Welcome to the Pony Picayune, a regular, independent newsletter about the Brisbane Broncos.
The season is over. We don’t need to sugar coat or hand wring. The Broncos have ten games left on their schedule and to scrape into finals, will need to win at least eight. Recapturing the magic of last year will not produce eight wins in total, let alone in addition to the current tally of five, and that is without considering the crushingly difficult run of opponents left on the schedule.
It’s over. Put a fork in it. We’re done. Save it for the season review.1
Earlier this year, the University of Indiana’s football team won a national title. After decades of being one of the worst teams in the top flight of college American football, they broke through with their first title in an undefeated season. For a Hoosiers fan, how could that experience be topped? More success may come but it is never going to be like this. In all likelihood, there is going to be more pain and frustration in the future than elation and relief. That’s the maths of being a sports fan. Indiana fans have gotten almost everything positive they’re ever going to get. Why keep going? Why turn up next year? You could retire from being a fan and go out on top.
People’s reasons for turning up again next year are as numerous as there are people: an unfathomable and irrational love of the institution, a strengthening of bonds with family and friends, deeply ingrained habits (what else am I going to do with my Friday nights? I’m 38), community and geography, nostalgia and strong memories. Note that all of this seems to be divorced from the results, which is funny given the win-at-all-costs mentality that prevails in professional sport, but suggests these attachments are built around a church-like shape in people’s lives.
Since covid, following the Broncos has meant following a team that ranges from below average to outright bad. With the exception of the 2023 and 2025 seasons, the Broncos have missed the finals every year since 58-nil. No Broncos fan cares about making finals for its own sake. We’ve gorged on decades of near-meaningless finals appearances but the 20s have been a desert. While acknowleding that all but two or three clubs would cut arms off and sacrifice first borns for the kind of rebuild the Broncos have had, the Broncos’ winning percentage since the covid restart is a lofty 46.8%, the seventh worst mark in the league. The two best marks are held by the only other premiers in this epoch. The desert did include two oasis-like grand finals appearances, in which the Broncos won one and nearly won the other. This dissonance mirrors the week-to-week experience of watching Brisbane play.
In 2025, the Broncos put it all together and won. Last year wasn’t the first Broncos title but it was the first in a long time and the most thrilling. A late season surge translated into three come-from-behind victories in the finals, a feat that is unlikely to be repeated for its spectacle, panache and defiance; the only known antidote to the Panthers’ formula. So why not get out while the going’s good?
I was born in 1987 in Brisbane and while I’ve travelled, I have never left Brisbane, a place that is extraordinary for its ordinariness. In the environment I grew up in, the prevailing sport was rugby league and the local team is the Brisbane Broncos. They were the biggest thing in town when I was a kid. Becoming a fan seemed as natural as being a fish in water. I’m surprised at how complicated some other people make it for themselves. While I come from a line of casual league fans, it was never a load bearing pillar of my familial relationships, even if it is for some friendships, but having made rugby league posting my passion project for the better part of a decade, the Broncos are deeply embedded in the mental wiring in a way that I may never full untangle.
So this is not my resignation letter from the Broncos fanbase. Even though that would likely improve my quality of life in some respects, I like being rooted in this particular place and time not because it is special in some way but because it is mine. If the friendships I’ve strengthened and acquaintances I’ve made in the orbit of this club, and a collection of jerseys, a lot of expended emotional energy and fading memories are all I have to show for it, so be it. We are all but dust and the eventual heat death of the universe will render all of this meaningless. The time you have is special because it is yours.
The Brisbane Broncos Pty Ltd do not see their fanbase as a collection of people with wants and needs. The Broncos exist to leverage our connection to our city and to the sport for its profit. While a lot of what follows will be directed at BBL, I don’t think there is anything particular about the ownership, the stock listing or the club’s governance that make it uniquely capable of being apathetic, even hostile, to its fanbase’s need for ethical leadership. All NRL clubs are at risk of this, as frequently documented in this newsletter, and this helps rule out switching allegiances as a solution to the conundrum created by the Broncos inviting Ben Roberts-Smith and his children into the sheds after the Dragons game.
Some of you are undoubtedly rolling your eyes at this. Just let it go, nothing’s going to change. More of you probably forgot that it happened. Oh yeah, whatever happened with that? A few of you may even be mentally preparing a defence. He’s an Australian war hero unjustly undermined by a woke establishment. More than a few of you will agree with me that, whatever happened there, sucks ass.
