BY DAN

The threat of a vulture looms.

Rugby 360, the roaming rugby tournament is an existential threat to every code built on rugby’s foundations; a white-walker surging at the wall. Is it coming for just rugby league? No. But it may be where will the impact be felt first, and deepest.

The NRL is clearly worried. Before the grand final they held a conference call with club bigwigs to allay fears. Blake Solly got on the front foot reminding players they’ll have to pay tax on earnings. The league applied sanctions to broadly align with those being proposed by Rugby Australia, arguably going well beyond their union counterparts. All this followed Peter V’Landys insistence that the competition would be a commercial failure and wasn’t to be trusted.

To an extent the analysis and approach from the NRL is understandable. The assertion that the league won’t be viable seems likely, given the model for such a thing already exists – it’s called the World Rugby 7s – and it loses money hand over fist. The quality of the sport won’t be high – the teams will be built like fantasy football teams, redrafted each year, in some sort of insane chaos intent on making GainLine analytics cry. There will be no connection to a locale, just mercenaries rampaging around the world like the best days of the East India Company. A good chunk of them will likely not even be first tier rugby players – a mixture of fringe, league, and semi-professionals cashing in because the timing or necessity suits.

With just six teams, there’s not enough games or audience base big enough to win broadcast rights to cover the cost of shipping mediocre talent around the world. It’s a vanity project dressed as sport. Whereas the model worked for Golf – at least in upsetting the existing apple cart – it was primarily because the were more defined names to grab, less big name events to undercut, and a class of golf fan who just wanted to go all Happy Gilmore on the event. If you said to the average rugby or league fan “haven’t you always wanted to travel overseas to get pissed for three days and watch a round robin of games” they’d shrug and say “been there done that”, either for internationals, or for Vegas.

But.

But here’s the thing: this might miss the point. Rugby 360 isn’t designed to make money — it’s designed to dominate. Like Uber or Netflix, it’s a late-capitalist model where profit is irrelevant. The aim is to drown the competition in cash until nothing else is left standing.

To me this could misunderstand what they’re up against here. This isn’t a league that is trying to be a commercial success. It’s borrowing a business model from other enterprises of late-capitalism, like Uber and Netflix. In short the profit margins don’t matter. Jam it full of cash, force everyone to keep up and hope you’re the only game in town at the end of it.

So making claims about tax or the sustainability of the enterprise misses the point. Focusing on losing individual players misses the point. This isn’t about profitability. This is about buying your way into the eco-system. To an extent that necessitates keeping other aspects of the eco-system alive. The series will exist around international rugby because otherwise why would people care who is playing in Rugby 360. That will be their source of legitimacy. But like the IPL in cricket, it will take the surplus value built over 150 years and strip it for the benefit of whoever ends up funding it, be it the Saudi investment fund as originally rumoured, or investment companies as now seems to be the case.

The problem for rugby league is that it is not a necessity for credibility. Whether the NRL exists or doesn’t has never mattered to international rugby. The recognition of some star talent will matter now, but beyond that rugby league players, and the pipeline, are just feed for the lot.

That’s the risk for league. The longer this competition sinks unending resources into the world of rugby, the more that the NRL’s talent pipeline in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands is at risk. Over 40 per cent of the competition identify as Pasifika or Maori. Many of them play rugby union through school until they enter professional pathways that these days only exist in league. If Rugby 360 franchises get sufficiently mature to be building more than year-to-year strategies, this could result in fundamental threat to the NRL.

This can be combated. In addition to the broader ban, the NRL can do two things in the short term. First it can do everything it can with its broadcast partners to stop this competition from being broadcast in Australia. I’m not sure how you do that other than to leverage your relationships with Nine and Fox. Removing or reducing the broadcasting in Australia will mean the reduce the status of the competition, lowering the risk you’ll lose top line players to it. If you can’t beat them with cash, you need to win them with status. Would you rather be really rich or just a kinda rich hero? Reduce it to being a ‘one last contract’ situation, like Super League once was.

The second things the NRL needs to do is on pay. In the next collective agreement it needs to make every effort to plunge whatever surplus it gains from the broadcast rights into two areas. Firstly the league should seek to increase the minimum wage for NRL contracts, and expand the supplemental list. You want to get as many people as possible making their living on the NRL dime, a relatively safe and secure way that makes them want to stay, or enter the competition.

That addresses your pipelines but doesn’t address the risk of losing big-names in the short term. There will be a temptation to create some sort of central NRL list of contracts for big name players to pay them out the wazoo. There are significant risks for competition balance in that – imagine [redacted] with another way to circumvent the cap. A less problematic way to get stars more money is to heavily invest in payments for international players. Pay internationals like they pay Origin players. It’s a massive pool, and would have the dual benefit of finding a way to reduce to financial gap without impacting the NRL competition’s stability, while also elevating international footy.

This does mean sending money to other countries – to Samoa, to Tonga, to PNG – in order to ensure they can also match those payments. It doesn’t make sense to only incentivise Australians and New Zealanders to stick around. There’s plenty of stars playing for those other nations that we want to keep in the game. Peter V’Lando won’t like that. But he probably would like that more than losing that talent.

Then you just have to hope the new competition never gains any legitimacy, either in the world rugby or Australian sport communities. That is a talk ask. While world rugby is holding out for now, at some point the desire for cash will overwhelm. The game may sell a part of it, as golf did before it, and as other sports have done in other ways.

At that point the risk changes, as rugby players fill the gaps and teaching an NRL star how to play rugby becomes less necessary for the survival of the game. But it does increase the status-pull as players may seek to make the leap, or use the competition as leverage, as Val Holmes once did with NFL (fucking lol. Remember that?).

It’s not clear how this will go. My hope is that this competition never gets off the ground, and that the lack of fanfare means that the big investors lose interest as it no longer suits their needs. That feels like a long bow to hope for. In reality best case is that it stays as a small parasite – occasionally coming along to pick up a loose ‘star’ in search of one last pay day. If it becomes a staple of the international rugby eco-system then the NRL will continue to be at existential threat, particularly if the competition loses its talent, and talent pipelines to it.

Peter V’Landys has never been short of noise or bluster, but this threat demands more than rhetoric. The vulture isn’t circling for show, it’s looking to feed. The question is whether the NRL is ready to fight for its own survival.

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