Charting everything you need to know about NRL TV ratings

You don't even need to be afraid to ask

Welcome to Stats Drop, an inundation of rugby league numbers.

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One of the basic premises of being a sports fan is that you want to watch your team play but fans don’t necessarily have the capacity to attend every single game. We all, after all, have got other stuff on.

In lieu of being there, it is much more convenient and much more cost effective to watch a broadcast of the game on television. In the world of the NRL, it is considered so preferable that many hundreds of thousands choose this as their way of engaging with the sport, compared to the few tens of thousands that attend games in person.

The attention of those hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people is valuable. The broadcaster can judiciously insert advertisements during the game that will grab the audience’s attention and help sell the advertisers’ product. The broadcasters use the promise of that revenue to buy the exclusive rights to show the game from the NRL, locking in a loyal, attentive audience for the sponsors.

This revenue stream is extremely important to the NRL. To take the example of the Brisbane Broncos, News reported that the Broncos clear $11.9 million on gameday revenue. It costs the Broncos nearly $10 million to make that revenue, without accounting for any of the footballing expenses. Game day makes some, but not much, money and it is far less for teams that aren’t averaging 41,000 at Suncorp every home game.

By comparison, the NRL pays the Broncos, and every other team, a central distribution of approximately $15 million per year out of the broadcast deal. That distribution pays for all of the players and most of the coaching staff, the basic human constituents of what people consider “their team”.

This simple logic gets lost when discussing how the NRL is structured. People seem to lose track of the direct link between fans and the clubs when the broadcasters mediate that connection. It becomes subsumed by the notion of money and greed. Really, the broadcast deal is the medium of exchange from fan interest to player salaries with the networks clipping the ticket along the way.

The idea that the NRL should be built exclusively around the needs of 15,000 people at Brookvale or 12,000 at Shark Park seems quaint when upwards of half a million people are watching at home. Viewers’ needs are rarely entered into the discussion, even though their economic contribution greatly outweighs that of the ticketholders.

If you are the kind of person who reads this newsletter, then it is likely that you would like to be an informed fan. Understanding the mechanisms of the broadcast deal helps clarify administrative decisions that would otherwise be unintelligible. While it is not strictly necessary that you care about the broadcast deal or TV ratings, if you want to know what’s up, then having that understanding will help greatly.

I personally find this stuff fascinating. Back in 2020, as the pandemic completely cleared out my schedule, I wrote Everything you ever wanted to know about NRL TV ratings but were afraid to ask, in which I delved deeply into TV ratings data. It ended up being one of the most popular pieces on PythagoNRL.com and I probably should have charged the NRL tens of thousands to do it as a consultancy, instead of publishing it for free on the internet where anyone could read it.

I had always wanted to go back and revisit and retest some of the conclusions reached with more data. It’s been five and a half years, so like a chump, here we are yet again, publishing valuable research for free.

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Before we return to the grossly underpriced consulting work, Jason at Footy/Sports Industry AU has kindly furnished me with NRL ratings data. He runs a website that I follow to keep up with media data and a Bluesky account. I hadn’t even planned on doing this until he sent me the numbers. If you think he’s a shill for a given code, you’re a dingus and should instead be thanking him.

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Sports on TV isn’t dead, it’s just resting

In 2020, I wrote that “its timely to do this analysis now before that becomes a really significant, and completely opaque, component of how fans engage with the sport.” If you’d asked me then, I would’ve guessed that Nine and Fox would’ve gone into bankruptcy long before 2026 and certainly wouldn’t be preparing tenders for the 2028 to 2032 cycle. Instead of streaming obliterating the past, good old fashioned television has shown a great deal of resilience.

While the methodologies that underpin TV ratings numbers have their flaws, there are no perfect statistics. There are also no better ways of measuring the size of a club’s fanbase. You could consult Roy Morgan’s maligned fan survey, you could look at attendances or memberships, but for mine, nothing beats TV ratings. Everyone has access to a TV and can make the choice to turn on the game. Where the ratings go, so do the dollars that allow the sport to exist.¹

This post is going to look primarily at free-to-air ratings numbers². While FTA has been resilient, it hasn’t been impervious to changes in technology. The difference is that FTA rating numbers have been reported publicly, for a long time, using an agreed-upon methodology to allow the networks to sell ad space. While that methodology changed significantly in 2024, in a way that conveniently paints a surprising picture of robustness of demand for free-to-air televised content, it is intuitive what one viewer represents and extrapolate from there.

