NRL, crime pays.

Break that down and things get even more obvious.

68% of their set restarts are conceded before play 2, the highest percentage in the league, just ahead of Melbourne2 and daylight ahead of everyone else.

The Raiders are also above average for when in the game they infringe, turning in plenty in the first 20 minutes (and also in the 20 after half-time).

But wait – who’s that with them?

Canterbury might concede fewer than anyone, but if you account for when they infringe, they’re right up there too: in the chasing pack behind the Raiders for early in sets and actually slightly higher than Canberra in the opening stages.

Go on then, what about where?

The Doggies are alongside Canberra in using infringements to control sets, as they increase in frequency the further they get from their own line.

By the time you’re in the opponent’s half, aka the bit that just got extended by PVL et al for this season, Canterbury are among the worst offenders.

What we can see from these two is that, alongside the Broncos and Storm, they are the best at manipulating a stupid rule. Again, crime pays.

Canberra do it all the time on a volume level, whereas Canterbury do it more judiciously, but either way, it is paying off.

The secret ingredient is crime

Across the league in 2025, around 18% of set restarts result in a try for the opposition in the next set, which is probably an undercount as that set ends if another set restart is called straight afterwards, meaning the effect is lost to statistics, even if it contributes to a try.

If you’re Canberra and Canterbury, however, you’re well below that, 10% and 11% respectively.

Filter down to just infringements on Plays 0-2 and just under 9% of Six Agains result in tries, but that drops to 5.5% for the Dogs and a tiny 3.3% for the Raiders.

We like processes as much as outcomes at WYGIWYS, so it’s worth mentioning that the Dogs had the best Pre-Contact Metres3 on both a net and a per run basis in 2025, meaning they had the fastest line, which is a lot easier to do if you’re standing offside and slowing your opponent down in the ruck.

These teams know how to foul, and do it superbly.

They’re actually punished for it – both, plus the Broncos, topped the sin bin count – but when you’re finishing in the top four, that’s just the cost of doing business.

Punishing things properly, by judicious binning of deliberate cheating, has always been the answer, but nobody wants to actually admit that so we’ll be stuck with this death loop forever, where the better you are at pushing the rules is rewarded.

All of these numbers are derived from 2025 stats and, of course, don’t factor in the many, many times when ruck infringements/offsides were not called, which is the tactic working absolutely as intended.

Anyway, all of this is to say that, after two weeks of discourse on the subject, we get the most perfect match-up to test out if we’ve learned anything.4

If you recall their only meeting of 2025, Canberra raced into a 20-0 lead on the back of a 60% first half possession split, only to lose 32-20 after the Bulldogs got 71% of the footy in the second period.

Oh, and Adam Gee contrived to award 11 combined penalties and restarts in the first half, but just three in the second. Nope, me neither.

That was a classic example of 2025 footy, where an exciting game on the scoreboard took the place of a good game, fooling some people but not all.

In 2026, where every game appears to be like that, once again the most important person on the field is likely to be the referee. Ah good.

Just to finish, and because it’s so stupid, there have been a set restart every 31.3 play the balls (hat tip: Rugby League Eye Test) and, if you fold in the penalties, an infringement every 15 (15!) play the balls, we have seen just seven sin bins across 16 games, and only two of those were for repeat offences.

Great job everyone!

This is your regular reminder that this Substack is free, but if you value things like this, please consider buying me a virtual schooner. If you like more of it, subscribe using the button below and get it delivered to your inbox.

Subscribe now

My Mate Jeff

A quick check in on My Mate Jeff to start the stats section.

If you remember from last week, this is how we track improvement over time based on performance against the same opponent in the same circumstances, aka the Broncos at home to the Eels, the Dragons at home to Melbourne etc.

The Cowboys are officially adrift at the bottom, having won at Leichhardt Oval last year but lost this time around, giving them a 0-2 start to the year both in real terms and Jeff terms. The Tigers avenged that and are thus +1 after their single game.

At the top, Newcastle’s win was punished by not having faced Manly at Brookvale in 2025, meaning their equivalent replacement fixture was the Dragons, who defeated the Sea Eagles last Easter Thursday. Great stuff on the real ladder, but no dice with Jeff.

We have a cluster in the middle of teams who merely maintained existing good records or, in the case of the Titans, just keep losing to the same teams. That’s their bit, I suppose.

Yer Boba Fetts, yer Baby Bunting, yer Mark Ruttes

Another decent week for the degenerates last time around. If you’d have followed the tips in this very column, you’d have cashed in on the Tigers, Knights and Eels (at decent prices) and even in defeat, the Titans were a strong cashout chance before their inevitable collapse.

I didn’t cash out5 and Cronulla was a flat loss, but all in all we’re 7 from 9 for the year.

This week is a doozy, with no standout bad prices like last week and no Manly Sea Eagles to bet against.

The obvious place to go is to pile a few favourites in together, so we’ll do that with the Storm and Sharks, who seem very likely to win, and get the big push.

Multis are usually against my better judgement, but in a round like this, they’re a good way to make it interesting.

Looking through the list, there’s probably a bit of value in the Tigers at Souths (currently $2.36), but I haven’t got the foggiest really so I wouldn’t pass onto you something that I wouldn’t punt on myself.

Ditto the Titans, almost certainly overpriced to beat a shocking Cowboys at $2.41, but after being burned last week, I’ll be letting that through to the keeper.

The Roosters are even wider at $2.56, but they always lose to the Panthers6, who have only conceded one try so far.

Instead, let’s have a throw at the stumps with the Dragons, who have had a relatively tough start, at a ludicrous $2.84 to beat Parra. I have no idea if they will do it, but that price is too big and I shall pile in.

And, seen as I spent a thousand words on it up top, let’s chuck a tenner at the Raiders. The Dogs underwhelmed in Vegas and my hunch is that they’ll struggle to get enough points to get by Canberra. Up the milk, as I believe they say.

Thanks for making it to the end of this week’s preview column - if you like it, share it. For more, subscribe. I love a comment and always respond to them, so let me know what you think below.

Subscribe now

Czechoslovakia and West Germany had fought themselves to a standstill over 120 minutes of football, before a miss by Bayern München star Uli Hoeneß in the penalty shootout gave the underdogs a shot at glory, one kick to win.

Up stepped midfielder Antonin Panenka, who, contrary to all prevailing opinion on penalties, penalty shootouts and shooting in general, opted against power and placement in favour of slowly dinking his shot right down the centre of the goal.

The last person expecting such an unlikely effort was legendary goalkeeper Sepp Maier, who had long since dived out of the way by the time the ball hit the back of the net.

Thus was the Panenka, both the act and the term, birthed.

A French journalist in the stadium called Panenka ‘a poet’ for his move, and more florid accounts characterised it as an individualist critique of the communist system in Czechoslovakia, a physical act of non-conformism against the rigidity of the Eastern Bloc.

