Charting the premiership void

Stare into the abyss where hopes and dreams die

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Where did our chances go?

Winning a premiership is hard. Everything can go right until it doesn’t and then that’s a year of work wasted with nothing to show for it. Just ask Melbourne, Brisbane, Parramatta, South Sydney, Penrith, Canberra, Melbourne (again), North Queensland and Melbourne and only the women at the Gold Coast Titans (the men’s team has no bloody idea).

A fair while ago now, I looked at expected premierships: how many premierships should a club have won in the NRL era? At the time, I ripped off Matt Cowgill’s methodology but variations have also been deployed by Neil Paine for US sports. It feels high time to gaze once more into the abyss where premiership hopes and dreams die in inky blackness and absolute silence.

The classic method to estimate expected premierships is to use Elo ratings (form ratings from my particular toolkit) as teams head into the post-season and run Monte Carlo simulations on the outcomes of the finals series. This will give each finalist a probability of winning the title that, over time, add up to a number of expected premierships that team should have won. The gap between the expectation and the actual grand finals won is where existential crises live.

Having had seven years to think about abysses of varying types, I don’t think this is quite right. The Titans have only made finals four times in their existence which means they would only be credited with four parts of an expected premiership (2009, 2010, 2016 and 2021). In theory, Gold Coast should have nearly 20 parts of an expected premiership because they have a shot at the title every season, until their incompetence rules them out of it. It might not add up to much either way (paying subscribers will get to see exactly what the difference is) but deeming their expected premierships prospects as exactly zero in almost every year doesn’t feel right. There should be some expectations in a closed, tightly salary capped league.

For this post, I ran full season Monte Carlo simulations (5k times) from 1998 to 2025 based on pre-season class Elo ratings.

Class Elo ratings tend to lag reality too much to be useful for predictions, which is feature and not a bug. However, class ratings are a good marker of sentiment, which makes them perfect for this exercise. While the alignment of exactly when an expected premiership is accrued is not quite right (e.g. did the Broncos ever have a 5% chance of winning the 2020 premiership?), over time that effect washes out as the class ratings catch up.¹

It is completely unsurprising to see the Panthers well ahead of their expectations. Even with their record-setting ratings, it’s a coin flip of Penrith versus the field, so that comes out as half an expected premiership. If a club wins four coin flips, they’re going to get two whole premierships above the abyss.

Another way of looking at this is that the Panthers and the Roosters won - stole, perhaps, or worse, misappropriated - premierships that should have gone to New Zealand, Parramatta, Canberra but didn’t due to the random walk that is professional sport. We’ll probably be adding Canterbury to that bonfire in due course.

Panthers and Roosters aside, the rest of the league can be broken into rough groups:

• An untouchable caste of just the Titans.

• Perennial losers that can’t get it done, including the Warriors, Raiders and Eels.

• Middle class, above average to below average teams coasting off a single title, comprising the Dragons, Cowboys, Knights, Sharks, Rabbitohs and Tigers.

• The Sea Eagles, as lower upper class types.

• Temporarily embarrassed millionaires fallen on hard times, namely the Broncos and Storm (depending on your perpsective the Storm are either in a huge hole or have dipped their toes in the abyss for the first time since 1999).

Where the Dolphins end up will only be revealed with time but I wouldn’t be surprised to see the untouchable caste come to consume all of the Southeast, including SEQ4 starting 2032.

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