Pay TV numbers stopped being made publicly available at the end of 2023 and while it was advantageous for the previous analysis to have a number assigned to every single match, with nine years of data to work with, the stickiness of subscriptions and smaller size of the audience for cable outweighs the need to benchmark every game.

Before you ask, Kayo is impenetrable. 400,000 people subscribed to Kayo in 2020 and that figure is closer to 1.5 million now. Unsurprisingly, Foxtel has not made much effort to report viewing statistics, not least because Hubbl cannot seem to get a decent ad platform for Kayo together, but press releases indicate the Kayo audience was about 80% on top of the traditional cable rating. Take this with a serving suggestion of salt. After the sale to DAZN earlier in the year, it all ceases to be their problem. I don’t expect transparency to improve. We also have no idea what’s going on in New Zealand.

This chart paints a slightly different picture to the more narrowly scoped one published in 2020. While the Broncos and Storm remain atop the standings, the Panthers have risen and the Bulldogs managed to pull themselves off the canvass, while the Cowboys and Sharks have slid backwards into the midfield.

Notable is the Broncos’ ongoing dominance of this metric, despite enduring the worst period of the club’s history. One common complaint, especially in the weeks after the draw’s release, is how many primetime slots the Broncos are given. Of course, their ratings are the highest because they’re always playing Friday nights. That is certainly valid to an extent.

Perhaps the biggest broadcast change arising from the introduction of the Dolphins is the reduction of Broncos games on free-to-air television. Pre-Redcliffe, the Broncos were allowed up to 16 regular season appearances on FTA, while all other clubs were capped at 12. With the Dolphins acting as the Aldi Broncos, Brisbane’s cap has been brought down in line with the other teams. As you can see from the data, these are not hard and fast caps, so much as beginning points of negotiation.

In the 20s, the NRL has tried to spread more games around more teams. This Broncos primetime fixation is clearly a bugbear of executives and commentariat alike. As a result, Brisbane will play their first ever Friday 6pm game in 2026 against the Raiders.

The simple averages don’t convey a good sense of what these ratings would be all others things being equal.

What gets people to watch?

The reasons that people decide to watch a NRL game fall into three main buckets:

• They want to watch their favourite team. I assume this is the primary motivator for a plurality of the audience. We will estimate a relative figure for this later.

• They want to watch rugby league football and the NRL is the pre-eminent competition in this sport. We call this the “sicko demographic”, who will watch whatever is on when it is available.

• There are a series of smaller factors that influence marginal decision making as to whether to turn the game on. This is the casual factor.

As you will know from your own experience, decision making isn’t a single thread alone but is weaved from a fabric whose threads change with time and mood. Even the biggest sycophant Knights fan will miss some games because they are beyond hope and also they have to go to a wedding in Dubbo. The worst pervert you know won’t be able to watch eight NRL games live every weekend for over six months.

Let’s unpack some of the elements of the casual factor.

Other than the extremely popular season kick-off in Vegas, Thursday and Friday nights are by far the most widely viewed timeslots in the aggregate. Even within the pay TV data, we see that night time games get better ratings than day time ones.

Fans complain about timeslots assigned their teams or how the schedules games in general. This is called an expressed preference. Fans will watch games in the primetime slots on Thursday and Friday in far greater numbers than the weekend day slots, giving an approximately 20% premium to games played in weekday primetime. This is called a revealed preference. Revealed preferences are far more important than expressed preferences, because they represent what people actually do, rather than what people will say they think they will do.

It is little surprise that people tune out as the season progresses. The novelty of a new season and hopes for change are, for a non-trivial part of the NRL, smashed on the rocks of reality every single year. Most rational people don’t need to see out a 8-16 season in every excruciating detail. It is enough to know that the team is bad, it is not getting better and to find something else to do until those hopes rise again next February.

We can use form Elo ratings as a proxy for the perceived quality of the match. The gap between the two teams’ pre-match form Elo rating gives a good indication of how well matched two teams are in a given fixture. Unsurprisingly, games with better matched teams rate (left hand side) rate better than games with less well matched teams.

Two poor teams may be evenly matched but that does not necessarily make for a compelling contest. Instead, let’s consider the average form Elo rating of the two teams. Two in-form teams will have higher ratings (right hand side). Conversely, two lower rated teams should be actively repellant to the average fan. When we group games of similar quality by this metric, we see a very clear linear relationship between the average form rating of the match and the TV rating. Good teams draw more viewers.

How big are these clubs?

Or, is this just an exercise in Broncos supremacy? And the answer is “mostly, yes”.³

If we account for these four casual factors, as well as the structural changes in how people watch TV (i.e. lower ratings in general now than in 2017), then what’s left should be reflective of the size of the fanbase, as measured by people who watch that team on TV, and by extension, the contribution made to the overall broadcast deal.

