Agenda 2025: Awards season
Women's footy, internationals and some belated recognition
Welcome to The Maroon Observer, a weekly newsletter about rugby league, Queensland rugby league in Queensland. It’s another reading of the news.
With the pre-season challenge about to start, All-Stars teams named and season previews dropping like autumn leaves, this is the last newsletter looking back at the off-season before we get stuck into 2025 proper.
People take the women’s game seriously and need to keep doing so
Maybe more seriously than the men’s game?
Jillaroos coach Brad Donald has sensationally resigned just three weeks before an inaugural Test match against England in Las Vegas… The bombshell decision for Donald to depart has emerged in the wake of an investigation that he allegedly used an expletive to refer to a journalist in front of players in camp, while airing frustrations about coverage late last year.
That at least explains why the Vegas training camp was cancelled at the last minute.
I don’t think calling a journo a c-bomb (one assumes) for highlighting that you overlooked one of the best players in the game to satisfy the cliquey incumbents would be grounds for firing in the men’s game. I doubt it would even be news, so that is quite some standard being set or, much more likely, a cover for a much more problematic and complicated story.
Over in clubland:
Preparations for Canterbury’s inaugural NRLW season have descended into chaos with the club to part ways with head coach Blake Cavallaro.
The Bulldogs are set to confirm the surprise move in the coming days, months out from the start of the NRLW season.
We don’t know why Cavallaro was fired.
Neither of these look good on the surface but it suggests that there’s enough eyeballs and enough care factor about the women’s game that if something repugnant (not an imputation, purely hypothetical) occurs, there is enough shame to make clubs and governing bodies do more than shrug their shoulders and throw in a misogynistic quip about how woman do be shopping. That they would obfuscate and lie to the fans about what’s really going on is what progress looks like. Kind of!
One of the things that the NRL can be justifiably proud is how well they’ve ushered in the professional women’s game. Scheduling remains a total nightmare, pay is on the lower side of value created and we are not forgetting the farce around the delay of the 2021 season but otherwise, they’ve done a great job of getting the product out, engaging the existing fanbase, expanding the field and the schedule and filling in the pyramid. That work needs to continue.
There’s a lot of handwringing from the rugby league left (cringe) about the potential for head office missteps to undermine progress to date, partially from watching the AFLW struggle to get past 1890s score lines. Those people mean well but they are wrong. Stop worrying about the talent disparity, future fixture congestion and audience splitting, whether the stadiums can be filled or if the TV product is any good. It is. It can stand on its own merits. That’s why there’s a women’s Magic Round now. Treat it accordingly.
As if it needs saying, the women’s game is not a curtain raiser for the men’s. It needs to be treated equally with its own terms, on the basic social principle that men and women are treated as equals. While I understand the reality of transitioning from amateurs to full time professionalism is going to take time to reach something resembling parity with the men’s game, and will require concessions to be made in the interests of logistics and commercial reality, these concessions should reduce over time. If you’re the kind of person reading this newsletter, you should have started to appreciate the deeper consequences of what this simple ethic means.
Some are noticing upticks in injuries, in blowouts and other negatives but they never relate back to what we expect from the men’s game. The men’s Titans started 2024 with an 0-6 record and a -90 points difference and weren’t even close to being the worst team in the league by the end of the season. The women’s Tigers started 0-6 with -112 but still ground out at a 2-7 record, which is a winning percentage of .222 and not that far off what their male counterparts produced (.250) over a 24 game schedule.
We’re not wringing our hands over the state of the whole men’s competition are we? No, we’re laughing at the Tigers for being useless. That’s how footy works. Sometimes it’s lopsided, especially when it’s in flux but, crucially, clubs, players and fans adapt to their surrounds. It is what it is. The women don’t need special dispensations. They’re adults. Let them take their beatings.
Fixture congestion is just something we’re going to have to live with. There are only so many slots on the weekend and only so much appetite for rugby league before people are overwhelmed. This is going to happen because of expansion of the Big M, never mind the Dub. You, the sicko, are going to miss out on some stuff unless you figure out how to split screen, a feature Kayo has had for years.
