TV ratings bruised by NRL grand final belting

The one-sided NRL grand final delivered a poor return for the code’s free-to-air broadcaster Nine, with the match drawing the lowest ratings for a rugby league decider this century.

The national television audience of just 2.377 million tuned in for a rugby league decider.

The one-sided NRL grand final delivered a poor return for the code’s free-to-air broadcast partner Nine, with the match drawing a national television audience of just 2.377 million — the lowest ratings figure for a rugby league decider this century.

While the overall ratings figure released on Monday morning by audience measurement firm OzTAM doesn’t include the number of viewers who watched the game on catch-up, or via streaming on connected TVs and mobile devices, the result is a disappointment for Nine.

Sunday night’s grand final, which saw Penrith comfortably defeat Parramatta, drew almost one million fewer viewers across the country than last year’s showdown between Penrith and Souths.

It is the first time since OzTAM ratings data was introduced in 1999 that an NRL grand final has pulled fewer than 2.5 million viewers.

The lopsided nature of Sunday night’s game undoubtedly contributed to the softer-than-expected TV audience, which was also the case with the AFL grand final a week prior, when just 3.06 million people watched Geelong thrash the Swans — the second lowest ratings return ever for an AFL season decider.

And while the NRL heavily pushed the narrative of a western Sydney showdown in the lead-up to the grand final, the fact that no teams from Queensland were involved was reflected in the TV audience — just 391,000 people in Brisbane watched the game, compared to 837,000 viewers in Sydney.

Similarly, viewing numbers in Melbourne — which obviously spike when the Storm is playing in the grand final — fell to 252,000 for last night’s game, the lowest grand final ratings figure ever recorded in the Victorian capital.

The highest-rating grand final on free-to-air TV of the past two decades remains the 2005 season finale between the North Queensland Cowboys and the Wests Tigers, which drew a national television audience of 4.1 million.