BY DAN

Throw the dice. Place the bets. Launch the boats. The Canberra Raiders are going to Vegas.

Vegas baby. Vegas.

It’s confirmation of one the league’s worst kept secrets. The Raiders will play the Warriors on March 1 2025, alongside the Panthers playing the Shark, a Super League game and a women’s international between Australia and England. For Raiders fans with the coin to get there this will be epic. Represent us well, I wish you nothing but the time of your life. I won’t personally be going but I’m beyond jealous those that will. Buy every jersey. Snap every photo. Enjoy the experience. Carpe Vegas or something like that.

We’ve covered before why this appeals for the club. In short it’s all business. The Raiders are seeking exposure for the purposes of sponsorship, and potentially partnerships built in the networking around the game. The Raiders have one of the lowest sponsorship revenue bases in the competition, and have been making efforts to diversify their revenue sources away from just footy, property and gambling. Sponsors want exposure and this is definitely that.

It’s probably a sound business strategy, as much as I know things about business strategies. It guarantees a high rating game domestically, and potentially opportunities for exposure in the USA, and partnership with organisations overseas, most obviously with the Las Vegas Raiders. There’s going to be a sick jersey to come out of this.

I have to say I’ve always been sceptical of the benefits more broadly. As I’ve noted here they’re mostly from exposure that occurs in the Australian market, and you don’t actually have to go Vegas for that. Sixty thousand people watched the games shown on Fox Sports 1 in the USA, compared to a million plus here.

Regardless the club must think the gains are worth it because I think they’ll miss out on Magic Round next year because of it. They’re giving up a home game for this and there will be costs, not in the least in what cost would come from existing contracts in Canberra. The Raiders usually get in on Magic Round because they take a home game there. They’ve given that game to get the Vegas game. I’m not certain they can take the financial risk of giving away two home games.

But the local media love it and the cost of the negatives isn’t heavily weighed on the club anyway. It’s Vlando’s (and the game’s) opportunity cost to risk. We admire the ambition but we can’t see the long-term strategy. When bigger leagues do this it’s usually to try and sew the soil for a team there (like the NBA and the NFL in expansion markets) or to basically take a travelling roadshow around the world capitalising on an pre-existing brand and demand (like when Man U or someone plays games at the MCG). This is neither and seems more about building the brand from scratch. To what end i’m not really sure. If playing a game in a country was all you had to do to win a foothold in it then they’d be singing AFL team songs in Beijing.

If this ends up just being something that appeals to Australian supporters, builds no support base in the USA and generally spends all the NRL’s money for some good press in Sydney and Brisbane then it’s a waste. Given Vlandy’s organisational takeover of the NRL was based on ‘reigning in’ HQ’s spending to please some dumbass broadcasting execs, well, let’s just say there could be a hoisting, and his own petard would be involved.

Business and expansion and all that fun stuff aside, of equal importance is the impact in the on-field sense. The clubs that travelled for 2024 all seemed to have slow starts to the season, and only one has really found it’s proper flight so to speak. Bye timing is a small thing, but there is a risk in burning a bye early in the season. It means they’ll have a long period at some point with no breaks in the action. We’ve seen how injury and exhaustion have impacted them this season. The risk will be greater next year.

But right now we have a sample size of somewhere between one and four depending on your knowledge of statistics (mine, as you might have guessed, isn’t crash hot. It’s been a few decades since I did fundamentals in quantitative analysis. Is SPSS still a thing?). There are a million variables that go into every season. Who’s to say this is determinative? So saying it will definitely be bad is not right. And even if it is hard on the teams that travel the Roosters have at least shown that it’s manageable if you’re good enough. God please be good enough.

But for now the risks and all that are a problem for another year. Book your flights. Find a hotel (or don’t, just party your way through the weekend). It’s a celebration. The Raiders are going to Vegas.

Vegas baby. Vegas.

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