Ironically for a man who played his club football at Bohemians Praha, the man himself was less interested in that analysis.

“I chose the penalty because I saw and realised it was the easiest and simplest recipe for scoring a goal,” he told UEFA.com many years later.

Compare this to a similar incident earlier this year, also in a major continental final.

Brahim Diaz, the Real Madrid midfielder, had the chance to put Morocco 1-0 up in extra time of the Africa Cup of Nations Final against Senegal.

Again, he chipped straight down the middle – only this time, Senegalese keeper Édouard Mendy stood stock still, gratefully accepting the ball into his arms.

While there were inevitable howls that Diaz should have just stuck the laces through it, the panenka wasn’t seen as a cri de coeur about anything, rather a weighing of the odds.

In the 50 years that have passed since 1976, data has transformed not only tactics, but also expectations.

We know, thanks to years of analytics, that one of the best places to put a penalty is straight down the middle, relatively high. We also know that, statistically, almost every goalkeeper will dive.

It’s why we get not only more panenkas, but also more stutter-stops, blind ball strikes and, yes, static keepers. Data proliferation means that everyone is weighing the odds, all the time.

Rugby league doesn’t have penalty shootouts, and we don’t really name actions after individuals, at least beyond Mario Fenech’s oft-encountered bonce.

What we do have, however, is the concept – and it’s one that smart coaches should be talking about.

The crux of the Panenka is that it seemed needlessly extravagant, only to be proven to be a legitimate, data-backed tactic all along.

The reason people didn’t do them as much before the nerds got involved is that they made the taker look outlandish, and in the relentlessly masculine environment of football, that was bad.

Exactly the same dynamic played on keepers, however, because the guy who stands and simply catches the Panenka is the same one that never dives for all the shots that go in, looking like a fool in the process.

Once the data proved that keepers almost always dived (and dived early), the obvious, scientific thing to do became to dink, stutter and no-looker, rather than the lair’s choice.

If we look at rugby league today and wonder what our equivalent is, the much-maligned chip and chase might just be it.

It’s certainly seen as a flair move, individualistic and low probability, and is detested by coaches as a result.

Yet in the risk-averse NRL of 2026 - don’t be fooled by the proliferation of points, this is a risk averse competition, where holding possession is of great value – we have seen a resurgence of the move.

Su’a Fa’alogo, Reece Walsh and Jonah Pezet have all kicked for themselves and scored, and Cody Walker would have too were it not for a Bunker call.

I have long referred to it as ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’, the thing you do when you’ve run out of ideas.

But, as we can still see despite more points, most kicking remains a way of giving the ball away rather than creating an opportunity, a low-risk, low reward strategy.

The reason you don’t chip and chase is, largely, because it’s not that likely to work, but given that the other options essentially consist of giving the ball away anyway, you’d think that it grows in value as an option.

In that context, using every attacking opportunity available makes sense.

Moreover, with the changes to the disruptor rule, the most prevalent form of attacking kick, the bomb, also dropped in value, as you can now just as easily concede a penalty the other way as get a positive result.

When high probability outcomes increasingly dominate set ends, the zag increases in value.

In 2025, we saw a proliferation of really boring kick strategies. Bad teams opted not to contest bombs at all, whereas good ones sometimes went a step further and simply ran the ball into the corners.

The rules, particularly the 7-tackle set, exacerbated an innate conservatism, which plenty of coaches are liable to take up any option that avoids risk, even to their own detriment.1

If you are, say, 30-50m from your opponent’s line – aka the place most midfield bombs start from – the chip can actually be a low-risk play given the fullback likely won’t anticipate it and will have little opportunity to return the ball anyway.

If you do it a lot, the opposition will start bringing their fullback forward, or even – as was the norm once upon a time – dropping a sweeper.

In research for my Tom Brock Scholarship project, Phil Larder discussed extensively his plans to use Shaun Edwards as a sweeper to counteract the chip during England’s 1995 World Cup campaign.

In commentary during the 2002 Ashes, Mike Stephenson regularly mentions it. While Stevo’s tactical nous might have been overshadowed by his bombastic style behind the mic, he was certainly a guy who knew footy and watched a lot of it.

Both of those references are hardly contemporary, but then again, they’re much more recent than Antonin Panenka.

In 2026 footy, the chip and chase works because it plays into key trends which we can already see after two rounds.

It requires poor linespeed, as the chipper has to have space to operate, and a scrambled fullback, as the ball has to have somewhere to land.

Crucially, it does not require anyone else to join in, allowing initiative to be taken without pre-planning, much like a dummy half scoot (of which we have seen a proliferation this year).

Moreover, the chip is the sort of play that, once you get a reputation for it, opens up other potentialities.

The best allegory comes from cricket, where England’s proto-Bazballers won the 2019 World Cup not by smashing dingers, but by making teams think that that was the plan.

With everyone on the fence, they’d play high-percentage ones and twos, accumulating easy runs in the space afforded to them by a reputation for slogging.

Remember, in the 2023 Ashes, it was actually Australia that hit more boundaries, despite England scoring at almost a run an over more.

A judicious low percentage play sets the tone and makes the opposition move. It’s only low percentage if you see it as one thing, happening once, and not as a part of a long-term strategy.

For example, when faced with an umbrella defence, the theoretically low-probability kick in behind can counteract it and change defensive behaviours.

If the chip is established, then the fullback has to play closer, which both removes their ability to shuttle from sideline to sideline and their ability to defend the 40/20.

Chipping on your own 40 is very 1985, but you’d only have to do it once – potentially once every so often – for every analyst to be pointing it out.

Do that enough and another risk/reward paradigm opens up via other kicks, or simply just better quality line breaks.2

This has already happened anyway.

The chippy-chasiest players in last year’s NRL were Nathan Cleary, followed by daylight, then Adam Reynolds, then daylight again. Hardly rampant individualists, rather master strategists.

Over the last three full seasons, of players who hit 800 minutes’ worth of sample size in a single year, it’s a similar story with Cleary top twice ahead of noted chip-chase merchants Jackson Hastings and Josh Schuster3.

In terms of successful chipping – rated by how many chips were regathered – it’s Cleary 2025, Jahrome Hughes 2024, Cleary 2023, Mitch Moses 2025 and Hughes 2025 in terms of total volume.

To add another layer, we can set a floor of ten per season attempted and find that serial individualists Schuster and Hastings are the best at getting them back – between 75% and 80% - but most are around two-thirds if they’re good and often as low as 50%.

For guys as good as Cleary to try a play with a 50% success rate, but still try it more than anyone else in the league, suggests that something else is at play beyond just whether it comes off or not.

This is about line manipulation, using a low-percentage play to move the opposition around, sow doubt and create more high-probability plays elsewhere.

What we are seeing in real time is the rehabilitation of the chip and chase.

There are 68 individual seasons in the last four years of NRL sample4 and three of the top five are from 2026, plus last year’s Broncos and Panthers.