The overwhelming majority of people do not watch NRL. There is a smaller subset of people that watch their team every week. There is a smaller subset again that might catch another game or two each weekend if they have time. There is an infinitesimal number of people who even attempt to watch all eight NRLM games but these are the people most likely to complain about there being too many games, audiences getting split and so on. If the NRLW gets the solid, once a week viewer watching two games a week, then that would be a huge coup for the NRL.
Pushing the women’s game into a summer that is going to be increasingly concerned with dealing with bushfires, floods and heatwaves is not a viable solution. By tradition, footy season is March to September, which amounts to the same thing as habit. Every sport in the world got to tinker with its schedule during the pandemic and it killed ratings across the board. They’ve all gone back to normal and so have the ratings. What you want is two Broncos games on TV and one in Brisbane every weekend and let people amend their habits accordingly. It’s going to take time but it will pay off.
I don’t expect much out of the Bulldogs in 2025 but time will fill in their gaps, as will perfidy. Eleven year olds in 2018 are turning 18 this year and the conveyor belt is dumping new bodies into the league. I think an underreported aspect is the churn of specific classes of talent that’s occurred since inception. The stars have been constant but the middle class have been turned over several times looking for people who can juggle part time footy with the rest of their life. 19 and 20 year olds who have nothing else going on are the best placed to deal with this and have the added benefit of continuous pathways on their way up to the big leagues, which is one reason that, once you get beyond the brand names, the competition skews young and has time ahead of them.
The biggest issue facing the women’s game then is the transition to getting the players paid such that all of them are full time professionals, instead of just a select few. As the season stretches in length - as more teams join the competition and if you look closely at the draw, there will be three weeks of finals this year - it becomes increasingly difficult to fit rugby league in around a job you need to hold down for the rest of the year. If there’s no need for the other job because they can rely on a full time salary, then players will do what’s necessary to play the game. This will greatly alleviate that middle class churn and allow today’s 20 year olds to have a career with the financial security to also have a life. In the short term, that looks like requesting that if the NRL are going to insist on weeknight play, then players need better compensation, and in the medium term, that probably means Monday night footy? Let’s come back to this some other time.
Locally, as previously suggested, the QRLW competition is moving to align with the NRLW and NSW equivalent. This will put the BMD premiership into a similar position as the Queensland Cup, a reserve grade competition, as opposed to being a pre-season warmup competition for professionals mixing with fringe players.
This is going to completely change the tenor of the league, as the big name stars that have pulled on random jerseys over the last few years will be absent, and we’ll get a better idea of who is coming through the ranks. I am not expecting this change to improve the watchability of the competition but it will grow into something resembling Cup over time.
Interestingly, the feeder arrangements in the men’s game aren’t transferring:
The Brisbane Broncos and Sunshine Coast Falcons have announced an historic new partnership today on the Sunshine Coast.
The first ‘stand-alone’ NRLW affiliation with the Falcons, will provide a pathway for local Sunshine Coast Falcons female players via the Broncos NRLW and Academy programs.
It will also see Sunshine Coast-based Broncos return to play for the Falcons when not required in the main squad, as well as development opportunities for coaches and staff.
The women’s game is now just another theatre of The Great Game.
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The International Game
It's February, so why are we talking internationals? If we’re catching up on what's happened since the grand final and now, then me going to my first proper international in October - I don’t think Colombia v India at Easts Mt Gravatt necessarily counts but it was fun - since the 2017 World Cup final is pertinent.
Tonga versus Australia at Suncorp was a deathly dull game. I enjoyed the pre-game vibe, the Tongan fans brought a lot of colour and energy to the stadium but the overall experience, and the Kangaroos in particular, were exhaustingly uninteresting. Here’s what I remember:
I watched a car get towed from in front of Newstead Brewing and then I saw Andrew Abdo cross a street, unassisted, without getting run over. The street was closed but still, what an effort.
Absolutely relentless complaining from the boomer couple behind me, who were far too invested in the Jillaroos putting 84 on the Orchids. No one in their right mind cares if the calls are correct at that point.
The graphics at Suncorp spelled Trbojevic wrong.
Sipi Tau.
Coates insisted on getting the ball back from the crowd in a rush to set a scrum in a game Australia were fully in control of. They were supposed to be able to keep it, Xavier! That was the promo.
