The fact that Ilona Maher, the USA women’s sevens player, has a social media following that dwarfs Nathan Cleary says much about the social and sporting landscape.
Maher has 2.5 million followers on Instagram and another 2 million on TikTok, while the NRL’s best has just over 400,000 on Instagram.
That owes much to Maher’s charm, savvy and wit, but it also reflects that rugby’s reach compared to league’s is incomparable. The Olympics platform, with sevens introduced in 2016, is unmatchable.
Maher will be 31 for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. If she pushes through to those Games, she may be one of the faces of the event, a powerhouse personal brand who will elevate rugby with her.
In fact, even though Australia’s sevens campaign ended in tears, beaten-down rugby fans have been reminded over the past two weeks that it is their code that matters in an interconnected world. None of this would be relevant if the NRL hadn’t taken the game to Las Vegas as part of its stated aim to grow the game globally.
It is clearly winning the battle with rugby in Australia, and making big strides in New Zealand, but the NRL has decided to take the fight to a stage where rugby is far more comfortable: overseas.
The USA’s Ilona Maher celebrates winning a bronze medal.Credit: AP
The success of the code in this era, therefore, will be judged on if it can crack markets overseas. It’s an astonishing gamble, especially as the other option would have been to consolidate the gains it has made in Australia and New Zealand, and enjoy the fruits of domestic success.
And those have been well-earned. The NRL is a great watch, and although my preference will always be rugby, league has made enormous advances as a spectacle over the past two decades. Through the various rule changes it has created a game in which there is space and opportunity for its more gifted players to express themselves athletically and through their skillset.
The modern era of rugby, by contrast, still has its best players in something of a box, constrained by the stop-start nature of contests, TMO interventions and so forth. In rugby, it is now the coaches who are lionised and to whom observers look to most influence contests, not the players.
But while those impediments are a factor in Australia and New Zealand, rugby remains an international game of reasonable scale that is starting to put together a pipeline of events that could make a ripple in the USA.
Souths centre Campbell Graham, Brisbane hooker Billy Walters, Roosters forward Spencer Leniu and Manly’s Aaron Woods in Las Vegas on a promotional trip.Credit: NRL Photos
World Rugby is investing in a Major League Rugby team, the All Blacks will play Ireland in Chicago next year, England will play the USA, and – of course – the Olympics in 2028 will be followed by rugby World Cups in 2031 and 2033.
But it’ll be no more than a ripple. The odds of either rugby or league taking anything other than a tiny fraction of the American sports market are small, owing to the size and complexity of the market, a relative lack of resources at both Rugby USA and the MLR. It could also be argued that World Rugby has been a bit slow out of the blocks.
Investment in the MLR team, Anthem Rugby Carolina, was announced only earlier this year. Its goal is to support American players in the run-up to the 2031 World Cup – mimicking the approach taken with the Fijian Drua – but leaving just seven or eight years to develop Test-ready American players via the MLR looks like a short runway.
Yet, rugby’s hopes are far more advanced because the NRL’s approach has a fundamental weakness that the bright lights of Las Vegas cannot cover up.
The marketing tagline for this year’s event was, “No pads, no helmets” but in reality it was, “No pads, no helmets and no Americans”. And good luck selling a game to the USA that features no American participants. This is a country that loves its own athletes winning so much that it was calling the NBA winners “world champions” long before you could argue the point.
Yes, no doubt there are worthwhile attempts at the ground level to develop American league players, but can they offer them an Olympics, or even the rebooted Pacific Nations Cup that the USA men’s rugby team will play in this year against Japan, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga and Canada?
