Too right. UK papers give more coverage to Super Bowl than they do RL.

Soccer has actually had a lot of coverage. Brisbane Roar have just won the A league with over 50k attending their last match plus about 2.5 pages in the papers.
Certainly give more equal coverage to sports here than back in the UK.

Sport as a whole gets more coverage in Oz. The entire nation is sports mad. Over here if it's not football it won't get any daily coverage. Football has a complete monopoly on the media. You just have to watch Sky Sports News for an hour to see that

Wait until it gets to State of Origin time. Half the Courier-Mail is dedicated to the Maroons, front and back.

Wait 'til you get to India.......wall to wall cricket.

.....and quebec or monteal....they are nuts about ice hockey....

I have been living in Brisbane for 9 months now and the amount of league coverage is great although when i visited Melbourne there wasn't half as much coverage with AFL being the page filler there. Soccer in Australia doesn't normally get much coverage i think the average crowd the Brisbane Roar got before the playoffs and final was only around 7,000.

TBF those are not national papers they are State papers. The only national paper we have is The Australian and the RL coverage is no better than the other main sports. In NSW and Q'land the papers are full of RL but try to find a RL story in a WA or Victoria paper.

It's like comparing the Yorkshire post or Hull Daily Mail to the Sun or Times.

Soccer is a joke sport in this country as is RU.

At least we are all reaping the awards of the picket of the Telegraph offices, Rugby League is barely out of the paper these days.

Oh wait...

Careful listy..I was branded a Union troll for pointing out what a total and utter waste of time that "campaign" was



At the risk of awakening the troll hunters.....



RL is not MASSIVE in Australia...it is MASSIVE in Sydney and Brisbane and therefore the papers there will give it MASSIVE coverage.....
Western Australia [urlhttp://www.perthnow.com.au/[/url 4th on the list
Southern Australia [urlhttp://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport[/url 4th
Northern Territories [urlhttp://www.ntnews.com.au/[/url3rd
Tasmania [urlhttp://www.themercury.com.au/[/url not there


Auckland [urlhttp://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/headlines.cfm?c_id=4[/url 3rd
Victoria [urlhttp://www.theage.com.au/sport[/url 10th

..Victorians eh...
National [urlhttp://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport[/url 4th

.......seriously, some people need to stop believing all the crap posted about how massive League is in Australia

So is there no biggest sport that is massive in Australia?

Dingo racing

Camel shooting.

Union Troll Hunting

Auckland is part of Australia now apparently.
C'mon Gutters, get your act together champ. Over half the population live in RL states.

What would you prefer, we split QLD and NSW up into tiny states like WA, SA and Tas just so we can say it's played in more states...

Not to mention that the AFL pays News Ltd to run stories in the newspapers around the country (It came out in the C9 court hearings), makes it look like there is more support for it than there actually is.

Following up: Ten of the largest 15 cities in the country are RL through and through, and one of the remaining five (Albury) is 50/50 RL and AFL. Interestingly none of them have RU as the top sport... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ci ... population

Following up: Ten of the largest 15 cities in the country are RL through and through, and one of the remaining five (Albury) is 50/50 RL and AFL. Interestingly none of them have RU as the top sport... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ci ... population

Do they still play RU here?

I know where Auckland is Loks....I was just highlighting that outside Sydney and Brisbane, RL isn't the massive game some paint it to be on here.
As for Union....don't believE all the bad press I get...I have no love of the game, but I do admire the way it is administrated and run........whilst the NRL and some of the more rabid elements who support it, will tell you that the new Billion dollar TV deal will be a game changer, you should temper it with exactly wht is beng sold here.....
201 live NRL games a season
60+ Toyota Cup games a season
3 SoO Games a season
2 Internationals (minimum) a season, All stars game & country city...
1,340 games $750,000 a game..........

Union will collect $2,100,000 per game for the 2015 RWC.......before TV Rights, Sponsorship and merchandise sales. Union currently ploughs about ₤150,000,000 over 4 years into development of the game around the world......the NRL will add 2 more australian teams to its competition.........

As I say, I am no fan of Union, but you have to admire what the IRB have done with "a pigs ear"

lol S15 is the only comp in this hemisphere that is REDUCING its salary cap. Yeh they are going great guns

Are they, By how much?

Yep.....they are having to cut their cloth accoringly.

What will the NRL do with it's new 1 billion TV deal? Will it invest in the future, or will it throw cash at the 16 teams, 14 of which are running at a loss, then add another 2 teams, and hope the TV money continues to rise in 2017



We get it JB, Club League is bigger than Club Union in Australia......good job they have 7 home tests this year (they made $21 million in 2008 from gate receipts at 6 tests) and a 4 match European tour in the Autumn.....and then the B&I Lions in 2013.......they made a loss in the last RWC year in 2007.....they whinged...they've made a loss last year...they're whinging....they'll make a profit in 2012.

By the way, the IRB will invest 150,000,000 GBP into the development of their game over 4 years.....how much are the RLIF going to invest in League around the world in the same period? How much did the RFL pay for the rights to host the RLWC 2013? Was it a figure close to the 100 million the RFU are coughing up for the 2015 Tournament? Maybe it was closer to the 115,000,000 the Japanese are paying for the one in 2019?

Only in a couple of Brisbane and Sydney schools where the kids are allowed to play every football code except rugby league... That'll change eventually though.


Have to laugh at Gutters. First he compares a sixteen team league in Australia to rugby union in its entirety worldwide and then tries to turn the S15 salary cap reduction into a positive...

Must be an interesting world he lives in.

A sporting competition cutting its cloth accordingly rather than blindingly spending cash to the extent that 14 of the 16 teams are running at a loss is a positive.......and believe me, the amount of money being offered globally for TV deals to sport will not last forever. The NRL may well end up like the NFL......very little sport involved but an awfull amount of TV



I compared the amount of money the IRB gets in hosting rights alone for its RWC, with the NRL contract for 2012 onwards......I could have just have easiy compared the amount of money the RLIF got for the hosting rights of the RLWC 2013 if you'd prefer. I believe the figure for the IRB was 100 million pounds......and the RLIF was slightly less than that....around about nothing IIRC.



Thread drift aside, Rugby League is not as massive in Australia as some posters on here would like other to believe. It's the 2nd placed football code and the third most popular team sport.....the reaction of some posters when faced with this fact smacks of insecurity and an unhealthy belief in the imaginary code wars created by a bored media.

Well, I actually live in Australia and can tell you that it is as big as many posters say here. Tell me more about the country i have lived in my entire life, please!

Where about in Australia do you live?

Northern NSW