Fold in Super League and you’ve got a 118-team sample across three-and-a-bit years, which adds 2026 Warrington and 2026 Hull KR to the top table.

Perhaps most interesting is that, while the overall prevalence of the move is declining alongside rising conservative footy – it has fallen every year in total volume across all teams - the better teams are trying it more, as are the better players.

Bad teams treat conservatism as an end goal, a method of not losing. Good ones use conservatism in some circumstances, but are far more willing to chance their arm when the opportunity arises, or to be proactive in moving their opponent’s line.

Is that because they back their defence to overcome the opposition pressure that might result?

Is that because they have better playmakers, who are more likely to back themselves?

Is it because they have better coaches who are better at giving players confidence to try things?

Whatever the reason, it’s a clear differentiator in a period of rugby league that is currently converging at a boring middle.

The original Panenka worked because it was outlandish, but Brahim Diaz’s version failed precisely because it wasn’t: the move is sufficiently backed by empirical understanding that it can be both a mic-drop piece of individualism and a high-percentage option at the same time.

We might be seeing something similar right in front of our eyes in rugby league.

If you enjoy long-form, data-driven articles like this, then you can encourage me to write more of them by subscribing to this Substack. If you really like it, drop me a few bucks - this Tuesday column will always be free whatever you do, but I do appreciate it and schooners are getting increasingly expensive these days.

Subscribe now

These will focus on whatever the most interesting tactical point is to watch for this coming weekend, with a few regular sections thrown in.

As many pointed out in the comments of last week’s Everyone Else Preview (and actual people in person, too), the Wests Tigers did not get a run.

Remember, whenever the Tigers are not on screen, all the other characters should be asking ‘Where’s the Tigers?’

This is your regular reminder that this Substack is free, but if you value things like this, please consider buying me a virtual schooner.

Even better, if you see me at Leichhardt Oval/The Orange Grove/Nortons on Saturday afternoon, buy me a real one. I may or may not be in a vintage Hull FC jersey, depending on how warm it is.

With that in mind (and because I’m taking my Da to Leichhardt on Saturday), here’s everything you need to know about Benji’s boys ahead of their belated beginning to 2026.

The point of these previews is to put each team into their own context, but that seems nearly impossible for the Wests Tigers.

This is a club without context, a trainwreck all of their own making with an anhedonic desire to take aim at their own foot whenever things look like they might be just just just about to get better.

Last season was a fair case in point, as Wests did actually play some good football at times, and under Shane Richardson, appeared to have quietened the chaos behind the scenes.

Then, y’know, the Tigers happened. Or the Magpies. Who knows?

What will all do if the Tigers are good?

On the field, Benji Marshall is entering the rubber/road section of his coaching career, the critical third year.

Having overseen just six wins in 2024 (which was an improvement on 2023 and 2022) and then nine last year (the best showing the club have had since before the pandemic) it’s an upward trajectory at least, albeit from the lowest base possible.

The team is, for once, quite settled.

Kai Pearce-Paul is the big in, and a definite improvement, especially if Benji lets him play like he did in Wigan rather than whatever it was that Adam O’Brien thought he was doing at the Knights.

Heamasi Makasini will likely also start on a wing, and comes with huge wraps from just about anyone who has seen him play in the junior grade or the trials.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but watching him crease Dylan Edwards en route to the line in the pre-season was like a time machine to Olsen Filipaina’s era. No pressure, kid.

Suddenly we’re looking at a front row with Terrell May and Fonua Pole in it (with Api Koroisau in between), a backline that includes Jahream Bula, Sunia Turuva, Taylan May and Makasini, plus Jarome Luai and Adam Doueihi in the halves.

When you put it like that, the Tigers should be a lot better.

If the league is going to be faster this year, then this side is set up to play that way a lot, with punch in the middle, pace to burn outside and one of the best ruck operators in the game calling the shots.

Then again, a faster game is one that punishes errors, historically a huge issue for this team.

Depth remains the biggest issue, so injuries will be a problem, but that’s true of just about everyone from the top six down.

If Api or Romey go down in particular, there is basically zero depth, but again, what side would not have that issue if their chief playmakers/best two players were missing?

The Wests Tigers, brought to you by Venues NSW

Crucially for the Tigers, they need to pick and stick to build cohesion as much as possible, because there is a very specific time of year for this side to target.

Their draw is weird, with three of the first four away and the last three also away, but a run of ten games between Rounds 5 and 16 of which nine are at home and three away – they give one up to play Manly at Magic, but gain one back with the Easter Monday game being played at Commbank, also their home ground1.

All things being equal, it’s unlikely that many Tigers get picked for Origin – only Luai did last year, and he’s out if Mitch Moses is fit – and they have a bye, then four home games, then what should be winnable away games at the Knights and Dragons.

Remember, this team needs to win ten games to improve on last year, and there’s six games to target while everyone else is looking the other way.

Oh, and they only get on a plane four times all year and just one game further than a bus ride between Magic Round and the end of the year. It’s 18 of 24 games in the greater Sydney area.

Benji has to know this, and plan accordingly. If he picks and sticks, lets the team gel and trusts them to improve over time, the conditions are there for more than nine wins and, potentially, a return to the finals after so, so long away.

Then again, this is the Tigers. It’ll all end in tears.

Prediction: Rise, slightly

Ephemera

My Mate Jeff

We covered the My Mate Jeff Table, which will be a regular feature here, in Tuesday’s column, so no need to go there yet.

Yer Joan Jetts, yer Steven Buntings, yer Mike Strutters

Gambling responsibly is fun, so I stick in $100 to start the year and see how long it lasts.

Usually that means five shies a round, and because this might be the bit of this Substack that eventually makes money, I share it all with you.

Hey, this is the three-time, reigning, defending, The Roar tipping comp champion you’re listening to here!

In due time there will be method to this madness, but for now, in the early season, it’s a lot of vibes. There’s no sample size anyway for at least a month.

Anyway, it’s been a banner start to the year for the degenerates, with Newcastle (and Leeds) criminally priced as outsiders in Vegas, then the Warriors, Souths, Panthers and even, at the start of the week, Raiders all offering value.

I hope you filled your boots - I certainly did, going 5/5 over Round 1 with a clean sweep and 133% profit.

This time around is a little trickier.

The Sharks started the week at close to $3 to beat the Panthers, a ludicrous price if you ask me2, a number that went out to $3.36 when the teams were announced.

Look, they might not win and the Panthers are good, but that is wild – the Titans are a lower chance to beat the Dolphins, and they lost by 50 points last week, to the Sharks no less.

The line in the Broncos-Parra game has blown out to 12.5+, which seems way too big at this time of year, especially with such volatility from the Bronx.

Newcastle are $2.41 outsiders at Manly – and while the only team with a worse middle than the Sea Eagles might be the Knights, this is a toss up to me so take the price going3.