In the kids game at halftime, a kid with a mullet scored a try on the hooter and kicked the ball away like a pro. He must've been 7. Great stuff.
Tonga’s energy - including completely inexplicable rounds of cheering at random times - leeched out of the stadium as Australia murdered everyone with the most boring game in recent memory.
Note the lack of macropussian heroics in the highlight reel here. A handful of Australian fans were happy to give it to Tongan fans because we all love to see a rich nation of 25 million pound on a poor nation of 100,000 and their expatriates. Personally, I’m just not that excited about Dylan Edwards cakewalking to an entirely expected victory. We get enough of that as it is.
The tournament picked up steam when New Zealand got crunched by Australia and then edged out by Tonga, setting up a more compelling rematch in Sydney for the final.
Despite my experiences at Lang Park, I thought this year’s Pacific Championships had a bit more juice than last year’s. To gauge by the reaction of the crowd of “33,000”, you'd think this was an experimental new format and not the oldest form of the game. That suggests there’s still a bit of work to do to re-integrate this back into the mainstream but that seems to be happening. It all seems rather promising.
I want to put two proposals on the table:
The Rorke’s Drift rule: any player who scores a try has to leave the field and cannot be replaced. This would have greatly evened up the Jillaroos game by restricting them to 9 players for the second half and may have injected some contest into the Kangaroos smothering Tonga.
Expand the Pacific Championships to eight by including France (via New Caledonia and Tahiti), to give them something to do as England prefers comfortable victories over half-invested Pacific visitors to relitigating Agincourt, and the winner of a Vegas play-off between Canada and the USA.
I had the latter thought before it became clear that the USARL are, still, a complete shambles. Last year, the IRL installed new governance that was meant to replace the previous shambles of an administration. This year, the USA told Canada they cannot play Greece at Vegas:
But the game has been inexplicably scuppered by the USARL in a move that’s left the Wolverines furious and Canada Rugby League Association (CRLA) allegedly thousands of dollars out of pocket for flights and accommodation…
rugbyleaguehub.com Long Reads understands Greece, bankrolled by Sydney Roosters owner Nick Politis, were keen to play Canada in Las Vegas and the match had the support of the NRL.
But the European nation has been pressured to pull out, with Canada's plan to play Greece in Nevada believed to have upset the USARL, who claimed that the game was "too much rugby league for the week", and another claim that "the second game would be too close to the first game for player welfare"…
Another source admitted: "It's been a shitshow."
The USARL then stopped a Utah U19s team from playing a British Columbia U19s. Utah is not happy. It’s going well then.
This brings us to the governing body, the International Rugby League. Specifically, what is the IRL doing? Troy Grant will give you some platitudes in softball write-ups:
However, more games of international rugby league were played in 2024 than any year before. “Africa is booming and parts of Europe are very active. Asia is a key future focus and the growth of women’s participation is amazing,” he says. That bullishness returns: “We’re doing a hell of a lot better than many people give us credit for because they’re assessing us from an unrealistic understanding of our role and responsibilities.”
While I don’t doubt the latter is true, we need to think about why we’re doing the same thing over and over again and are then shocked when the results are the same. It is difficult to deny the situation in the USA is pathetic and is just one example of national-level mishandling of the sport.
I could lay out the problems facing the game - huge gaps in competitiveness, lack of funding because the World Cup cannot turn a profit, unstable and ineffective member nations - and reason our some solutions from first principles but strangely, we'd end up close to, but not quite, where we are now.
The NRL is the only thing holding the international game together. We get a southern hemisphere nation touring England and the Pacific Champions every year and, other than adding some midseason tests to soak up the Origin dregs, that is about the limit of the appetite for international footy right now. Even this relatively limited program only happens because the NRL pays for it. No one else can afford it. The 2026 World Cup is only happening because the NRL is paying for it. The RFL is practically begging V'Landys to come over and rule them like kings because they want to tap the NRL's money supply.
Why not give up the pretence and centralise control of the professional tier of international football under the NRL? The Olympic-style structure of an international body comprising regional confederations and member states operating democratically is a relic of last century. League isn't big enough to need that much infrastructure, much of it working counterproductively in lieu of Someone in Charge, and union isn't letting league into the Olympics because they can't risk anyone finding out there's a good rugby. There is no reason to operate like this.
