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Where have all the good players gone?
Once upon a time, way back in 2019, a NRL club looking to fill out its roster could pick up a Nicho Hynes- or Jamal Fogarty-quality player from Queensland Cup. Even as late as 2023, you could spot a Keano Kini, Sua Faalogo or Morea Morea (now coming to the Chiefs).
In 2026, Caius Fatili is in Super League with Tyson Smoothy, Maika Sivo, Br*die Cr*ft, Tristan Sailor, Zac Lipowicz, Jacob Alick-Wiencke and Keenan Palasia. That leaves homebodies like Guy Hamilton, Moses Mbye and Anthony Milford behind to dominate a competition that has a lot more district A-grade (and declining former NRL) talent in the ranks than it has in years past.
When the Dolphins came into the league in 2023, there was a surfeit of second tier players that didn’t directly move onto their roster but plugged gaps created by players moving around the labour market to fill the 30 jobs newly created. Trai Fuller and Jono Reuben would not have played NRL without the league expanding.
Even for established teams like the Broncos, who regularly went to the QCup well to fill the depth chart, the sudden scarcity of decent second rowers has been a problem for a while. It’s only when no one is injured can Brisbane string together enough wins to take the title. When players at key positions do inevitably get injured, then 5-11 is the result.
The Bears are slated to join the NRL in 2027, the Chiefs in 2028 and possibly a second New Zealand team as early as 2029. Given how stretched the league already feels, adding three more teams does not bode well. To find the first graders required to fill out those rosters is going to require scraping the bottom of the talent pool.
This is all very qualitative and the eye test can be deceiving. What quantitative changes have we seen in the NRL talent pool since the admission of the Dolphins that might inform what’s coming?
One would assume that the most noticeable impact on rosters would arise from changes in the rules around roster construction. The concept of a top 25, as a function of determining minimum salary, is introduced in 2006 and this is formalised to the top 30 structure we are more familiar with in 2018.
While we don’t see a lot of impact directly from expansion, the impact of covid is clear. The number of 10 game players drops precipitously in 2020 because of the shortened season and there is a huge increase in players used in 2021, the highest in nearly 20 years, as clubs grappled with a rapidly changing public health situation.
Immediately prior to the pandemic, the average NRL club in 2018 and 2019 carried two players in their top 30 that they didn’t use. These players sat as spare capacity. The post-covid elimination of this spare capacity indicates the greater strain on rosters as administrators (largely vainly) search for talent that can play week-in, week-out in first grade. If the rate of churn is relatively fixed, then those players must be coming from somewhere.
Between 2015 and 2025, 1,560 players in Queensland Cup and 1,573 players in NSW Cup played at least five games in at least one season, noting there is some overlap in the lists. Of these, 283 in QCup and 579 in NSW Cup spent some time in the NRL between 2016 and 2025, enough to meet the same qualifying criteria for first grade. For qualifying players, the probability of playing at least five games in a season of QCup and another five games in one season of NRL is 18%, and is double that for NSW Cup. This disparity likely reflects the greater number of feeder arrangements below the Tweed.
Of these qualifying players, 111 in QCup and 205 in NSW Cup played their last qualifying season in state cup at the same time (up to 2025) or before their first qualifying season in the NRL. While this is not a perfect definition1, and only captures a snapshot in time, we read this as roughly 35 to 40% of players that spent time in both the first and second tiers were promoted to the NRL, rather than highlighting those heading into state cup in the twilight of their career or bouncing between as a fringe player. That means the proportion of the state cup playing pool that become solid NRL players ranges from 7 (Qld) to 13% (NSW).
As a proxy for player quality, we use Z score to measure player production, i.e. the accumulation of statistics that correlate with winning. For the quality of a career, we use Wins Above Reserve Grade (WARG) to capture the volume of production.
Strangely, production shown in Cup has a weak correlation to that produced in the NRL. While this has myriad potential explanations, it rules out Z score as a scouting metric to be used in isolation, which it was never intended to be.
To get a finer toothed comb on the data, let’s break players into cohorts defined by the year they stepped up to the NRL: 2016-17, 2018-19, 2020-22 and 2023-25.
There are a lot of details to parse through here. While the average NRL career Z score in each of the cohorts is similar, the Queensland Cup players have a consistently higher Z in Cup than their NSW counterparts. This means, on average, to get out of Queensland Cup, players have to work harder and separate themselves more from the pack than would be the case if they played in New South Wales. Whether this disadvantages potential Maroons or makes the Sydney-based contingent a bunch of pitiful weaklings is an exercise left to the reader.2
There are two golden cohorts, whose career NRL Wins Above Reserve Grade per cohort member is noticeably higher: the 16/17 NSW cohort and the 18/19 Queensland cohort. Around 30% of both cohorts have accumulated at least five WARG in their careers up to 2025, a mark that only 15% of NRL careers reach.