As ever, don’t chuck what you don’t have, speak to someone if you need to and track your bloody bets so you know if you need to stop. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up.

Context, in all forms of analysis, is vital.

If I told you that I was in Lancashire elite junior pathways with double Man of Steel winner Sam Tomkins, dual code international Kyle Eastmond and 387-game first grader Richie Myler, you might think I was pretty good.

With the context that I was playing for Rochdale, where you only really had to turn up to get picked, and that we lost every game by 50 points, you’d get a lot closer to my actual standard.

In the NRL, context isn’t often applied – everyone says they’re going to win the Premiership at this time of year - but it should be.

This might be just the fourth season in this current configuration with the Dolphins, and the last before we add the Perth Bears, but for 16 of the 17 competing teams, it’s everyone playing the same opponents, and nobody else, for nearly 20 years. We don’t even have a cup competition to spice things up.

That does, at least, provide pretty ample opportunity to compare.

But wait: the NRL has a mad draw, in which teams play everyone once, then some teams twice, some of whom they always play twice – the Dolphins and Broncos, Roosters and Souths etc – but others that are picked at random.

Then there’s the uneven travel, fixture back-ups, occasional neutral venues and sometimes even home games played at the stadium of the away team – when the Dragons play the Roosters at home this year, it’s Anzac Day so the game will be played at Allianz Stadium, and they’ll play the Bulldogs there too, having already played them in Las Vegas.

It makes sense in this regard to lean into the bit that works and ignore the bit that doesn’t – repeatability, theoretically, is an analyst’s friend.

That’s where Uncle Jeff can help.

Last week’s Tactical Previews were based on taking every team in their own context by comparing 2026 against the year before – so let’s take that idea to the next level by introducing a fun analytical concept, the Uncle Jeff Coefficient.

It’s a metric popularised by Benji Lanyado on the Totally Football Show, or more accurately, by Benji Lanyado’s Uncle Jeff, who tracks West Ham United’s results based only on their results against the same opponents the year before.

The logic is as follows: a team’s individual results are compared to the same results against the same opponents in the same circumstances the season before, with a league table derived from whether they did better, worse or the same.

For example, West Ham lost away to Nottingham Forest in 2024/25, but beat them at the City Ground this time around, so they would gain three points on the Uncle Jeff Coefficient, whereas Forest would lose three.

He invented it to track progress over time, because in English soccer, you play everyone exactly twice in the league, but never in the same order as the year before.

The Hammers are currently on 28 points on the real Premier League table, and at this time last year, they were on 34 - but Uncle Jeff can track that they maybe aren’t as bad as that looks, but have simply played harder fixtures earlier on, because on his table, they’re a flat 0, no better or worse at all.

You can go one stage further, as by turning the cumulative Uncle Jeff Coefficient into the Uncle Jeff Table - a league ladder based on it - can help to project into the future, as you know the trajectory of results against the same opponents, so can extrapolate a trendline from them.

If a team have picked up wins against the teams they lost to last time, they only have to match their results against the other opponents to end up ahead come the end of the year.

In the NRL, with a wildly unequal draw, this can go a long way to providing context.

Here’s an example.

Manly played Canberra at Brookvale Oval in Round 1, a game that the Sea Eagles won in 2025.

They lost, so are now at -1 win on the Uncle Jeff Coefficient, while the Raiders are +1 win after improving on 2025’s result at the same venue.

Now, I can hear the cries from the back: ‘But the NRL draw is not equal!’.

Well, back to the Beaches we go for the workaround.

In Round 2, Manly play Newcastle at the Fortress, a game which did not take place last year.

In these circumstances, we take the closest available team based on the 2025 NRL Ladder.

As Manly did not play Newcastle in 17^th at home, we go to the Titans in 16^th. They didn’t play them either, so we go to the Dragons in 15^th, who defeated the Sea Eagles last Easter Thursday at Brookvale.

Under this logic, if Manly beat Newcastle in Round 2, they will gain an Uncle Jeff win, as they are avenging 2025’s home loss to the Dragons.

It’s not perfect, but no model is.

The original Premier League equivalent, which has the advantages of an equal draw, does something similar, replacing relegated teams with their promoted equivalents for the purposes of continuity.

For example, Leeds United, who came into the Premier League as 2024/25 Championship winners, are compared in 2025/26 to Leicester City, who finished first in the second tier in 2023/24.

The Uncle Jeff Coefficient is essentially a bit of fun, but it has a real world logic that can add depth to the understanding of the NRL on a week-to-week basis.

If you want to know if a team has got better, the NRL ladder is the obvious place to start, but if you want to know how much of that improvement is due to schedule, then the Uncle Jeff Table is very useful, as it compares like to like much more easily.

In 2025, for example, the Roosters dropped from the top four to eighth on the ladder, but were dead zero according to Uncle Jeff, suggesting that a much harder draw might have had a fair bit to do with it.

The Warriors, on the other hand, gained 5.5 real wins (they had a draw, hence the .5) but only 2.5 on the year-end Uncle Jeff Table, which would imply that they played much easier teams than in 2024.

The Wahs were bounced out by the Panthers with relative ease, looking all the while like a non-finals team that had somehow snuck in.

As games are not played in the same order as they were last year, tracking the discrepancy as the weeks go by should give a good read on who is going well and who has just faced more difficult opponents, just as the original Uncle Jeff intended.

Given that the only ladder that matters is the one in Round 27, the Uncle Jeff Table can act as a proxy for relative improvement against the field rather than just who is currently where.

Come finals time, it should come into its own as a gauge on who is actually good and who has played crap – because, as Canberra, last year’s Uncle Jeff champions discovered, that’s what matters anyway.

So – where are we after a round?

Well, Canberra are in the black, as we discussed, as are Souths, who were smashed by Redcliffe at Suncorp last year, but avenged that defeat.

While this year’s Knights-Cowboys clash was played in Vegas, on paper it was in the Hunter - Newcastle didn’t play the Cowboys at home in 2025, so they get the adjacent Eels, to whom they lost in Round 11 last year, and are thus +1 in 2026. The Cowboys got the Titans, who they beat, are -1 to start the year.

The Warriors, Cronulla, Melbourne and Canterbury all beat teams they beat last year, while the Roosters, Titans, Eels and Dragons were on the other side, earning all eight of them a flat 0, and the Wests Tigers didn’t play at all.

Penrith did win at Brisbane in 2025, but, in a piece of typical confusion, that was actually a Panthers home game, so they instead get the next closest team they faced away – the Roosters – who they also beat, so it’s a zero for them here too.

The Broncos stand-in was the Sharks, who they downed in Round 16 of 2025, and thus lose a point, joining Manly, North Queensland and Redcliffe in the -1 Club.

This Substack will incorporate the NRL Uncle Jeff Table as a running metric in the weekly Thursday preview – and if you know a prominent rugby league Jeff to name it after, leave it in the comments1.