England, NZ and PNG can still select teams, like Queensland and New South Wales, but otherwise, let's align the incentives and the power structure. Let the NRL sort out the World Cup and producing inventory people want to watch (we could talk formats for days - I like knockout tournaments, with high stakes and shorter timeframes, as a solution to everything - but we simply do not have the time), and leave the IRL to focus on developing nations to produce amateur players under stricter eligibility requirements that could compete in emerging nations championships. Conceivably, those nations could join the professional tier eventually but, barring the kinds of demographic shifts underpinning the rise of the Polynesian nations, that's not going to happen in my lifetime.
In the meantime, if the NRL wants an Italian team or Lebanese team or Irish team, because it'll sell subscriptions and jerseys and tickets, then that will happen a lot more regularly if they don't need to comply with domestic player requirements or have to care about what observer status means or confer with randoms in Beirut already dealing with a war, or in Nuku'alofa who spent their World Cup money on sending their union 7s team to Hong Kong, or in Tripoli.
One of the things I was struck by in November was that roughly as many people are look at the front of the Kangaroos’ jersey as the front of Tonga’s, and statistically, most of those people are Australian. Yet one has a large insurance broker on the front and the other, well, I’m not really sure what Pacificast does. If consolidated, the NRL would be able to sell Tonga’s jersey space for roughly the same amount to Australian corporate interests because of the predominantly Australian audience, instead of relying the Tongan RL, who presumably have far fewer connections to the Australian business ecosystem and are more reliant on their smaller domestic market, to generate its own revenue.
Grow the pie and share it around. Let Vlando cook.
Intermission
Honorable mention to the international rugby league road map that is a bunch of circles. Anytime I feel bad about myself, I’ll remember that chart got published in News Corp papers and feel a lot better.
The next broadcast deal
With the next broadcast deal starting in 2028, negotiations are already underway. We have seen some trial balloon ideas released late last year but rubber will hit road this year.
Rugby union just sealed a 40% uplift on their deal, of which about 20% can be chalked up to inflation so it's a 4-5% p.a. gain in real terms. I don't think it's hard to argue rugby league is in better health, given the Storm didn't go bust last year and get immediately forgotten. I think this proceds will generate plenty of potentially interesting headlines but, with no particular expertise to offer, my guess is that we will stick with the status quo for as long as Nine can remain operational, which is a less than compelling outcome. Barring a massive reform in anti-siphoning, the best we have to look forward to is DAZN increasing the price of Kayo and enshittifying its service.
V’Landys doesn’t seem like the kind of man that really gets innovative solutions or has much patience for driving a hard bargain or dealing with the overheads of packaging up the rights into tiny tranches, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the last “$2 billion” deal became close to a “$3 billion” deal for five years starting in 2028.
So given how bland that outcome is, let’s take up some room with baseless speculation about what might be. A 20 team NRL lends itself to four divisions of five teams. With that structure, 18 or 23 game schedules become easy to generate. Teams play in-division rivals home and away (eight games) and play inter-divisional teams once, either two divisions on rotation (another 10 games, for a total of 18) or all three divisions (another five games again, for a total of 23). The division winners are seeded one through four for finals and the runners-up five through eight. Simple, elegant and should the English lay down arms and accept a V’Landyan Conquest, the NRL could turn Super League into two more divisions and weld them onto the structure. We could spend weeks talking about what that might look like but we need to keep moving.
20 NRLM teams, an ever expanding NRLW and an under 21s (men only apparently) competition, greatly increases the supply of NRL-branded content-like spooge. Supply and demand remains undefeated, so for the price per unit to remain as is, either supply has to give or demand has to increase. While demand definitely seems to be up, how long will that continue? Can that demand be met by women (I’d like to think so) or kids (I care far less about this outcome)? What kind of cost cutting can we expect?
One of the reasons I’ve advocated a shorter regular season for the NRL is that we get so much dreck from the Origin period and there’s better things we could be doing with that time. I don’t care about this issue as a specific disadvantage to particular clubs, and I know why it happens (revenue must go up, people can’t stomach not watching the Dogs and Titans play out a 18-4 thriller with a combined completion rate of 65%), but we could simply not play these games. Pair men’s Origin with international bilaterals/three game series and allow the NRLW to provide club-based content that weekend (repeat and flip the genders for Dub weekends affected women’s Origin) to generate a decent round’s ratings in the aggregate and delete the shitty NRLM games from the schedule. It makes the season more interesting without making huge sacrifices to the rhythm.