Here is a brief selection of the former: Joseph Tapine, James Fisher-Harris, Damien Cook, Mitchell Barnett, Cody Walker, Angus Crichton, Josh Addo-Carr, Addin Fonua-Blake, Viliame Kikau, Dylan Edwards and Cameron Murray.
Here is a brief selection of the latter: Jahrome Hughes, Brandon Smith, Moeaki Fotuaika, Kotoni Staggs, Scott Drinkwater, Ryan Papenhuyzen, Patrick Carrigan, Payne Haas, Thomas Flegler, Reuben Cotter, Tom Dearden and Rhyse Martin.
In the absence of these golden microgenerations, the stats bear out that the cohorts transition from reserves to firsts in roughly the same manner with some idiosyncrasies.
The cancelled 2020 seasons and the covid-affected scheduling of 2021 - NSW Cup only made it through 15 rounds before being cancelled, while the Queensland Cup finished a week after the NRL in a frequently disrupted schedule - means that there is no correlation between Cup production and the NRL for that cohort of players. Presumably some mix of missed development time, small sample size in Cup and covid psychosis explains this.
Most importantly, we see an enormous increase in the number of players undergoing the transition. Since the addition of the Dolphins to the league in 2023, approximately 42% more players have matriculated from the Queensland Cup to the NRL, and 32% from NSW Cup, than the typical annual rate from 2016 to 2022. While these players have not had the time in the NRL to accumulate significant WARG, the sheer volume of them necessitates that their mean production will be lower and there will be proportionally fewer high quality outliers.
If you were, like me, wondering where all of the good players have gone, the answer is now clear. They’re all in the NRL and they brought a bunch of scrubs with them.
Salary cap
The essence of Moneyball, a cliche so hackneyed now that not even the Courier Mail will touch it, is the efficient pricing of sporting talent. How the pricing structure works depends on the regulations around paying players. Leagues often have a minimum salary (a maximum salary is much rarer), a salary cap to be limboed under and a salary floor that has to be exceeded. In the NRL, the minimum salary was $130,000 for 2024 and the salary floor was 95% of the cap.
The history of the salary cap ended up being a tangent to the main point but plotting it out, and making some adjustments typical of Stats Drop, reveals some interesting details in the history of the National Rugby League.
The line I ran with during the last round of bargaining with the RLPA, circa 2022, is that V’landys capitulated to get the deal done, after months of prevarication by Abdo and co. His toadies in the media downplayed the surrender so they didn’t make the Great Leader look bad.
But, when factoring in inflation and hindsight, the outcome is incredibly club-friendly. The cap appears to decline in real terms from 2023. By 2027, we will be back to 2018 levels and overall spending on player salaries will match 2020, even with the Dolphins now in the competition. That this was his plan all along would require V’landys to have successfully forecast inflation, a difficult thing to do for experts, and predicted the Iran War, one of the stupidest things to ever happen, so we’ll put a pin in that.
This decline is not unprecendented. The salary cap in 1998 was $3.3 million and nominally had increased by $1.1 million by 2012 but this was a decline of about 10% in real terms before The Commission We Had To Have, and a sudden surge in legacy broadcasters realising they were competing with the internet for attention, put the sport back into the big time.
We can only speculate what the cap will be past 2028. Historically, the cap increased by 33% in 2013, 34% in 2018 and 15% in 2023, aligning with the start of new TV deals and the conclusion of enterprise bargaining. With the new broadcast deal increasing revenue by - if we take the numbers at face value - approximately 75%, then the range of possible caps are $14 million (a PVL and club-friendly increase of 15%), $16 million (an increase of 33% in line with historic step changes) or $21 million (a RLP-friendly deal that aligns with the 75% increase in broadcast revenue).
Accounting for inflation, Super League’s original salary cap of £1.8 million in 2002 (approx. AU$4.9 million at 2002 exchange rates, higher than the $3.5 million in the NRL that year) would be worth £3.4 million in 2026 (AU$6.6 million at today’s exchange rate).
The current salary cap is £2.1 million (AU$4 million), raised circa 2020. While the southern hemisphere’s salary cap has increased 80% over 24 years in real terms, England’s has declined 40% and that’s without accounting for purchasing power loss. That some Super League clubs can’t even spend up to the cap, tells its own story of professional rugby league in the northern hemisphere.
And yet, they keep winning the World Club Challenge. Go figure.
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