For now, we’ll call it the My Mate Jeff Table, after Newtown Jets director and colourful Sydney identity Jeffrey Gabriel, who greatly enjoys the vagaries of name proliferation.

As the year develops, I’ll refer back to it to see where we end up – and, hopefully, it can give us some insight.

If you enjoy nonsense like this, you can read it twice a week by subscribing today. Thanks for reading.

Subscribe now

You can read the whole criteria in the other piece, but the short bit is that we compare apples v apples, judging each team in their own context, and applying predictions only on whether they will get better, worse or stay roughly the same.

Just like last week, we will be also doing them in the order that they play, starting with the Storm v Parra on Thursday night and ending with Redcliffe v Souths on Sunday.

Me, I’ll be at Brookvale Oval on Saturday night with my parents, various in-laws and a gang of mates, because we are gluttons for punishment.

If you hear someone with a conspicuous Northern accent giving out to Luke Brooks, come say hello.

Should you like to buy me a 4 Pines, they are suprisingly expensive these days, so all contributions are taken.

Then again, this is a free publication and I can buy my own grog, so I’ll just say I appreciate all the subscriptions, if you like what you read then smash the button below.

Subscribe now

Storm

There have been a lot of predictions of Melbourne’s demise. These seem to be predicated on the idea that they can’t continually be as good as they have been.

My permanent position on the Storm is that I’ll believe it when I see it. Their whole thing is that they have the highest floor, which is why they almost never miss the eight, or indeed the top four, but don’t win as much as people think they do.

Two Premierships in a decade is good by most teams’ standards, but not that great for a team that continually gets into the pointy end of the season. If anything, it’s a poor conversion rate for a team that has made at least a Prelim in nine of those ten seasons.

The reason this happens is, of course, tactical. They raise the level of the worst player better than anyone else in this weak link sport of ours, but often struggle against the very best of the best in the most important games.

So what has changed from last year’s Runners Up? To my mind, very little.

Sua Fa’alogo takes over from Ryan Papenhuyzen, who averages 14 games a year over five years, so that’s not a huge loss. Fa’alogo is probably the best non-regular 1 in the league anyway, and now he gets to step up.

Eliesa Katoa is a very unfortunate out, but backrowers just don’t move the needle that much, even a very good one like him.

Beyond those two, it’s the best 6, 7, 9 combo, the best bench 14/back-up, the tallest wingers and the best set piece unit.

With the usual caveats about injuries, they’ll be about as good as they were last year, which is about as good as they are every year.

Prediction: No Movement

Eels

Out of the Storm and in at the Eels is Jonah Pezet, who proves the strength of Craig Bellamy’s outfit by being a fringe player in Melbourne and a walk-up starter in Parramatta.

He will lead the team around the park in Jason Ryles’ second season, alongside a rejuvenated Mitch Moses.

Ryles was a qualified success last year, changing the style away from the wide fours/offload game of Brad Arthur, but in doing so, made Parra much more like everyone else.

Now, what are they? Brian Kelly is in, so that’s a lot of tries against, and Zac Lomax is missing, which will be a loss no matter how correct the Eels are to freeze him out.

Isaiah Iongi blazed a trail last year – stop sniggering at the back – and should be better for the experience, but the rest of the team are a bit meh.

Moses can win games on his own, Pezet is solid and there’s a few fun guys in there, but this is a startlingly middle-of-the-road roster.

They were 11^th last year and will be again.

Prediction: No Movement

Warriors

The Warriors were great beneficiaries of the draw in 2025, probably inflating their sixth place finish.

Andrew Webster is entering the put-up-or-shut-up phase, but shouldn’t be: NZ were truly dreadful before his time and now are, for perhaps the first time in their history, boring.

The general vibe of the Wahs, over years if not decades, was a few highs and a lot of lows, the great untippables. Now they’re fun and colourful, even if the footy is often crap.

They’ll roll into position, with very little risk, then try to score from close in. It’ll work against bad teams everywhere and some good ones at home, which should get them into the finals most years.

That’s great given expectations, but it’s probably an underachievement on their squad. This is a side that has Roger Tuivasa-Sheck, but never give him good ball. They’ve got Wayde Egan, one of the most exciting hookers, but don’t let him run riot. Leka Halasima remains the great hope.

I doubt the tactics will change, but the draw will and that’s bad news. Conservative football like this can only take you so far and the worry will be that the Wahs have maxed that out.

Neither the Panthers nor Roosters will be as bad. It would only take one more team – likely the Dolphins, but really anyone – to see NZ drop out of the finals.

Prediction: Fall, slightly

Roosters

Easts are as stacked as anyone in 2026 and have a major crack at winning the lot.

Sam Walker remains the spirit animal, and with Daly Cherry-Evans alongside him, he should have full licence to run this team. Make no mistake, DCE will control and Sammy will get the reins to kick, create and (probably) not tackle that much.

The backline is insane, the forwards are strong, the halves are balanced. They have both NSW hookers.

Trent Robinson remains among the smartest coaches and basically invented the ruck control that gave us all the Six Again.

All four of their bench would start at any other club and there’s guys who would be nailed-ons for most NRL teams walking around in their reggies.

The Chooks should score the most points, and if Walker stays fit, there’s a good chance they take the Minor Premiership at the very least.

Prediction: Rise, lots

Broncos

Your defeated World Club Challenge finalists might have been caught cold in Hull, but they return to Australia as defending Premiers and the team to beat.

Their victory over Melbourne was deserved on the day, which is all that matters, but maybe not over the course of the year.

A 15-9 regular season record isn’t great for a team that gets to play more games at home than everyone else, and getting through to the GF required Canberra’s milk bottle smashing everywhere, then the Panthers collapsing too.

So are they any good? Well, obviously they’re quite good, so it’s unlikely that the Bronx drop more than a few places, but they’d have to improve a fair bit to keep up with everyone else.

Michael Maguire’s greatest strength is his ability to galvanise a team around a goal – it’s why he was such a great rep coach – but the fear has to be that the intensity spills over into contempt.

Tactically, he’s usually quite hands off, and with the talent available, can do that and get away with it for long periods.

If they make the top four again, Brisbane absolutely have the quality to go all the way, but this is a team that lost to Parramatta, Manly, Souths and the Dragons last year.

Are they the team that showed up in the first half against Rovers, or the one that nearly came back to win? You could take out Hull KR and replace them with a host of other teams.

This is the highest ceiling team in the comp, but barring the known also-rans, probably also the lowest floor of all contenders. Anything between first and ninth is possible.

Prediction: Fall, slightly

Panthers

Last year slammed Penrith hard enough in the middle that they couldn’t overcome it and win. Even so, with everything that went on, with all the churn and all the negativity, they were 40 mins from a Grand Final.

An optimistic reading would be that the Panthers retain the bulletproof system, not to mention the never-ending wellspring of talent, to keep this going.

They certainly won’t be changing the way that they play, not least because 90% of the NRL is still also trying to play it, just not as well.

