No one wants the NRL’s bold expansion into Papua New Guinea to work more than Justin Olam, yet concerns remain.
PNG will join the NRL in 2028, based in Port Moresby, underpinned by $600 million of Australian taxpayer funding over the next 10 years. There are sceptics about whether the bold venture will be a sustainable success. Olam has been among them.
Few players are more qualified to provide a perspective than Olam. He grew up in PNG’s remote and mountainous Chimbu Province, remains the only player to have graduated from the PNG Hunters’ Queensland Cup side to the NRL and is such a revered figure in his homeland that footy fans hang off his every word. If he ran for the prime ministership, he’d probably score an easy win.
Olam, who holds an applied physics degree, remains optimistic about the opportunity. The Tigers centre also harbours a few reservations, most notably over whether the nation’s junior pathway system is sufficiently established to turn talented locals into bona fide NRL players.
“The challenge is that PNG has never had an NRL team,” Olam said. “To manage that at a bigger scale, the big one is a pathway where you have a pool of talent to pick from. That’s the biggest [issue] and the second one is to run it the right way, so it’s not politically motivated and it’s just an independent body run by Papua New Guinea Rugby League, and it’s for the good of the game.
“The main objective is to compete and give opportunities to young kids back at home. That’s probably the biggest challenge, to convince people to go live there.
Anthony Albanese, Justin Olam and Peter V’landys.Credit: Getty
“It’s not bad, I think you have to go and experience it yourself.”
Olam was buoyed by the performance of PNG during the Pacific Championships, where they defeated Fiji and the Cook Islands before losing to New Zealand.
“I think they’ve done pretty well,” he said. “If we had an NRL team this year, then most of those boys are gonna play, I think they can compete with the rest of the NRL teams.
“Most of them don’t have NRL exposure training and defensive systems and attack and all of that. As soon as you get a good coach that can point them in the right direction, they will compete.
“I think they’re gonna be good, but my point of view is different from everyone.
“It’s going to give opportunity to people, but what I’ve always spoken about is [the need for] stability, having a pathway for players instead of hiring them from overseas.”
According to Oxford Economics’ Global Cities Index, Port Moresby is the fourth most dangerous city in the world. However, Olam is concerned about how the country is portrayed and believes it is a safe and desirable destination for footballers.
“I think a big thing will be the way the media paints Papua New Guinea,” he said.
PNG has been handed an NRL licence.
“That’s probably how most of the NRL boys will see it, they think of PNG as this and that, but it’s actually not.
“Like every other city in the world, you’ve got some places with criminals, there’s some bad places in parts of the town. A bad part of society is always [everywhere] and I think that’s probably a misunderstanding.
“There are other parts of the world, even there are some parts in Australia, where some people would say ‘Oh, don’t go there.’
“Most of the crimes in PNG, I can say are tribal related. My province is peaceful, we don’t fight. There are some problems as well, but the PNG media love to put a bad story out there, so those people need to pull their socks up as well.
“They need to [promote] PNG the way it’s supposed to be. There’s beautiful places around where people can go and visit, it’s great for kids, for people to bring their family up there.”
Asked what would constitute success for the new franchise, the premiership-winning former Storm star said: “Off the field will be really good for the league and for NRL as well because of the audience.
“They’re going to get the crowd to the game, it’s going to be consistently high.
“The success will be to give opportunities to young boys. If I see modern tech and the PNG boys are competing at a high level, I will call that a success.
“Winning the premiership is obviously the goal when you play, but to give opportunities to young kids back at home, some of them don’t have any education, that to me is a success to the country and the club.”
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