For example, the Sea Eagles hosted the Roosters in round 19 of the 2018 season on Sunday afternoon. The Roosters won 56-24, going into the half up 34-6. That game rated 515,000 people on Nine, which is

• 15.4% less than the average game in 2018

• 7.5% more than the average Sunday afternoon game

• 8.6% less than the average round 19 game

• 3.8% less than the average for two teams of that combined form Elo rating

• 5.2% less than the average for two teams of that gap

This averages out to 5.1% less than the average game, all other things being equal. While you could weight these factors, derived from multivariable regression, and you would arrive at marginally different conclusions, the main findings are inescapable.

Obviously, the Broncos having nearly 20 games more than the next team skews this somewhat, so we’ll adjust that by looking at a per game average.

In the previous analysis, I noted that the Warriors rated OK for a team that had three (3) free-to-air games in three years because Nine wants to show as little of the New Zealand team as possible. I thought this might underestimate the size of the Kiwi ex-pat community’s attachment to the club but with the larger dataset, the Warriors have the lowest average FTA audience and, on a per game basis, they have the worst average value-add. Nine were right but the Warriors’ presence greatly improves a New Zealand TV deal that brings in more than their distribution means that all of this is irrelevant to their prospects.

It also means that the Warriors are the ideal replacement level team to benchmark per game value-add. As a team without an especially long or illustrious history and no specific connection to Australia, the Wahs’ Australian audience overwhelmingly consists of people watching the other team or watching NRL for its own sake. On that basis, I’ve shown the above average value-add relative to that of the Warriors (-15.3% unadjusted)⁴.

The league breaks itself relatively neatly into tiers:

1. Broncos

2. Storm

3. “Big” Sydney clubs, Queensland clubs

4. Small markets

5. Newcastle

This may not be a revelatory result but it is worth confirming.

Are the Tigers a sleeping giant?

That Wests could be a commercial powerhouse in waiting was one of the lesser conclusions reached in 2020. Anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of Tigers fans on the internet. Until this year, the 2005 grand final was the highest rating NRL match of all time. Wests seemed to outperform their expected ratings, given their generally low quality team and less-than-optimal scheduling.

However, the Tigers have been crap for at least the last 15 years. Not being able to make finals in a decade and a half in a competition that sends half its teams to the post-season is about as damning a sporting indictment as possible to imagine. You might then conclude that the Tigers’ relatively low value-add is a result of that.

While there is a relationship between winning and better TV ratings, it is not a strong one. The Broncos were basically 12-12 over this entire period and still rated far higher than the rest of the league. The Tigers, and the Titans, are about where we would expect them to be given their performance.

There is still a trend though. The Storm’s value-add has improved markedly relative to the rest of the league through the 2020s. This may be partly due to changes in calculation methods, both for ratings and in this analysis, but sustained competitiveness would also be a factor in their rise to the commercial apex of the league.

At the resolution of single seasons, the trend is practically random across the league and within individual clubs. One reason is related to the quality of data but another is the vagaries of TV ratings. The Panthers’ prime years of regular season success (2020-22) came while NRL-wide ratings were at their lowest ebb in the dataset. Linearly regressing the Panthers’ season ratings against their winning percentage yields a negative gradient, which implies the more the Panthers win, the fewer people watch. That doesn’t make a lot of sense given what we know.

Similarly, there’s never really been a good Gold Coast team. We have simply no way of reliably predicting what would happen to their TV ratings if the Titans were sustainably and regularly good. A few consecutive seasons in the top six might see ratings not budge after decades of ineptitude has wasted any sense of goodwill in the nation’s sixth largest city. Conversely, had that success come earlier, we might see a different result. Alternatively, the Gold Coast might be the nation’s pre-eminent bandwagon sports city. We just don’t know.

Can the Tigers become a commercial powerhouse? Sure, anything is possible.

But probably not.

The big games

While the regular season is the bread and butter inventory for the NRL, where the real money comes in from the influx of marginal fans who tune in for the big games: finals and State of Origin.

Even before we got to the grand final, 2025’s finals series was astonishingly well received. A rational person would likely look at changes to ratings calculation methods in 2024 and then layer on top of it the biggest club in the sport putting together three successive incredibly unlikely, unbelievably thrilling comebacks and draw the conclusion that was probably a one-off. The administration is likely to conclude that Sunday afternoons are a good time for finals footy and do more of that. Thanks Ricky, you’re only going to disappoint V’Landys.