In Nathan Cleary they have the best half and in Brian To’o, the best set starter. It wouldn’t make sense to alter the playstyle too much.

Assuming that the best players remain on the field – Cleary especially – then you can’t see the Panthers finishing outside of the top four, but the gradual loss of topline talent means they are much closer to the pack than previously.

This is probably as wide open a season as we’ve had in a long time, and they’ll be right in there amongst it.

Prediction: Rise

Sharks

Cronulla finally broke through their finals ceiling in 2025, turning over the Roosters and then the Raiders to make a Prelim. Throw in another fifth place finish and it was, all in all, a great effort.

Were this a different sport, we’d look at a team from a small market with a small stadium and marvel that they so consistently do well, as the Sharks have under Craig Fitzgibbon.

The style of play is well-grooved, the roster has improved over time and the culture appears to be aligned from juniors to Newtown and down to the Shire.

This is a side that can score points against bad teams, put on a show when they get going and don’t really have a weak link anywhere. It’s a pretty perfectly constructed roster.

But, in a comp with only one winner, that’s not enough.

There’s a feeling that, in with the very top end, Nicho Hynes mightn’t be quite at the level, and in all likelihood, neither is Will Kennedy.

That could be mitigated if Brayden Trindall kicks on, which would allow Hynes to go back to more of a 6 – their numbers are always swapped anyway – and notably, Kennedy is unsigned beyond this year, which opens up the chance for a fit-again Liam Ison to step in ahead of time.

Up until then, this is a settled enough side, with topline talent and depth. They’ll be in the lower half of the top eight, maybe higher depending on other teams.

Prediction: No Movement

Titans

Rebuild number 75 on the Gold Coast begins with Josh Hannay in charge, and for once, they seem to have made some good decisions.

Getting rid of David Fifita cut their losses on a potential superstar, but one who never played up to his pay cheque (which was already inflated for a backrower). Getting someone else to take on Brian Kelly was a masterstroke.

Hannay also appears to have decided on who the spine is, with roundish pegs in roundish holes.

You could argue that Keano Kini, AJ Brimson and Jayden Campbell all do their best work at fullback, but Kini is the purest 1 of them all and will start there.

This is not a bottom four roster, but it is a sub-bottom four culture, so Hannay’s job will be getting performances from the group to match their talent.

That’s been the same for every coach, however, going back to as long as there’s been a Titans, so whatever.

The Gold Coast is where tackling goes to die and there’s not really any expectations that it will improve until, well, it does. That’s Hannay’s main thing, because if he can get that bit even vaguely functioning, there’s points in this team.

It was bottom four last time out and likely will be again, but the tanker might start to turn around.

Prediction: No Movement

Manly

Manly were once the most tactically interesting team in the NRL. In 2024, they were going pretty well based on a lot of attack, plenty of ball movement and an almost Bazballian recklessness.

Now, who knows?

Last year was a disaster, not just because results were poor but because it was dreadful to watch. If you’re going to fail, at least do so in style.

They have, in Tolu Koula and Haumole Olakau’atu, two of the most devastating edge runners going, but seemed to do anything to avoid giving them the footy.

They were great from 0-80m up the field, but horrendous within the 20m, with no close range plan and poor kicking.

As an assemblage of talent, it was a massive underperformance and Anthony Seibold will lose his job even if Manly keep him until his contract runs out at the end of the year.

Now, the club are in a situation where pretty much everyone knows that the coach will leave, but has to go through the motions this year anyway.

It’s all a holding pattern until Seibold departs, which will see bulk players leave: notably Jake Trbojevic, who will almost certainly retire, plus stalwart Reuben Garrick and pack duo Siosiua Taukieaho and Nathan Brown.

Whoever comes in will get a fair bit to play with, given this is still a side with a lot of talent in it, but what until then.

This might be the fan in me talking, but anything above last keeps our record intact and avoids total embarrassment. I’ll take that now.

Prediction: Fall

Raiders

Canberra are on a bit of a hiding to nothing after a massive overperformance last year, which delivered a highly unexpected Minor Premiership.

Ricky Stuart, wily old fox that he is, developed a killer attack and an obstructive, often to the point of outright rule-pushing, defence.

The Raiders were great, but never likely to trouble the biggest of the big when the whips got cracking. They pulled all their rabbits out in the regular season and, by the end, straight setsing it out of the finals seemed about right for their level.

This year was meant to be their good one, and though they’ll do very well to emulate 2025, anything in the Finals is a success for what is still a very young team.

If the two Ethans can build a partnership in the halves, they’ll be set for years. Ricky knows that teams are built over time and will approach this season with suitably set expectations.

Canberra used to be effective but dull, now they can be less successful but fun, knowing that they are properly building something.

Context, as they’ll know, is everything.

Prediction: Fall

Dolphins

It’s not quite put-up-or-shut-up time in Redcliffe, but after going 13th, tenth and ninth, this is the bit where they have to make the finals. Even the Titans had done that by this stage.

The Phins have also transitioned from a battling, attritional team to quite an exciting one, especially when they get Isaiya Katoa, Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow and Herbie Farnworth pulling in the right direction.

The pack hasn’t quite got the upper end to challenge the best - though it’s not impossible if they keep everyone on the field - but the backs certainly do.

Kristian Woolf is criminally underrated, largely because people don’t value the Super League or international footy that much, but this could be the year that he gets his dues.

For the coach, it’s a case of maintaining the level in the middle well enough to let the more talented players win the game, and of balancing the exuberant young guys and wringing the last drops out of the veterans.

If they can get that right, the finals beckon for the first time.

Prediction: Rise

Rabbitohs

Souths have had their roster backwards since letting Adam Reynolds go, and now seem to be fully leaning into it.

Back then, they gave Lachlan Ilias the keys at 7 in what appeared to be a workaround to keep Latrell Mitchell, Cody Walker and Cameron Murray going as a concern - only to ditch him.

The Bunnies have since thrown Bud Sullivan, Lewis Dodd, Jamie Humphreys and latterly Ashton Ward at the halfback role while somehow adding more peripheral but expensive talent in Jack Wighton and, now, David Fifita.

I was Ilias’ last backer, and the time since his departure has somewhat underlined that, good or not, he was at least embedded and probably wouldn’t have done any worse than his four successors.

Wayne Bennett is not a tactics guy, so where I see Souths as an exercise in throwing money at the wrong positions, he’ll see this as getting as much talent on the field as possible and watching it go.

Maybe Ashton Ward is the guy. Maybe Humphreys is.

Maybe it doesn’t matter, because Walker will come back to life and be great again, or Murray will return from his long injury as one of the game’s best locks.

Maybe Fifita plays like everyone has seen he can (but infrequently does) and maybe Wighton keeps up his form but now has others to go with him.

Maybe Mitchell will have a year with more highs than lows, or at least, play more than 17 games, which he never has for Souths to date.