The frustrations layer upon themselves into a shit parfait. Who is Roberts-Smith to this club? I’ve been here for ages. I’ve been a paying member for nearly a decade. I even technically own a very small part of the club. How is this man privileged above me, and the thousands like me? Not that I have an interest in going to the Broncos’ dressing room but it would be nice to be asked. There wasn’t even a contest for it.
Broncos chairman Karl Morris claims Roberts-Smith is a citizen like everyone else. Except that almost no citizens of Australia are currently going through a criminal proceeding to determine whether they committed war crimes. It is, pretty much, just him. That the findings Roberts-Smith’s defamation case in the Federal Court boil down to several allegations of murder, and more allegations of ordering subordinates to do likewise, makes me feel insane. How is this guy walking around? He has rich and powerful friends, does he? That says wonderful things about our society.
While it would be cleaner to set aside the culture war baggage, that Roberts-Smith is a totem of the chuddish, uninformed, right wing of the electorate, who think war is a free-for-all with no holds barred instead of a carefully orchestrated event that has laws because, if nothing else, you never know when you will be the civilian suffering violence at the hands of an alien armed force, is a factor in my grievance. Accordingly, I don’t think Adam Walsh’s fetishisation of the military complex and commitment to Whatever It Takes should be a cornerstone of Broncos’ approach to reputation management and I certainly do not want to be associated with it. Men would rather idolise an accused war criminal than go to therapy, its gender all the way down, crisis of toxic masculinity, etc, etc.
All of this is appalling. I wrote an email to the club, expressing that sentiment. They responded by thanking me for sharing my views, which are varied across the Broncos fanbase. I wrote back telling them that wasn’t much of a response, and that I would like an explanation - not even an apology or a commitment to making amends or heads on spikes, an explanation - and was met with silence. I asked for something entirely reasonable, in nice but firm terms, and did not receive it. How much do I need to pay to get an answer?
I was unsurprised by this, just as I was unsurprised by the Broncos deploying the overly optimistic strategy of ignoring it and hoping it will go away. I am floored by the stupidity of it all but felt strangely hurt. Despite all of the following words being true and known in advance, the Brisbane Broncos Limited is a small-to-medium size enterprise, and run accordingly, that happens to be owned by the Murdoch family but I can’t believe they would not care about me.
The episode reflects the endemic attitude of the Broncos that they can take their fanbase for granted. The Broncos do this because they can. The member hotline is only open 10am to 4pm, five days a week, and I think this represents a recent increase in operating hours. If, as a customer that spends several hundred dollars with the organisation every year, you wanted some help without making a phone call, be prepared to wait a few days for someone to use GPT to read and respond to your email. Presuming that even happens at all, as when I signed up for a digital membership this year, only to have to follow up when the Kayo code did not arrive in my inbox after spending nearly $400. This level of customer service would not be accepted from any other organisation as omnipresent and regularly profitable as BBL, like a bank or a utility. Yet here we are, living at the whims of people who should be grateful to serve but know you’ll keep coming back anyway.
We’re all just numbers in a spreadsheet and provided there’s a good reason to explain why number go up or number go down, no one making any decisions about how those numbers are treated, will ever encounter any accountability about doing the right thing by the numbers. Dave Donaghy’s most recent missive to the membership was not about how an alleged criminal ended up in proximity to Kotoni Staggs and Michael Maguire but how the number of members just crashed through 70,000, a new record.
After several thousand words, I am still no clearer on what to do. I do not feel like throwing out my jerseys but I also do not want to wear one. I could wear a Kangaroos or Maroons jersey instead because Australia and Queensland have never hurt anyone.2 I definitely do not want to give these people any more of my money but I probably will to facilitate other aspects of a tenuous social life. I do not care about the on-field performance but it is easy not to care when it is so bad.
I will probably just wait it out. Like I did with Matt Lodge and Anthony Seibold - both bad but for different reasons - because, eventually, the club will turn over the donkeys. When that happens, I will still be here, so will the city of Brisbane, and we will want to watch the Broncos, whoever they may be, play.
We are all prisoners in a society of our own making, brains weighed down with the nightmarish traditions of the past. As pithy and insightful as those latter words were, Napoleon III was ultimately undone by a war with the Prussians, two decades later. If the 2020s are as reactionary as the 1850s, then it may be the 2040s before we see any change. May we all live long enough to see it.
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