The 2024 NRL Rivalry Survey
Two years ago, I put the call out to rugby league fans to tell me which teams they considered their rivals and a few months later, I published the results of the 2022 NRL Rivalry Survey.
Despite the muted interest in the results, I found it an interesting enough exercise that I ran the survey again earlier this year. Here’s what you told me.
I knew the number of responses would be down, decreasing from 622 responses in 2022 to 199 in 2024. In 2022, I had 2,500 Twitter followers, that platform still functioned reasonably well and the original tweet seeking responses had 50 or 60 RTs. Now I have a newsletter that goes out to 300-odd sickos and one or two shares on Reddit. While those sickos are more engaged, and occasionally write me nice emails, 300 is noticeably less than 2,500.
However, I was relieved to see that we had similar response rates among the Queensland NRL clubs, which means I had more or less kept the part of the audience I care about and whose teams I can actually be bothered to watch, and lost the interest of a mass of New South Welshpeople who had been following my more general NRL content. That does mean that in 2022, 15% of respondents were fans of Queensland clubs - the Q4 - but that share has now increased to 45% of respondents in 2024.
With relatively small sample sizes for most clubs, it becomes difficult to conclude what those fans think as an accurate representation of the fanbase as a whole but near enough to 200 people is enough to judge how those fans feel about a given club as a proxy for the wider NRL fanbase. Given the change in share of Queensland fans, I’ve broken out the ratings into how the Q4 fans feel, how the non-Q4 fans feel and how both together feel about each club. How fans feel about their own club has been excluded from all analysis.
It’s important to remember the world in early 2022, when the survey was first taken. The Panthers had only just won their first grand final and hadn’t become the threepeat champions we’ve come to know today. Penrith, and an expected to be resurgent in 2024 but actually flat Cowboys, have the highest increase in rivalry rating from non-Q4 fans, increasing by an average of 0.3. The biggest dips were for the Dragons (incompetence, fewer Sharks fans responding) and the Tigers. In the latter’s case, taking two wooden spoons in a row undermines the credibility Wests might have as a threat to anyone other than their own board.
Thank you for reading The Maroon Observer
The first column lists how that team’s fanbase feels about the teams list in the first row. Within the Q4, everyone’s hackles are raised, except when it comes to the Titans. I attribute this partly to a methodology change. In 2022, I asked about respondents’ feelings. In 2024, I asked them to simply rate how much of a rival they felt the club in question was. Broncos fans understood the assignment this time, rating the Cowboys only a 3.5 rival in 2022 and upgrading them to a spicy 4.2 in 2024.
With three editions of Conflict on Caxton under our belts, Broncos and Dolphins fans are taking each other more seriously. Brisbane’s fans rated Redcliffe a mere 2.8, less than Gold Coast, before the team joined the NRL but have them at 3.8 now, well clear of the Titans and catching up to the Cowboys. For the Red Fish brigade, they’ve not only doubled in numbers, but increased their perception of the Horses from a simmering 3.2 to a combustible 4.7. If its phins up in round 26, I’d expect that number to increase for both fanbases.
The Cowboys’ fans perceptions are largely unchanged, as are the Titans’, although they too have an increased wariness of their fellow south-easters, with the Dolphins moving from 2.1 to 3.4. Gold Coast are yet to open their account against the NRL’s newest team, which is probably not a problem the Legion thought they’d have in 2022, or even well into the second half of their first meeting in 2023.
I had toyed with only analysing clubs with at least 9 responses (my arbitrary cutoff was going to be ten, but the Dolphins and Titans didn’t quite get there) but I figure you’re all adults and can work out that the four (4) Storm fans that responded are being pretty generous giving the Broncos a 4.0 rating.
The response that really stood out for me was the ten Panthers’ fans all rating the Eels a rock solid 5.0. Considering the absolute crushing that was handed out in the 2022 grand final, and the fate of the Eels since then, I don’t know if that’s justified. The Eels gave the Panthers a 4.4 in return, which makes this one of the highest rating rivalries in the league.
The standings of two-way intensity of rivalry in 2022 was dominated by Sharks-Dragons (a combined score of 9.1 in 2022, 8.5 in 2024 with few Dragons responders) and Roosters-Rabbitohs (9.0 in 2022 versus a very healthy 9.7 in 2024 with few Roosters responders), as one would expect, but based on this result, Eels-Panthers (8.1 in 2022, up to 9.4 in 2024) should be in that mix of tier A rivalries too.
At 8.7, The Game (Broncos-Cowboys) is now a tier B rivalry, up from tier C and 7.9 last time. Conflict on Caxton (Dolphins-Broncos) has a combined rating of 8.5, firmly a tier B rivalry. The Classic (Broncos-Titans) is still tier C, dropping slightly from 7.8 to 7.6. None of the other Q4 combinations come close to a 7, the threshold I set for a real rivalry.
As usual, some of the results are just baffling to me. Rabbitohs-Bulldogs was a sedate 6.8 in 2022 and is now 8.3. What happened to drive that pairing up a whole gear in two years where both teams have been pretty average? A coward would attribute that a quirk of small sample size and I guess I am a coward.
The fun thing about the rivalry survey is how closely it hews to my expectations, with just enough surprises to make it interesting. Most clubs have at least one obvious rival, usually their closest geographically, but sometimes they pick up someone else for a while because they’re in a similar place on the ladder at a similar time. Throw in some finals match-ups and that’s how these things can get started, e.g. Manly-Storm for the classic version and perhaps now Cowboys-Sharks?
After the obvious rival, generally fans default to the best teams. With the breaking of the Storm’s and Roosters’ stranglehold on the league, only to be replaced by an even more iron fisted Panthers dynasty, those two clubs are still well in the mix but the Panthers are scattered well throughout, and not just in western Sydney. The fanbases in Canberra, Brisbane and North Queensland all put Penrith in their respective top fours.
It is a good time to consider how much can change in just two years. Last time, I wrote about the potential power of inter-city rivalries, as opposed to the rhetorical focus on suburban teams and suburban grounds and suburban tribalism that was the style of the time. That theatre of the rugby league culture war has been well and truly lost by those of my ideological bent, although I didn’t really expect any other outcome, even if the Controlling Body failed to bilk the NSW government out of much in the way of funding for derelict assets. The suburbs are here to stay and rugby league will throw as many resources at the wall to ensure it stays that way.
Such is life but no matter what happens, at least you can rely on Cronulla and St George fans hating each other.
You can download the csv files for the 2022 and 2024 surveys.