It’s all maybes. If the Rabbits can avoid an injury crisis like they had in 2025, they’ll surely get better, and if the wheels are moving the right direction, they’re a nightmare for anyone.

As it stands, however, this is a Ferrari with a turbocharger, a roofrack, a caravan and a 15 year old driver. Anything could happen.

Prediction: Rise

Thanks for getting to the end of what is, on reflection, a massively long preview. Should I have cut it into three? Probably too late for that nonsense now.

If you liked it, don’t forget to click subscribe. I’ll be back on Tuesday!

Subscribe now

One of the joys of the Substack platform is that there’s no editor beyond myself, and nobody to tell me to shut up. If you like this, click the button below and you’ll be sure to receive more articles like it.

I hit 100 subs in a week, which is far more than I ever expected, so if you are already subscribed, thank you very much for your support. It means a lot.

Subscribe now

It’s not known if Antonio Gramsci, the early 20th century Italian Marxist, even knew that rugby league existed.

If he did, he’d probably have liked it: a central tenet of his philosophy was counter-hegemony, in which the working class should challenge the establishment by setting up their own alternative institutions.

The meeting at The George Hotel took place when Gramsci was just four, but as far as sport goes, it’s hard to think of anything that fits the counter-hegemonic bill as well as rugby league.

While the flame still flickers within those that love the sport - even in Australia, where it reached the Gramscian idyll and transplanted rugby union as the hegemonic power - it has never extended to the field itself.

Rugby league has never lacked for intellectuals, but it has often struggled to see them recognised as such.

When we talk about philosophy in rugby league tactics, it’s not so much about the ideological and intellectual underpinning of the sport, rather the manner in which we discuss the game.

It doesn’t mean that we stop the guilty pleasures of transfer gossip and soap operas that currently dominate our media landscape, but that we add another layer.

To use the advertising phrase, we prove that the market exists.

It would be easy to see how this is someone else’s fault, but is just as much our own.

The values that we hold up as our sport’s best - collectivism, determination, humility - are almost antithetical to the production of geniuses, and when they do exist, they are invariably described in physical rather than intellectual terms.

Similarly, when we talk about the best on-field aspects of the sport, it is often in respect to the toughness, the speed and the skill levels required to enact such feats in such an environment.

When we do discuss the mental aspects, it invariably veers towards resilience and inspiration rather than calculation or strategy. The brain exists to convince the body it isn’t hurt or tired, not to scheme.

The outside world’s view of rugby league is profoundly anti-intellectual, as much due to prejudice around the people that play it as anything else, but our own perception of ourselves doesn’t help to dissuade that notion.

Gramsci could have a word here too: part of his conception of hegemony was that working class people would adopt the mores of the bourgeoisie, repeating the views of the establishment as if they were their own, or at least, in their own interests to do so.

The idea that rugby league is a simple game is, of course, nonsense. It is an intensely tactical sport, and has only become more so since full-time professionalism kicked in the 1990s.

It is perhaps because the game is so technical and tactical that, when trying to convince outsiders of our sport’s merits, the first place we point is to the low-hanging fruit of athletic spectacle.

It’s much more difficult to point out how a set was sequenced or how a long series of sets gradually overwhelmed an opponent than it is to show the end result of a winger diving in at the corner.

A casually interested friend will certainly be more impressed with bell-ringing tackles than with the intricacies of line speed and fatigue management.

These preferences are understandable, but they also don’t contribute to a deepening of the discursive milieu around rugby league.

In league, we don’t talk about our own intellectualism, so we can’t expect anyone else to notice that it exists.

Soccer was once seen similarly to league, but the endless column inches that comes with an insatiable desire for content has opened the door to tactical and statistical analysis, which in turn has slowly changed minds.

They still talk about dribbles and tackles, but also passing lanes and pressing traps.

Indeed, tactical discussion has advanced to the point that the more casual supporter now often laments how much talk of Xs and Os there now is compared to previous eras, when individual skill and bravado was celebrated.

For league, tactics should be front and centre.

It is, to use the jargon, a weak link sport, in that the ability of your worst player is far more important than your best.

It doesn’t matter if you have Nathan Cleary or Tamika Upton if you also have a player who can’t tackle, because the opponent will simply run straight at that player.

An alternative extreme might be basketball, where LeBron James can carry an entire team on his back, using his superb ability to mask the comparative lack of skill in his teammates.

Inherent in weak link sports - soccer, incidentally, is also one - is the formation of strategy around hiding your weaknesses while identifying and exploiting those of your opponent.

To that end defenders are moved across the line to shield them and attacking structures are formed to limit damage from less capable players.

Prior to matches, extensive tactical analysis takes place to find the best way to construct a set of six so that, at the vital moment, the right qualitative or quantitative match-up exists.

We go to the left, then the centre, then the short side, all so their halfback has to make three tackles out of four. We move to the right to create space so that, on the last, we can run the crash line over their smallest player, who is now also knackered.

We run push supports to build confusion, hitting a lead runner twice so that on the third shift to the same side, the defender bites and the overlap appears.

An American Football quarterback gets to see a playbook between downs, but a rugby league playmaker has to hold this in their head, then choreograph it simultaneously with the rest of the spine, hoping that each member of the orchestra of off-ball runners chimes in at their allotted moment.

Moreover, the coaches get to devise these plans week-to-week, lining up opponents in video, while maintaining an overall philosophical underpinning of their style of football that gives individuals the confidence to improvise within it.

Comparable sports simply don’t have this.

Rugby union may be able to string 15 men across the width of the field, which necessitates similar attacking moves, but their contest remains fundamentally about the ball and how to maintain possession.

Without guaranteed second phase play, the maintenance of the ball is the priority, and with unlimited tackles, there is no imperative to use it or lose it. Sequencing multiple plays, even less multiple transitions of possession, isn’t as important.

Though this has changed - some would say due to the impact of rugby league coaching - the fundamental object is still get ball, keep ball.

The scoring system also incentivises penalty goals, which make the physical contest at the ruck a valuable way of generating points, far more so than in league.

With that in mind, the location of the ball - i.e. close enough to goal to take a penalty shot - is of far more importance than it is in league, where tries are much more readily available from further away.

This isn’t to make an intellectual case against rugby union1, rather to point out the vast strategic differences.

Union does a fantastic job of selling itself as a thinking person’s game, whereas league actively obscures its own complexity.

Part of that is to do with preconceptions about the participants rather than the activity - who could have predicted a game conceived by and for the bourgeoisie would be seen as smarter than its proletarian equivalent? - but it is also as much about how little we do to break those stereotypes.

Discussions of Gramsci, philosophy and the like often feel like they should be taking place in an undergraduate seminar room, so instead, let’s relocate them to a different lecture theatre, that which lies beneath the main grandstand at Belmore Sportsground.