Instead, watch the dinguses in charge overlay an annoying conference structure that no one asked for to give a Sydney team a dream run to the grand final, not implement the midseason internationals and continue to treat the NRLW as a scheduling afterthought and not a meaningful alternative to NRLM that could push a lot of the same buttons for the fans.
2024 Players of the Year
One thing I ran out of energy to do at the end of 2024 was do some player awards. I did them at the end of 2023 in various season reviews but leaned on the stats a bit because, guess what, I didn’t watch a whole lot of Ipswich Jets or Mackay Cutters football. I am only human.
But now I have the stats sorted and some faint memories of watching players in 2024, although it’s touch and go for the Titans women because I’m not sure they made it to the field, so here’s some belated awards for 2024 and some new categories that I have retroactively awarded for ‘23 and ‘24 (marked with *). Just to make it fun, I’m going to toss in some predictions for the ‘25 winners (the fun bit is coming back and laughing at wrong I was).
Broncos Players of the Year
2023: Reece Walsh / Ali Brigginshaw
2024: Kotoni Staggs / Stacey Waaka
2025: Deine Mariner / Tafito Lafaele ???
Cowboys Players of the Year
2023: Scott Drinkwater / Kirra Dibb
2024: Kyle Feldt (lifetime achievement award) / Emma Manzelmann
2025: Jamal Shibasaki / Lily Peacock ???
Dolphins Player of the Year
2023: Isaiya Katoa
2024: Herbie Farnworth
2025: Max Plath ???
Titans Players of the Year
2023: David Fifita / Georgia Hale
2024: Alofiana Khan-Pereira / Karina Brown (lifetime achievement)
2025: Jayden Campbell / Ngatokotoru Arakua ???
QCup Dudes / Guys of the Year
Dude is a NRL-calibre player, Guy is a Cup-calibre player. The line between the two is blurry and there is some overlap in the groups.
Bears - 2023: Keano Kini / Jacob Alick; 2024: Guy Hamilton, Josh Patston (joint guys of the year, no dudes)
Blackhawks - 2023: Zac Laybutt / Robert Derby; 2024: Kyle Laybutt (lifetime achievement)
Capras - 2023: Blake Moore, Bailey Butler (joint guys of the year); 2024: Anthony Milford / Zev John
Clydesdales - 2023: Darryn Schonig; 2024: Taniela Otukolo
Cutters - 2023: Flynn Camilleri; 2024: Jaxon Purdue / Josh Smith
Devils - 2023: Breandan Piakura / Jack Ahearn; 2024: Tesi Niu / Manase Kaho
Dolphins - 2023: Trai Fuller / Cody Hunter; 2024: Josh Kerr /
Oryn KeeleyBrent WoolfFalcons - 2023: Sua Faalogo / Scott Galeano; 2024: Caius Faatili, Zacariah Miles (joint guys)
Hunters - 2023: Rodrick Tai; 2024: Judah Rimbu
Jets - 2023: Gerome Burns; 2024: Alofiana Khan-Pereira / Rhys Jacks (lifetime achievement)
Magpies - 2023: Ben Te Kura / Rory Ferguson; 2024: Blake Mozer / Ethan Quai-Ward
Pride - 2023: Daniel Hindmarsh-Takyi; 2024: Jake Clifford / Thomas Duffy
Tigers - 2023: Jonah Pezet / Corey Thompson; 2024: Leivaha Pulu (no dude awarded)
Tweed - 2023: Treymain Spry / Lindon McGrady; 2024: Tony Francis / Brayden McGrady
Wynnum - 2023: Deine Mariner / Josh Rodgers; 2024: Cory Paix / Kalolo Saitaua
QRLW Player of the Year*
2023: Chelsea Lenarduzzi
2024: Emma Manzelmann
2025: Skyla Adams or Emily Bella ??? (they’re not going to have to compete with established NRL stars any more)
Q4 NRL Coach of the Year*
2023: K Walters, BNE
2024: T Payten, NQC
2025: R Henry, NQC ???
