‘Extraordinary potential’: The next country in NRL’s sights
Fresh off the back of a second Las Vegas NRL round, rugby league boss Peter V’landys has now set his sights firmly on the next challenge. See the video.
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Rugby league boss Peter V’landys has flown out of Las Vegas with a bold prediction that broadcast revenues from Papua New Guinea might one day topple the $400m a year the game generates in Australia.
Reflecting on the successes and lessons to be learned from the NRL’s second foray into America, V’landys told The Daily Telegraph the US market was the primary play but only part of a plan to maximise global broadcast rights.
Leading American sports and business figures are confident rugby league will eventually unlock a windfall from US broadcasters because of the speed, athleticism and physicality of the code.
V’landys is buoyed by those forecasts and is already thinking how the product can be tweaked over the remaining three years of the Vegas agreement.
For starters, he will cut the schedule from four games to three next year – “it was too long” – and create an “always on” marketing campaign over the next 12 months.
But V’landys also believes other golden goose markets can be tapped to help drive the dollars capable of turning the NRL juggernaut into a sporting behemoth.
PNG is top of the list, with an expansion team based there to enter the NRL in 2028.
“I think, in the long-term, PNG could be generating more broadcast revenue than Australia,” V’landys said post-Vegas 2.0, where a crowd of 45,209 delivered a 15-year attendance high for a season opener.
“It’s because we will have such an engaged audience of fans. In Australia, there’s a lot of sports and the public has a lot of choice. In PNG, it is all rugby league.
“As a result, we are going to penetrate that market a lot more than we do in Australia. If you keep it at a low price point, you’re going to have a lot of people.”
The PNG population has not been Census tested for a decade. New figures are expected in the next couple of months with a PNG government official telling this masthead the figure will likely be around 12 million.
“I think the market for broadcasting in PNG has extraordinary potential,” V’landys added. “A lot more than when we first looked at it.”
A light bulb moment for the ARL Commission chairman was seeing the out-of-ground audience number for the PNG match against an Australian Prime Minister’s XIII in Port Moresby last year.
“They had 1.8 million watching on a streaming service,” V’landys said. “That’s remarkable.
“That’s when it hit me. Even at a small subscription rate that’s a lot of new broadcast money you can make. It will more than pay for anything we do investing in PNG.”
He said the best comparison for rugby league in PNG was cricket in India – albeit with a vast difference in population.
“The English brought cricket to India and it’s now a religion,” V’landys said. “Why wouldn’t that be the same in PNG with rugby league? You learn from history. Anywhere you go in India they love cricket. It’s ingrained into them.”
PNG Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said V’landys was “a shrewd operator” and his instincts were correct.
“That PM’s game was a second-tier Australian side,” he said. “When the NRL comes to PNG you will have millions and millions of people signing up to watch it. That is certain because the game is in our blood, it’s in our DNA.”
The morning after the Allegiant Stadium extravaganza, V’landys said further analysis would be undertaken but there were key take outs from the 2025 venture.
“This started as an experiment last year to see if we could penetrate the biggest sports market in the world,” he said.
“It was a bit of a haze for me. We hadn’t done it before and we were in uncharted waters. We just hoped for the best really.
“This year, I learnt a lot more. The four games are too many. It was too long. We’ll go back to three games.
“But I was also interested in some of the experts talking about how we can penetrate the US market … things like having almost 60 minutes of ball in play compared to 10 minutes in NFL. We need to leverage that.
“We have a consistent, physical, entertaining sport which is what American audiences want, particularly the younger demographic.
“Everyone forgets them but if you’ve got a 10-year plan, they are your next audience. If you can get them now with this fast, entertaining game then it will pay dividends in the future.”
Free-to-air viewership for the Vegas weekend reached 715,000 on Channel Nine. Fox Sports numbers are expected on Tuesday.
While the Nine audience was down 10 per cent from 796,000 last year, there was one shining light. The Penrith-Cronulla match returned the highest free-to-air ratings on record for any regular season game played between the two clubs.
* The NRL has helped fund our team’s travel expenses to Las Vegas
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