Ultra-processed rugby league is a big problem for broadcasters (and the NRL)
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”
Magic Round was, we’re told, a great success.
Record crowds, viewers, sponsors - everything. That might be true: right up until the bit where the footy started.
This year was a fiasco on the field, with all but one match a blowout, a terrible standard of play and, of course, constant interference from the officials.
It’s a problem for the NRL.
While there’s no metric for the product feeling a bit crap, there’s plenty that show the symptoms of it - and the broadcasters are likely to turn up to the TV rights negotiations with a folder full of them.
Australia gives the impression of choice, but really, it is a cartel.
This is a country with one hardware store, two supermarkets, three phone companies and four banks - and if you watch sport in this country, you’ll know all about it, because they’re the ones chucking the money at the advertising.
Which parts of the cartel you see, however, is often dictated by which sport you watch, and what channel you watch it on, because both of those things are cartels, too.
There’s the rugby league bit, in New South Wales and Queensland, which is broadcast on Channel 9, and the Aussie Rules bit, everywhere else, which is broadcast on Channel 7.
If you only tune in for one game a year of the other sport1, as many people do, it’s like Bizarro World.
Suddenly Peter Overton, the avuncular host of Nine News, is replaced by Mark Ferguson, his slightly more serious Seven News equivalent.
You get The Chase rather than Tipping Point and Farmer Wants a Wife rather than Married at First Sight.
Shows like these are the most vital revenue drivers because, in a streaming world, they remain the only things that you need to watch at a certain time to make the most of.
Often in Australia – and for Australians, this is the opposite of how UK telly works – there won’t even be an ad break between one show ending and another starting, because if you even introduce the concept of the audience going away, they do.
Stall for a second between Tipping Point and the news and you might lose the ratings that night, and indeed, forever, because there isn’t really any difference between Fergo and Overton, and they’re telling you the same news anyway.
This is a huge problem for rugby league at the moment.
They’re losing viewers as scorelines get out of hand and viewers turn off, which in turn, is causing severe consternation at the networks they rely upon for their cash.
The Sunday news, which comes directly after the footy, is the highest rated show of the week on Nine, pulling in a million more viewers than the NRL.
If people have already turned off due to an uncompetitive game, they might have stuck on the AFL on Seven, a streaming show on Netflix or (heaven forbid) turned off the telly entirely.
As the NRL negotiates its new TV deal, it is faced by a problem that Channel 9, the biggest free-to-air payer in the sport, are losing vital lead-in viewers, which is one of the reasons they are so committed to the sport on free-to-air television.
It cascades through everything else, from the news ratings to the ads for other high-impact properties that they get to punt to the footy audience.
If that audience isn’t there for the last 20 minutes, it’s a 25% drop in exposure for other products.
It’s ironic, really, because the viewer switch-off is a direct on-flow from other decisions made to placate broadcasters.
The Six Again rule was designed to create more tries, which means more ad breaks for broadcasters.
From that, there is also more opportunity for bookies, who know that the Same Game Multi is the most profitable product they offer, and thus more opportunities to punt that via the broadcasters.
It certainly, as has been discussed extensively in these pages, wasn’t made for players, coaches or fans, who were all pretty pleased with the product as it was in 2019 – but it is a highly virtuous circle for the NRL bigwigs.
Peter V’Landys has made it his mission to avenge the great TV rights disaster of 2020.
You will rarely hear about it in the mainstream media in Australia, but the game is still picking up the financial pieces from this.
The NRL rights were sold below market value to keep the game going – who knows, rugby league might have stumbled on – with Channel 9, in particular, big winners.
They got the footy back, at a lower rate than they would have expected, and then used the spare cash to buy Australian rugby union, which they continue to sell at a profit.
PVL was, in his defence, very successful in getting the game up and running during the pandemic – but the cost of this was a cut-price deal that not only came in north of $100m a year worse than the direct competition of the AFL, but also gave away the biggest two growth areas of the game, the NRLW and Test footy, for a song.
Whenever you hear talk of the game’s financial health from HQ, remember that this is the deal they trumpeted.
V’Landys gets a free ride from the legacy media – who are, you will remember, largely concentrated in outlets owned by the two NRL broadcasters – but bear that point in mind when a new deal is signed and you hear how much of an increase it is.
It can’t help that the new, accelerated, sugar hit version of rugby league, both figuratively and literally, turns viewers off.
Andrew Abdo’s ‘bigger and better’ boast has been debunked twice in these pages already2, so we don’t need to go into that too much, but there is one aspect about the TV ratings pie that is worth dissecting.
