Like all good columns, this one was hatched on a Tuesday afternoon while sitting at the bar with Bryan Fletcher at a place called Margaritaville, just across the strip from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
We were there last December for the NRL’s promotional tour ahead of the ambitious season-opening double-header to be played at Allegiant Stadium on March 3 (AEDT).
After taking a sip of his frozen blueberry pomegranate margarita, Fletcher had a revelation.
“We need to stop calling it ‘rugby league’,” the Fox Sports and SEN media personality declared. “Because the people here think we’re referring to ‘rugby’. We need to call it ‘NRL’ instead.”
If there’s one thing rugby league people cannot abide, it’s their sport being called ‘rugby’. It sounds like fingernails running down a chalkboard.
Alas, few Americans understand the difference. “That’s the All Blacks, right?” is a common response.
Roosters recruit Spencer Leniu on the NRL’s promotional tour of Las Vegas last December.Credit: NRL Photos
Forget about securing big-name celebrities and NFL stars to spruik the Vegas matches. The NRL’s priority should be setting itself apart from rugby union, which is entrenched in US colleges.
If the rivers of gambling gold are going to flow into the game as ARL Commission chairman Peter V’landys has promised, surely the fans/punters will need to know the difference.
Brent Richardson, chief executive of Australian sports marketing and management firm Rich Digital, knows the US market better than most, having coached rugby league while working as an executive for Google in New York. He coached the Brooklyn Kings for five seasons while also coaching the US national team from 2017 to 2022.
“Americans have no idea there are two different types of rugby,” Richardson said. “The only team they know are the All Blacks — that’s the brand they can identify. In my opinion, you wouldn’t get into an argument about the differences. You’d say our sport is the best rugby game in the world. And that brand name is ‘NRL’.”
Professional leagues in the US are known by their acronym: NFL (American football), NBA (basketball), MLB (baseball), NHL (hockey), MLS (soccer) and MLR (rugby union).
Then there’s UFC, with whom the NRL has entered a partnership.
Whether you like the sport or not, you can’t ignore its ability to market itself. Notice how often UFC boss Dana White drops “UFC” into a sentence. It’s never “mixed martial arts” but the ubiquitous brand he’s cultivated globally over the past decade or so.
The NRL’s “no pads, no helmets” marketing strategy, which features South Sydney co-owner Russell Crowe walking fans through the rules, differentiates rugby league from American football.
NRL players testing out the UFC’s high-performance centre in Las Vegas in December.Credit: NRL Photos
“We have to view this Vegas trip as a first step in a journey,” Crowe said via email. “A lot of things will be learned that can be applied in future forays. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
The NRL is starting the season at Vegas’ version of the coliseum, the 65,000-seat Allegiant Stadium, which hosted the Super Bowl just over a week ago.
Differentiating itself from the NFL is a smart move, but the NRL shouldn’t market itself as a superior alternative. In 2023, the NFL held 93 of the top 100 programs across all broadcast platforms in the US.
Unlike Australia, US sports fans are less tribal about the code they support than the city from where they’re from, according to Richardson.
“If you’re from Philly, you support whoever comes out of there,” he said. “You want people to add rugby league to the sports they love.”
What the NRL must push, he says, is its brutality: big, strong, athletic footballers running into each other at speed sans pads and helmets.
Australian advertising legend Nick Law has long claimed that’s the play, too. A South Sydney tragic, Law has worked with clients like Apple, Nike, and Beats by Dre.
“Nick once said to me, ‘If you’re going to get Americans interested, you have to show highlight reels of players bashing each other’,” Richardson recalled. “If you tell an American you play ‘rugby’, they’ll say, ‘Oh you guys are crazy’. They’re interested in huge humans hitting each other without pads. They love it.”
The NRL kicks off the season with a double-header in Las Vegas in March.Credit: NRL Photos
The NRL is marketing itself to the US at a time when the game is moving away from the organised mayhem we know and love, and fair enough, too, with the shadow of concussion litigation looming over every heavy contact.
As the game speeds up, hulking players are being replaced by smaller, mobile forwards who can play in the middle for 80 minutes. But there’ll always be a place for big, strong, athletic players looking at each other from opposite sides of the ruck and running at each other with murderous intent, their sweaty heads jolting back from the impact, prompting a visceral reaction from the crowd.
Will our American friends fall in love with it as we have? Will they buy the NRL’s international app, then get up at 2am to see if their five-leg anytime-try-scorer multi has been successful?
We won’t know for years, possibly a decade, if the Vegas experiment is a worthwhile gamble in the city of hopes and broken dreams. That’s the short-term challenge for V’landys: to convince every stakeholder that Rome will eventually get built. Maybe. Possibly.
But if he can build Rome, if the NRL can get a toenail in the US market and the rivers of gold start flowing to the areas of the game that truly need the money, I’ll think back to that Tuesday afternoon at Margaritaville when Bryan Fletcher had a revelation between sips of his frozen blueberry pomegranate margarita.
The NRL should expect an invoice from him by the end of the week.