QCup Coach of the Year*
2023: L Harbin, CQC
2024: P Aiton, HNT
2025: E Smith, RED ???
Proof of Concept Coach of the Year*
2023: K Hunt, SLM
2024: T Campese, TSV
2025: T Ingebritsen, IPS ???
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Reads
John Davidson: IMG, AI and genuine appetites
Rob Burgin: Mal Meninga believes international rugby league is on 'right path' despite global development concerns
Jason Oliver: Take it or Leave it: 2025 NRL Predictions
Rodger Sherman: The spineless cowardice of the NCAA's anti-trans swerve
Notes
The QRL dropped their annual report. Profitability has returned, turning a $300k loss into a $900k win thanks to a couple extra mil tipped in by our new best friend, Peter V’Landys. Praise be. Participation is up, mostly for women but also men.
The clubs have too much money: NYC expected to return in 2026. That’s sooner than I thought but this seems to have all the momentum of a runaway freight train and none of the consideration, so why not. Can’t wait for it to be canned in another decade because of spiralling costs, player welfare and ineffective development regimes. I guess when the only conceivable investment in the future are hotels, you may as well burn money on more footy few asked for.
To that end, the Q4 are putting together a four team mini-league to follow Mal Meninga Cup to prepare for next year’s NYC, which included this anonymous quote: “The Queensland clubs have been hamstrung for a period,” said one Queensland official. “You look at the pipeline that Sydney clubs like Penrith, Parramatta and the Bulldogs have been able to put together over the last 10 years.” Sorry, no, you don’t get to say that without having your name attached to you so we can identify the specific retention failures you were responsible for. Also, the Bulldogs and the Eels are the success stories? What have you been watching? The Broncos lost a grand final and fired their coach just as effectively as Parramatta did, and that was the high water mark of the last decade for the Eels. The Bulldogs scraped back into the finals for the first time in years by taking the leavings of the Panthers and destroying Karl Oloapu’s neck. Make it make sense.
Extrapolating a bit further, is this the last year of the reserve grade super bowl? No one seems that interested in playing it, especially the Queensland side (which makes last year's victory even better), and an under 21s final would fit the vibe better, as well as ticking a bunch of boxes for some old fogeys on about all three grades before they never actually watch it. Yes, and you sick freaks will probably enjoy it too. Fine, I will start looking into these children for you.
Farewell to Kyle Laybutt. A Kumuls hero and Townsville stalwart, his latter career arc - beating the British Impotents with PNG in 2019 and then leaving the Blackhawks as its most capped player because of the Cowboys’ being doofuses in 2023, only to return once that relationship shattered beyond repair in 2024 - is as much a reason for this newsletter’s continued existence as any. Of course, the 29 year old is not retiring retiring, he’s playing A-grade in Townsville with the defending premiers, the Souths Bulls. Best of luck.
I wondered where Rohan Smith was going to turn up after his exit from Leeds and it turns out, it’s back at Norths. That is a short shrift for Dave Elliott, who left Mackay to takeover the Devils, won a premiership just six months ago and is now an assistant coach with the women’s Maroons. Then again, with three different coaching setups in four years and three premierships to show for it, apparently winning the Queensland Cup at Nundah is simply not that hard.
2032: Timber stadium proposed for new, relocated Gabba. Oh, Richard Kirk, here we go… hmm, that actually sounds pretty reasonable. Still, glad I'm not the structural engineer that has to make the timber stadium on the deck that extends over Main and Vulture Streets work.
Buzz raising broadcasters’ concerns over a Perth team (but ultimately backing in PVL to get it done). Why didn’t we hear from them for PNG ???
Brains: Rugby’s concussion trial moves a step closer to reality after high court progress. “When Moses led his people out of the wilderness, it took 40 years to get to the promised land,” Cook said. “We’re not going to spend that amount of time wandering around.” Sassy judge.
Player charged over on-field incident in Qld rugby league game
Ozfish drop more than 3,000 man-made oyster reefs at Port of Brisbane in bid to restore shellfish population. Living on the bay now, I think this kind of stuff is neat.