Writing in The Roar prior to the appointment of Cameron Ciraldo as the coach of the Bulldogs, I opined that it would be unthinkable that his first press conference would include a question about his coaching philosophy.

Were he taking his first steps into elite coaching with Western Sydney Wanderers - or, really, any soccer club - it would be highly unlikely that he wouldn’t be asked about it. How else would fans know how a Ciraldo team would play?

Even while wondering aloud about this - and knowing that there was a decent chance that, as a working NRL journalist, I might be in the room - I wrote that the ludicrousness of such a question wouldn’t be felt by the coach as much as by my colleagues.

Coaches are our intellectuals. Their job is to sit atop the complexity and direct it. They devise it, communicate it and study the results.

If it goes wrong, they are responsible, but any considered response to complexity is more likely to see them ridiculed.

Remember, any level of intellectualisation in this environment is an over-intellectualisation.

How we - that is to say, those who write about rugby league - communicate that communication doesn’t help. We avoid complexity, even in an environment with near-limitless airtime available.

Rugby league in Australia has found a soap opera sells better than an investigation.

In 2022, a clip of Jonny Lomax, still in his kit, explaining in extreme detail how he had just won St Helens a match, went viral.

Many Australian commenters questioned why, given the access and talent available, these questions were never asked on their screens.

In England, where the characters don’t have the mass market cut through, the transfer market - a subject lifted straight from soccer - has filled that role. The constant drama of recruitment and retention sells better than anything else.

Speaking to colleagues, journalists don’t seem to particularly enjoy writing about either, but like any subjects in a capitalist economy, they don’t get much choice in the matter.

Soap and transfers sell, and punters don’t get served anything else.

If a News Corp journalist asked about coaching philosophy before getting the vital Supercoach information on injuries and suspensions, it would be the last press conference they ever attended.

This is not a criticism of either gossip or transfer rumour, both of which have a place in the landscape. It’s a question about why we don’t get more than that.

Gramsci, again, would like a word. His world was always defined by economics and how it permeated out into the world.

The base - as Marxists called economic factors such as production, workers and capital - interacts with the superstructure, which is culture, ideology, civil society and social relations.

In rugby league, this is reflected both in how the game is played and how it is represented.

On the field, the economic imperative has always ruled: from 1895 onwards, every aspect of the game has been up for sale, every rule malleable to improve the product, every player performing to keep their payments going.

The on-field tactics and its rules are in constant struggle, a synecdoche of the same dialectic that created the sport.

The rules are one way, the tacticians work out a way to exploit them, gain success as a result and provoke a change in the rules.

Most recently, that might be Craig Bellamy’s Melbourne Storm wrestling on the floor, but prior to that it was Warren Ryan’s blanket defence, Eric Simms kicking too many field goals or the creeping barrage rolling down the field monopolising possession.

Remember, the men who sat around that table in Huddersfield were not socialists, rather they were bourgeois businessmen who saw the potential product they had on their hands, if only the aristocrats would let them sell it.

They had workers who wanted to produce and customers who wanted to pay, but were restrained in trade. The Northern Union created that.

Like any product, they had to refine it to suit the desires of their customer base, hence the bevvy of rule changes that have fundamentally, repeatedly recast what rugby league is as a sport.

To quote historian Tony Collins on the subject: “Players will cheat, coaches will scheme and rule-makers will fight a losing battle.”

The ideology we have built around the sport has reflected this.

A cricket fan can talk about the Bodyline bowling tactic in the 1930s, an on-field innovation that redefined the sport and its value system.

A soccer fan can talk about Rinus Michels upturning the sport in the 1970s through Total Football, redrawing the concept of positions and space on the field.

The rugby league supporter has no touch point. The rules simply don’t allow it, changing reactively to adapt to tactical changes to such an extent that comparing eras based on tactics is impossible. We compare by the rules.

In cricket, one might say the era of overarm and underarm bowling, which ended over a century ago, or covered and uncovered pitches, which came to close a mere half century ago.

In soccer, the offside law was introduced in the 1920s and the backpass law in 1992, but beyond that, by and large, it is almost exactly the same game as watched by our grandparents.

The introduction of TV refereeing, which has fundamentally reshaped the interpretations of the LBW law and the offside law respectively, have given fans of those sports an indication of what it has been like to be a rugby league spectator for most of the sport’s existence.

In league, a rule that the casual fan has only just got used to can change again, even in the middle of the season: five metres becomes ten, six tackles reset to zero, rucks speed up to start the year and slow down as it goes on.

One of the funniest things about being a rugby league fan is watching supporters lose their mind about the authorities messing with the fabric of the game, as if that hasn’t happened all the time since the sport’s inception.

The economic push and pull forces the superstructure to react. As the media pays for the whole thing and the punters pay for the media, the circle only accelerates.

The base of rugby league, much like in wider capitalism, is always a battle between the forces of production - players and coaches - and, for want of a better phrase, the means of production, which is to say the game itself, the end result on the field.

The reaction of the superstructure, like out in the world, is not independent: the culture of rugby league, in all its diversity, is tied to the way the game is interpreted via the media, who are, of course, also the central funders of the game; at least in the direct sense, as TV companies hand over the cheques, though they are merely the conduits of cash that flows from punters and the advertisers that want to talk to them.

This is certainly the case in Australia, and to a lesser extent in the UK, though the more niche nature of Super League has a mitigating effect and allows a greater independence of thought and output.

My pet theory for the lack of tactical discussion in Australian rugby league is that, while those who write and report on the sport are undeniably fans first and foremost, those who commission content - whether written, audio or visual - aren’t.

They are forced to react, like everyone else is, to the market forces that dictate blanket rugby league coverage, as they know how their bread is buttered, but aren’t interested in the deeper cultural understanding of those that create it, and thus rely on what they think the people like.

As Mancunian legend and Northern nationalist Tony Wilson - or at least the version of him in Michael Winterbottom’s seminal postmodernist film 24 Hour Party People - dismisses the viewers of his TV show: “The public like public executions.”

Needless to say, very little content is commissioned in Western Sydney or Queensland, where the bulk of rugby league people live. Nobody knows if they would respond to tactical content, because the question has never been asked.

Gramsci would, as ever, have an answer, and luckily, it’s one that rugby league people will understand innately.

When we talk about philosophy in rugby league tactics, it’s not so much about the ideological and intellectual underpinning of the sport, rather the manner in which we discuss the game.

It doesn’t mean that we stop the transfer gossip and soap operas, but that we add another layer. To use the marketing phrase, we prove that the market exists.

Rugby league does not lack complexity and its participants do not lack intelligence, but that is widely communicated outside of the game, and cause great offence within it.

Until we stop recreating stereotypes ourselves, we can’t expect others not to believe them.

If you like long-form, analytical pieces like this, let me know by commenting. Even better, subscribe and encourage me to do more.

Subscribe now

If you think I’m a pretentious prat who should stick to footy, feel free to say that too, although it’s unlikely to put me off.