By Jordan Baker
The city of Las Vegas is a grab for attention that can never be sated. World-famous music legends, comedians and stage shows compete every night along the famous Strip, where there’s no cap on excess; a miniature New York, a garden of Babylon, a neon-infested imagining of King Arthur’s castle. The soundtrack is slot machines, singing around the clock. Tourists walk in a daze, as if their minds are in meltdown.
Australians have made it here. Manpower, the tanned, greased male strip show known as the Thunder from Down Under has long been popular, as is Human Nature, which has a residency singing Motown classics at mini-Venice, with its “genuine” gondolas. Puppetry of the Penis, which had a flash of publicity as an art installation in Melbourne almost 30 years ago, has also found a keen audience in Sin City.
No limits: Las Vegas is where the NRL is launching its foray into the United States sports market.Credit: LVCVA Collection, LVCVA Archive
This is where the NRL is launching its foray into the US sports market, which, like Vegas writ large, is a relentless bid for attention, from heavyweights such as the National Football League to up-and-comers like pickleball, rugby union and cricket. By trying to crack this market, in this city, with a foreign sport that few have heard of or understand, the National Rugby League is shooting for the moon.
To critics, including some within the game, Vegas is a weird, wild, waste of time. But the more optimistic say there are three things that could make the venture, estimated by some to cost up to $15 million a year, a not-so-crazy idea; the booming US betting market, the entry of global streamers into the broadcast market and the boost from the Las Vegas week’s razzle-dazzle to the perception of the sport back home.
Still, it’s a risky play; the NRL will have to navigate new and rocky terrain, and it may end up with nothing but a glitter residue and a hangover.
Rugby league and American football are estranged brothers, both rogue sons of rugby union. In Australia, the split was over paying players. In the US, it was over brutality. Late 1800s Ivy League rugby was becoming so dangerous that president Theodore Roosevelt, who thought its aggression schooled young men in masculinity, demanded the sport reform itself before the “mollycoddles” outlawed it.
Panthers star Nathan Cleary will headline the opening round of action in Las Vegas on Sunday.
That raw aggression, edited out of the US game more than 100 years ago to reduce what sports historian Allen Guttmann described as the game’s “extremely high level of expressive interpersonal violence”, is what the NRL is selling back to the Americans; the Aussie gladiators who fearlessly clash without pads or helmets.
The March 1 NRL gala in Las Vegas is a massive undertaking; transporting the teams, the gear and the officials, the timezone discombobulation, the delicate exercise of stabilising deep NRL goalposts in a shallow NFL turf tray. Still, last year was a public relations boon, partly due to the sheer audaciousness of the exercise; it ventured where no Australian sport had before, infused with the razzamatazz of so-called adult Disneyland.
Most clubs say it’s a good morale boost. Not all. “Las Vegas was a f---ing disaster, and it was a party trip for everybody,” Wests Tigers boss Shane Richardson told The Australian Financial Review last year. Even among those who thought it was a welcome sugar hit, there’s still confusion about the point of it all. “No f---ing idea,” said one club boss. “They talk about the lucrative sports betting market, broadcast appeal, but they’re unwilling to put figures alongside that.”
The point, says NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo, is expansion. Sports are going global; cricket and rugby are pushing into the US, while American football and basketball are bringing matches down under. “If you don’t have ambitions to grow,” says Abdo, “then all you’re doing is effectively becoming bigger in your existing market. We think rugby league is genuinely an entertaining product that will have global appeal.”
Betting boon
The biggest growth is in sports betting, an area in which Australia has the dubious honour of being a world leader. It was illegal in the US (outside Nevada) until less than a decade ago, and it remains so in states such as California. “We’re the most mature gambling market in the world and they’re the most embryonic,” says Hunter Fujak, a sports lecturer at Deakin University. But the floodgates have opened, and what the Americans lack in experience, they’re making up for in enthusiasm (which is already causing social problems).
Even a tiny slice of that pie would be lucrative for the NRL. “There’s massive demand,” says Professor Thilo Kunkel, from Temple University in Philadelphia. But there’s a problem; Australia has regulations to ensure sports bodies get a slice of betting revenue, but the US does not. Cashing in requires sports to strike a deal with betting platforms (the biggest are the original fantasy football platforms, FanDuel and DraftKings), in which sports provide content, such as live streams and official data, in return for a slice of revenue.
“It’s quite a complicated ecosystem,” says Glenn Lovett, a former AFL player who now works for a sports analytics firm in New York, “but it’s all about playing on a bigger stage, opening yourself up to a bigger market, which is huge here in the US. By establishing the right relationship, you can capture some of the revenue”.