Ratings are announced typically in two forms: average viewers and total reach.
Essentially, a panel of viewers report their habits, which are then extrapolated nationally, producing an average – the number of people watching at any given moment – and the reach, which is all the people who watched for a minute (or 15 seconds in streaming).
You’ll note that neither of those features a metric on how many people watched to the end, which is highly salient for internal use when Channel 9 executives sit down with potential advertisers.
They will certainly cite higher viewing figures for the NRL in 2026, and increased opportunities in the Westpac Red Zone, which lead to more Harvey Norman replays of tries, which come after more commercial breaks while someone lines up a conversion.
Anyone across the table would then ask to see how many of those viewers were there in the final quarter, when the Red Bull Try Predictor was set to 100% for the team that was already 20 points ahead.
A smart negotiator might also point to the more ephemeral, but still important variable: meaning.
People switch off because they are watching something that isn’t meaningful, which is in turn not engaging.
This isn’t necessarily linked to closeness of margin – if it was, we’d celebrate 0-0 draws in soccer – but whether something matters, either in the context of a season or just, simply, the context of itself.
It’s whether, to use the Australian parlance, something is fair dinkum or Mickey Mouse.
A good equivalent is cricket, where there has never been more content, featuring all the things that theoretically people like, but served in such a way as to remove any semblance of context.
The T20 version of the sport has more hits and wickets in a more spectacular fashion in a shorter period of time, in more tournaments than ever.
But, crucially, nobody cares who wins - up to and including the players themselves, who can easily play in multiple competitions in different countries back-to-back without any time in between.
When I was in hotel quarantine in January 2021, I watched 14 straight nights of Big Bash League cricket, interspersed with Australia v India in the Sydney Test.
I could tell you ten things that happened in that Test match and zero things that happened in the over 24 hours’ worth of T20, because none of it meant anything, it was just on. I did get a KFC on the final night though, so at least the advertising worked.
People used to speculate if there was a T20 version of rugby league that could help the sport break through to new markets - instead, V’Landys et al have taken all the worst aspects of short-form cricket and made it the regular product.
Magic Round was a great example of this: I watched 95% of it and could barely tell you anything interesting that happened, just days later, have almost entirely forgotten it.
Compare that to Magic Rounds passim: Jordan Tansey’s try in 2007, David Hodgson’s sickener3 in 2012, James Maloney’s drop goal in 2021, Murray Taulagi’s offload in 2022 - and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head in four seconds of thought.
Much like the Shapes4 that were advertised throughout, it was semi-diverting at the time but instantly forgotten and terrible for you in anything other than small quantities.
This sugar hit feeling is one that we see increasingly across culture.
Blade Runner (1982) and Transformers (2007-2023), for example, both feature androids locked in a final battle.
In one, enough work was put in to make you care about them, so it became one of the most critically acclaimed films of all time.
Nobody knew what C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate meant, but it meant something, that’s for sure.
Those movies made a truckload of cash but viewers didn’t care why the robots were fighting, so a decade on, nobody remembers the first thing about any of the films.
In rugby league, everyone likes tries.
They create ad breaks, which is great for selling ad slots.
They give you something to post on socials, a perfectly formed piece of (to use the jargon) snackable content, able to be packaged, sold, consumed and forgotten in seconds.
Narrative moves on context, so it’s a risk to decontextualise the principal plot device of your story.
The NRL has prioritised the quick hit, more-is-more approach, while neglecting the aspect of the game that drew people in and made them care in the first place.
Narratively, rugby league was always based on the battle of possession v position, where physicality, fatigue, smarts and strategy combined.
But when tries are cheap and plentiful, each individual event loses value.
It’s ultra-processed rugby league, and everyone knows that’s bad for you.
The issue for the NRL is that, when the broadcasters come to the table, they might point that out too.
They know their audience. They have the data. If they’re smart, they’ll point to the product and wonder why it doesn’t matter as much as it once did.
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Typically the AFL Grand Final or, in reverse, State of Origin
At least to this Hull FC supporter. Rovers fans likely hold an alternative view.
I don’t think they sell Shapes outside Australia (though they should), so for non-Aussie readers, they’re sort of like crisps but also biscuits - a bit like Mini Cheddars but much better.
Love the reference to cricket because I wholeheartedly agree. It's also a deep critique of culture. So good!
Spot on mate. I am a rusted on die hard rugba league supporter so cant see myself just losing interest anytime soon. It helps being a manly fan that our team is killing it but something just feels off at the moment watching games and im losing interest each game. In a culture increasingly demands snack sized entertainment i fear its ever going to be reversed.