COVID-19 brought rugby league to a halt on this day five years ago, but the officials who shut down the NRL say the pandemic has helped secure the code’s financial future and taken the NRL to a new level on the field.
ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys, commissioner Wayne Pearce and NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo did not know what to think when a leading epidemiologist told them the virus was going to make it too dangerous for the competition to continue.
On Monday, March 23, 2020, with the NRL competition just two rounds old, and the world coming to grips with the full horror of the pandemic, the decision was made.
V’landys had already made his intentions clear a few days earlier about forging ahead with the competition behind closed doors.
The Thursday night game between North Queensland and the Bulldogs posted an official attendance of 241 people, which included the 34 players and three family members allowed in to watch Jake Averillo’s NRL debut for Canterbury.
But on the advice of an epidemiologist – then the Queensland Government’s decision to close its borders – there was only one thing for officials to do.
Former NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg and Peter V’landys announce the NRL season has been suspended.Credit: Getty Images
Pearce had driven to Balmoral Beach at the start of the day and pulled over to dial in to a meeting with then NRL CEO Todd Greenberg and the commissioners. He did not know what to think when Greenberg read out the expert’s report, which pleaded with them to stop the competition.
“It was such a surreal moment,” Pearce recalled.
He later jumped on his surf ski, “which gave me an opportunity to do a bit of reflection on the harbour”.
V’landys was across town at Racing NSW’s head office when Greenberg broke the news to him. Another teleconference was held – Zoom was yet to be fully embraced – the news was broken to the 16 NRL club chief executives at about 5.45pm, followed by a snap media conference.
Bulldogs interchange players and support staff, seated well apart, look on at an empty ANZ Stadium in round two of 2020.Credit: Getty Images
V’landys, in his role as Racing NSW chief executive, made sure that sport survived an equine influenza outbreak on the eve of the 2007 spring carnival. But COVID was a very different beast.
As he drove home that night, wondering what the immediate future looked like for the game and for the world, V’landys started to think back to the day he visited a fortune-teller as a child.
“The fortune-teller told me, ‘You’re a cat’,” V’landys recalled. “And I remember asking her, ‘What do you mean I’m a cat?’
“She told me, ‘People are going to throw you in the air, and you’ll be thinking, how the hell will I land? But you will always land on your feet, like a cat’. That conversation always stuck with me. And for whatever reason, I thought of it in that moment.”
The Broncos take on the Rabbitohs at an empty Suncorp Stadium in 2020.Credit: Getty Images
That same night, V’landys started to track the COVID infection rates and circled May 28 on the calendar as the return date for the game. He was convinced the positive cases would have started to dip by then.
Some people wanted to reboot the competition in late June. Others were prepared to wait until the start of September. But V’landys informed the broadcasters he wanted to return on May 28, and even asked Pearce to form the Project Apollo committee to ensure all the proper biosecurity measures were in place to help make it happen.
Abdo, then the game’s chief commercial officer, knew the NRL could only survive a few months before going broke. The money they had was simply an advance from the broadcasters for games that were yet to be played. The broadcasters, including Nine Entertainment, publishers of this masthead, paid in advance each quarter.
Abdo this week confirmed there was talk about “attempting to get a debt facility” as fears grew the NRL could become insolvent.
The enforced break allowed the game to introduce the six-again rule and return to one referee rather than two. The six-again rule led to more fatigue in the game, which led to more broken play, which led to more attacking raids.
The NRL has also recorded a profit every year since the pandemic. It has acquired more assets, including hotels, so it does not rely exclusively on rugby league as a source of income.
“As a game we’ve matured a lot since that experience [COVID],” Pearce said. “In a weird kind of way, it was a wake-up call to get the code to work together to achieve an amazing outcome.”
Abdo added: “In some respects, COVID exposed the frailties of the game’s financial ecosystem, and gave us an opportunity to work together to get through a crisis.
“There were a lot of positives that came out of the pandemic. We were given the chance to look at our game, see what it was, see what it could be, and what could happen when all stakeholders came together.”
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