I was unable to find a suitable method for teasing apart what impact the participating teams had on the final rating. The rating seems to reflect the teams involved, another of general cultural fugazi as to how people felt about the NRL that year, as well as our old friends - the slow and sad decline of free-to-air television and monoculture.

The inexplicable plateau seems to be largely from a mass influx of regional viewers. Quite why the combination of teams in 2012 through 2014 inspired such devotion from our country friends is unclear. The long run average share of audience is about one-third but regional viewers seem to have spiked to 43% in 2013.

While I was inclined to chalk this up to data or measurement issues, there does seem to have been a boomlet in the early 2010s. League wide attendances dropped from a high water mark of 16,423 in 2012 to 15,940 in 2013 and then again from 15,905 in 2014 to 15,074 in 2015, before a long glide into covid had people wondering about the future of the sport. Fortunately, the Dolphins arrested that slide and now the NRL has had back-to-back years over 20,000.

Whether that boomlet was caused by the first part of Queensland’s 15-in-20 dynasty, I’ll leave to the reader to judge.

Code wars

Doing an apples-for-apples comparison of TV ratings between sports is challenging. The games and seasons are different lengths. The NRL has a slate of high rating representative matches that the AFL does not. Sponsors like the AFL’s solid national footprint. It is then hard to render the numbers into something sensible.

The best we can do over the long run is compare grand final TV ratings as our yardstick events that stop the nation. Both the AFL and NRL have had their grand finals lodged in the top ten, if not the top five, rating TV events every year for at least the last decade and a half.

Interestingly, the ratings recorded over the long run by enthusiasts have typically been the 5 city metro. I can’t help but notice the AFL trumpeting its total audience this year with no mention of its metro component. Is it because 2025 is the year that the NRL finally outrated those bums? Maybe, although this doesn’t do a good job of hiding it, seeing as the NRL’s total viewership still blew the AFL out of the water with the highest rated grand final of all time.⁵ This year’s total AFL rating was similar to last year’s, so it would follow that the 5 city metro rating is similar.

The second game of rugby union’s 2025 Bledisloe Cup test rated 893,000 viewers on Nine. That’s the best result for a union test since they switched to Nine during covid and follows on from a Lions tour, which should give the sport some momentum. It is also less than any game of the last two women’s State of Origin series or this year’s women’s grand final, which were all around the million mark.

Last year’s men’s Pacific Championships final between Australia and Tonga, in the sport where “no one” cares about the international game, rated 630,000, which was fractionally higher than this year’s cracking final between New Zealand and Samoa (615,000) in the absence of Australia. Anyone who tries to tell you that international rugby union is still culturally significant in this country even though the club game is a total irrelevance, you now know that’s cope because the best they can do barely out-rated the most boring match I’ve ever attended (possible exception for Knights-Dolphins).

I don’t have a huge dataset of men’s internationals ratings. Of the highlights, the ANZAC Test in 2017 rated 1.3 million, as did the opening and final matches of the World Cup, while an end of season 2019 trans-Tasman test brought in 888,000.

Much of the more recent data is relatively pedestrian. The international game is a long way from threatening the sport’s sporting and commercial peaks.

These are far from astronomical numbers and largely wouldn’t be competitive with most of the NRLM season. Comparing to the pre-covid ratings, it is demonstrable that this facet of the sport has taken a step back in the public’s imagination.

Potentially, the international game’s issues are less a lack of interest - the Kangaroos, and increasingly the Jillaroos, can do numbers when given the space - but a lack of commitment to a consistent structure and a lack of drawcard nations outside of Australia. When there’s at best half a dozen nations that might pull a decent audience, replacing a full round of eight NRL games for a representative weekend becomes a complete commercial non-starter for the broadcasters. The NRL is pushing on with the Pacific Championships, with some help from the federal government, which I think will pay dividends down the track.

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The next deal

Presuming that something resembling these numbers carry over - it is unlikely that the 4.4 million for the grand final will be broken without the Broncos but a suitably compelling matchup could still deliver more than four - then Peter V’Landys finds himself in an excellent position to commence negotiations for the next broadcast cycle.

The NRL TV deal will expire at the end of the 2027 season. You’ll recognise this from various thought balloons that have been sent up via the media: shorter club season, wild cards, questions as to how to fit in both men’s and women’s expansion.

V’Landys clearly wants a big number. A big number will secure his position in the short term by satiating the sharks that briefly raised their noses when it became apparent just how badly he handled the covid negotiations. A big number will also secure his legacy into the long term as a visionary administrator of the sport (i.e. delivers lots of cash to the clubs so they shut up).

