Examining whether the NRL’s talent pool can survive Perth expansion

The depth of rugby league’s talent pool has been a major topic of conversation in the last week, ever since the news broke that the NRL’s expansion into Perth is set for 2027. 

With the accession of the WA Bears, the sport will need to find a whole new team’s worth of talent, then do it all over again when PNG’s franchise joins in 2028.

Eagle-eyed fans might have also noticed that, on the same day the Bears news hit, Wests Tigers CEO Shane Richardson also talked up an NRL acquisition of Super League, which, if you believe Richo at least, will likely involve cutting two teams from the competition.

Easy solution: move Salford to Port Moresby and Huddersfield to Perth. The net number of professional NRL clubs stays the same. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that sounds.

It’s hard to accurately say how many male professional rugby league players there currently are in the world, which has suddenly become a major talking point given the need for new talent.

An NRL club has a Top 30, the guys being paid full-time to feature in the competition, which comes to around 510 full-time players. 

Then throw in development deals, which are limited to between four and six per club per year. If we split the difference at five, that’s another 85, so 600 in total.

Do the same again for Super League – 30 x 12 – and you get 360, and for the sake of easy maths, let’s chuck in three per club on dual registration who get us to a round thousand across the two major competitions.

Given the attrition rate inherent in a sport like rugby league, that’s really not that many people.

To expand, veterans who otherwise might have retired will keep playing at the highest level, kids will be thrown in earlier and fringe players will become first graders.

Fortunately, the cost of doing this will likely be covered by an increased TV deal, especially if Richardson’s plan to sell NRL, Super League and international rights collectively is adopted.

The wider fear might be that the quality will drop, but that isn’t actually as cut and dried as you might think.

The NRL and Super League are, like all sports competitions, zero sum games. Someone has to finish first and someone last. 

If you split the talent pool more widely in a controlled manner, theoretically the competition element can be maintained – as we have seen with the addition of the Dolphins in 2023.

Net quality is harder to measure, but the higher end of the talent bracket arguably doesn’t really matter that much given the way that rugby league works. 

Our game is a very weak link sport, which is tactics-speak for the basic knowledge that most footy fans have, which is that the level of your worst player is far more important than that of your best.

A team that is decent across the board will, all things being equal, do better than a side that has one superstar but a few horrendous players. 

For example, if Nathan Cleary suddenly played for Rochdale Hornets, they’d definitely do better but they’d still lose 99 times out of a hundred to anyone in the Super League. 

Compare this to basketball, where adding LeBron James would have a much larger material effect on a bad team, because it’s a strong link sport where your best player is most important.

In the context of two teams entering the NRL, we have a very real recent example of how this works, as the Dolphins didn’t sign any marquee players in their first season, but instead assembled a squad of competent if unspectacular players and did absolutely fine.

With the Bears, expectation levels will be similar. Even in their original North Sydney format, they were famously bad and that was before being exiled for 30 years and reborn 3,000 kilometres away.

When a team enters the comp, it really doesn’t matter that much how they do in the short term because the idea is that they exist for the next century, not just a few years.

Western Australia hasn’t produced a single current NRL player and can’t really be expected to do so in the short to medium term and, since we’re on the subject, neither has Papua New Guinea since Justin Olam’s retirement earlier this year.

PNG do have several home-grown players in the Super League, plus a whole squad of second graders in the PNG Hunters team, but it would be a shock if more than a handful graduated to the NRL by the time the new team hits the comp in 2028.

The PNG team is slightly different due to the tax incentives and a real talent base to work with over a longer lead time, but for the Bears, the goal has to be to attain competency based on fringe and off-contract talent, much like the Dolphins did.

If they get Brad Arthur as coach, they will have a solid operator who can build a roster, not to mention one with very recent experience of NRL pathways and Super League talent.

For fringe first-graders and high-level reserves players, the talent is absolutely there. 

At the Phins, one could point to Josh Kerr, Sean O’Sullivan and Jamayne Isaako as blokes who were bottom-end NRL players mostly operating in second grade in 2022, but who have barely touched the lower levels since. 

Adding 30 more full-time roles as rugby league players was the chance they needed to cement themselves.

Your columnist regularly watches Newtown Jets, who have Jayden Berrell (Q Cup Player of the Year 2021, NSW Cup Hooker of the Year 2024), a player with only three NRL appearances, stuck behind Blayke Brailey at Cronulla, the Jets’ first grade affiliate.

One would expect that an equivalent player would have played NRL far younger than Berell eventually did and likely thrived in it had there been more spaces available.

Mawene Hiroti, who has excelled for Newtown for several years, slotted perfectly into the Sharks NRL side this year when KL Iro got injured despite making just two NRL appearances in two years prior, and Iro himself was NSW Cup Player of the Year in 2022 before getting a permanent spot. 

This weekend’s NSW Cup team lists include Danny Levi, Ryan Matterson, Bryce Cartwright, Morgan Harper, Tanah Boyd, Jackson Hastings, Josh Schuster, Matt Eisenhuth, Charlie Staines, Raymond Faitala-Mariner, Drew Hutchison, Jake Turpin and Chad Townsend. 

Nobody is saying these blokes are world-beaters, but they represent around 1,500 first grade appearances, enough to suggest that they’d be absolutely fine at the level.

Adding the 18th team creates not only more opportunities for Australian-based players, but also the chance for Super League stars to move to a part of Australia that is much closer to home and already has a huge expat population of Brits – even more than Sydney, a city twice the size of Perth.

Should the NRL come into Super League and reduce the number of teams to ten – as is very much the intention from major figures in Australia – then the push factor would grow yet further towards the southern hemisphere.

The likely effect of this would be more top-end Super League players in the NRL – a positive for England, as detailed here – and the rest of the comp backfilling the positions, which would also probably act as a net positive for the quality of week-to-week footy in the UK.

This is all speculative, but there’s a world where Perth becomes a stepping stone for English players who want a crack at the NRL – like Canberra but closer and warmer – alongside the usual core of Antipodean talent. 

The idea that the sport doesn’t have the talent to fill an extra 30 players in the elite competition is nonsense, peddled by those who either don’t watch Super League or second grade, or who have a misunderstanding of how talent distribution functions in a highly systematic sport like rugby league.

If anything, rugby league’s collectivist nature positions it well to absorb moderate increases in player pool, and has an underserved talent base with insufficient opportunity. 

Rugby league is often guilty of having an ‘if you build it, they will come’ attitude about itself, but as far as growing the number of professional players goes, that axiom might actually be true. 

If done slowly, sensibly and with the long-term in mind, the Perth Bears might find that the talent was there all along.