Abdo says the NRL has had discussions with “several players” about a non-exclusive deal. “It’s more about how we can acquire fans and educate fans through the wagering companies,” he says.
Nathan Cleary, Nicho Hynes and NRL chief Andrew Abdo, who says “rugby league is genuinely an entertaining product that will have global appeal”.Credit: Marija Ercegovac
Then there are television rights. The NRL’s deal with Nine, the publisher of this masthead, and Foxtel, which has been bought by a British company that has recently had an injection of Saudi Arabian money, runs until 2027, but Australian Rugby League Commission boss Peter V’landys has said he wants to set up a new deal by the middle of this year.
They’re looking to shake things up. Free-to-air broadcasters are bleeding advertising revenue. Streamers are moving into the market – Netflix paid $240 million to broadcast two NFL games on Christmas Day – and offshore interest would help attract them. “If you don’t do it, you get caught out in the traditional TV and pay TV model,” says economist Tim Harcourt, author of Footynomics.
Abdo says most NRL revenue is generated through the domestic broadcast. “We need to diversify that, and one way to do that is to think about the globalisation of your broadcast rights,” he says. Through its Vegas venture, the NRL hopes to recruit subscribers to the international Watch NRL app, “so that when we negotiate our rights next time, we’ve got more options and even more opportunity to commercialise with different partners”.
Formal talks have not yet begun, he says, but the NRL is looking at how it presents its content to make sure “we have as many potential partners interested in that process as possible”.
But there’s broad agreement on one thing; the Las Vegas opener has been a boon for the profile of the game in Australia. It sizzled back home; fans enjoyed the razzle-dazzle, novelty and sheer chutzpah of the season opener. Even if it was a wild pitch at the moon, the venture told the story of a sport with the ambition to see itself on the world stage and the brazen confidence to try to make it happen.
Some might question the overall strategy, but “it really captured the imagination of supporters, much to my surprise”, says one club boss, speaking on the condition of anonymity so he could speak freely. Lovett agrees. “It had definite benefits back in Australia – the NRL playing games in the Super Bowl arena. I had AFL mates saying, ‘how is it there, it looks incredible?’.”
Fujak lives in Victoria, and “it’s probably the most I had heard and seen Victorians talking about rugby league”, he says. “It looks really good for the NRL to do this. It makes them look innovative; it makes them look like a leading code.” It’s something the AFL would never be able to do, he says, because of the incompatibility of its field with American stadiums.
The NRL’s deal with Las Vegas is for five years. It’s an expensive exercise. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authorit provides only about $US620,000 a year, enough to cover stadium hire and other on-the-ground costs. The NRL has never confirmed the total price tag, but it has been estimated at $15 million (Abdo has said it’s not that high, and Harcourt says that the Victorian government reportedly paid around that much for a single game of NFL in Melbourne).
Yet Abdo hopes to break even this year, depending on ticket sales in the final week (V’Landys, ever the optimist, says the venture might turn a profit), helped by sponsors attracted specifically to the US venture, such as JD Sports and Fiji Airways. “We’ve actually got a very strong business case that it is now at break-even point,” says Abdo. “We’ve very close. How [close] depends on how many tickets we’re able to sell in the remaining week.”
An annual Las Vegas splash alone won’t build a foothold in the US, says Lovett. To do that, league needs a consistent presence. “You can’t just dip in and dip out,” he says. “The competition is just so intense, there’s so much going on. [Rugby league] is just not part of the chatter at the moment. If they used it as a platform to set up more permanently, expanding to have a team here, a US league, some kind of reciprocal franchise, that’s when it starts to become more serious.”
That’s what cricket is doing; targeting niche markets popular with the south Asian and Caribbean diaspora (New York, Florida), where wealthy fans set up franchises, such as actor Shah Rukh Khan’s Los Angeles Knight Riders. Arch-rival rugby union is one of the US’s fastest-growing sports. “The ambition couldn’t be to become a dominant sport in the US market any time soon. The ambition might be to establish a really targeted league in five to 10 markets; that becomes part of the global Australia-UK-US system,” says Lovett.
Abdo says the NRL is looking at boosting the US competition. “To get a stronger system going … it’s certainly part of the plan,” he says. That would involve more players, more talent development, better quality football, more age-group competitions. “And then, who knows? Ultimately, in 10 years’ time, we might be talking about a much closer global elite competition.”
It’s a Vegas-style gamble, but Lovett believes rugby league is in with a shot. It might never be a big player, but “you could be small but do very well, like cricket. Be a niche sport, but still succeed. The game is simple to understand, fast, powerful … it’s got a lot potentially going on”.
The Herald’s travel expenses to Las Vegas have been partly funded by the NRL.
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