The current deal is something like $2 billion for five years, although the exact terms and conditions vary from report to report and is not ever going to be revealed transparently. The expectation is that the next deal will be a headline of $3 billion. A 50% uplift, in a market where rugby union got 40% earlier in the year and given the wellspring of inflation since the deal was last negotiated, should be the minimum expectation.

If the NRL can show that its inventory, headlined by a 4 million viewer grand final, three 3 million men’s Origin games and a slew of 1 million viewer games, including women’s Origin, men’s finals, women’s grand final, some of the bigger derby games and potentially internationals, backed by 200-ish men’s regular season games plus whatever they assemble for the women⁶ with a newly achieved national footprint and international status, is sustained and sustainable, would $3.5 billion be out of the question? $4 billion?

Quite what that would do to the brains of the geniuses that run the NRL clubs is unclear. They already seem drunk on their own importance off a central distribution of $15 million. Bumping that up to $25+ million, with a corresponding salary cap, might either break brains or force in a new layer of talent that previously considered the NRL beneath their pay grade.

If the TV deal does double, and the salary cap with it, it kind of puts into perspective how unlikely the NRL is to be threatened by any other rugby competition in the short term. The top paid NRL player might be making $3 million per annum in just three years.

Notes

• Our friends at

  The Cruncher
  have turned out two of the best pieces of analysis of the year since I finished the regular newsletter. I highly recommend a read of Who will take home the 2025 Dally M Medal? and A brief stats nerds’ tour of the Broncos’ 2025 season and subcribe.

• The lowest rating game for which we have both FTA and PTV numbers was the Cowboys deafeating the Titans, 32-6, in round 13 of the 2022 season. Only 351k tuned in for that. Strangely, Johnathan Thurston’s last game, also a Titans-Cowboys clash, was the highest rated PTV-only game, in round 25 of 2018, with an even 400,000 viewers.

• The lowest rating pay TV game whose number I trust was the Warriors defeating the Tigers, 30-22, in round 24 of the 2023 season. This is the only game in the dataset with fewer than 100,000 viewers.

• The highest rated regular season game in the dataset was the Eels defeating the Broncos, 34-6, on resumption of play in 2020, with over 1.2 million viewers on FTA and PTV. The NRL claims that the at least one of the free-to-air Vegas games and at least one of the Conflicts on Caxton has out-rated that subsequently, although we don’t have the specific data for that because it includes a heavy component of streaming.

1. If of interest, a well written history of the NRL’s broadcast deal was published in The Roar recently: The sad history of rugby league TV deals in focus: Why AFL zoomed ahead of rival code in rights rumble.

2. Specifically, unconsolidated overnight data excluding video on demand to keep things as consistent as possible across time. We don’t have a lot of regional breakdowns but remember that Nine on-sells the NRL to regional networks at a fixed rate, so has no interest in how well footy does in the bush. Their ad sales are predicated on 5 city metro performance.

3. If I may digress from my prepared remarks: the Brisbane Broncos prop up this league commercially. As will be shown, the Broncos and their fans make a substantial and disproportionate contribution to commercial revenues, broadcast in particular, and only get the same cash back from head office back and play under the same player and football department spending rules as everyone else. This results in the Broncos actively subsidising the existence of other clubs. I don’t want a congratulations or a thank you, I just really wish people would realise that the Broncos are the reason your club, and possibly, this sport is still there, so shut the fuck up with your whinging. You sound like Blake Solly.

4. This will remain the case when the Chiefs put up sub-replacement level numbers.

5. Albeit, still behind several Matildas games that seemingly everyone in the country watched. And it was because VOZ ceased reporting 5 city metro figures for Friday and Saturday but has no issues with Sunday. Go figure.

6. I didn’t comment on the NRLW for lack of consistent data. 16 games in 2025 suggests an average FTA audience of around 150,000, with a lot of caveats applied (these are the better timeslots where the NRLW actually rated, in some of the lesser spots only demographic numbers were reported which is a sign of lower ratings, we’re missing full ratings data for 50 games). Like international footy, the women’s game is not yet competitive with the men’s but considering there was effectively no women’s footy in 2017, there’s some room for growth to put it mildly. Some other datapoints:

• The 2024 season kickoff between the Roosters and Knights drew 409,000.

• That fell to 328,000 in 2025 with the Eels and Sharks.

• The semis averaged 213,000 with 697,000 on grand final day in 2024.

• Despite the hand wringing about competitiveness, this year’s finals averaged 285,000 and the grand final exploded to 1.084 million.