If England want to beat Australia, more must follow Morgan Knowles to the NRL

The transfer of Morgan Knowles to the Dolphins in 2026, confirmed by both clubs last week, could be something of an inflection point for the England rugby league team.

It’s possible that, when they line up against the Kangaroos for the first Ashes Test at Wembley in November, they might have more players with NRL contracts than without.

Knowles won’t have travelled by then, the England team will have him plus Herbie Farnworth, Dom Young, John Bateman, Morgan Smithies, Matty Nicholson, Kai Pearce-Paul and Victor Radley, as well as George Williams and Luke Thompson who have gone to Australia and come back.

The NRL’s Pommy cohort now is as big as it has ever been, a condition of both rugby league economics and the desires of players to challenge themselves at the highest level possible.

Knowles’ decision to swap St Helens for Redcliffe prompted a fair bit of hand-wringing, largely connected to the obvious direction that talent now flows and what that means for the state of the domestic competition in the UK.

Realistically, there are two strands to this argument. One concerns the health of the England national team, which would be improved by more of its players featuring in a better competition; the other the health of the Super League, which would be improved by having the premier English players remain at home.

On the first point, it is indisputable that the NRL is a superior competition to the Super League, even if some individual Super League clubs remain among the best in the world.

Wigan and previously St Helens were incredibly successful within the UK competition, then defeated the dynastic Penrith Panthers, proving that single clubs are able to compete and win on with the very best that the NRL has to offer.

Those sides were successful despite having around a third as much money to spend on players and without the access to the rivers of junior development cash that come from having a proprietary, socially-parasitic casino across the road handing them free money, as the Panthers and plenty of other NRL teams do.

On a week-to-week basis, the NRL is a lot, lot better than Super League. As is usually the case in rugby league, it’s better to take the temperature at the weakest point rather than the strongest, and even the worst NRL team would lap most of the Super League. It’s not close.

If you believe that iron sharpens iron, then someone like Knowles having to be at their best for every match, rather than facing good opponents one week and bad ones the next, would make him a better player.

England need better players to compete with Australia and other Southern Hemisphere opponents, the NRL makes players better, so more England players should go to the NRL. Case closed, right?

A drain of the top talent away from Super League certainly does damage the standard of the competition and, in the long run, stops it from being able to overtake the NRL or even get close to it.

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As we have seen repeatedly on a financial level, the Southern Hemisphere is moving away from the North, and even if Super League was doing better in that area, it would not be doing so fast enough to close that gap.

The NRL salary cap is now around $11.25m (£5.5m), more than twice the Super League equivalent, and while there are a few marquee players allowed in the UK, it would be safe to say that not many elite footballers are staying home for financial reasons.

Either they don’t have offers from the NRL or they prefer the lifestyle that being a Super League star brings them to what is possible in Australia and New Zealand.

Clearly someone like Jack Welsby, who would have half of the NRL after him if he wanted to move, prefers living in England, being close to his family, working in St Helens or some other non-money, non-footy reason to starring in Australia.

That’s totally fine and his prerogative, but it doesn’t make him a better player for the England team. At 23 and having won literally everything he could have won (and multiple times) in just under 150 appearances, Shaun Wane should be doing all he can to get Welsby to the NRL.

(While that would suit Wane in his Wigan capacity, he should also do it for Junior Nsemba and Harry Smith.)

Compare to other sports, where this is totally normalised behaviour. Argentina, the last football world champions, and France, the champions before them, have almost no players based at home.

Australia, currently the world champions in ODI cricket, and England, who won the edition before them, had their talent go to the finishing school at the Indian Premier League rather than play exclusively in domestic competitions.

While the Primera División, Ligue 1, Marsh Cup and Royal London Cup would almost certainly be better off had Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe, Glenn Maxwell and Ben Stokes stayed at home, the health of their sports as a whole is better by them having left.

The question facing English clubs should be how much a successful England team would drive interest in the Super League versus how much they lose by not having their superstars close to home.

There is an argument that rugby league in the UK lacks superstars, nationally-known figures like those of the past. While that is undeniably true, there has been little reflection on why is it is the case, and indeed, how much of it is the fault of Super League itself or rugby league in general.

When the sport thinks of its heyday, a time when everyone from the Queen downwards knew who Ellery Hanley and Martin Offiah were, the media landscape was totally different.

There were four channels on TV, a handful of newspapers that everyone read and few other avenues to consume sport.

Without laying it on too thick, we had a more homogenised culture in general: more people watched the same TV shows, more people listened to the same music and more people saw the same film, as there were far fewer methods to consume culture than there are in 2025.

Now, we are an atomised society. We can watch whatever we want, from wherever, whenever. If you like science fiction and heavy metal, you can only consume that through specialised streaming services, without ever being forced to know who Ed Sheeran or Curly Watts are.

For what it’s worth, the rugby league landscape was totally different too.

We had almost no televised games (there wasn’t a TV deal for non-Challenge Cup fixtures as late as 1987), attendances were half of what they are today and the product was crap. Oh, and we still got flogged by Australia, who won every game they played on British soil in the 1980s.

In sport, the Premier League has grown so much that it’s hard for anyone else to get a piece of the pie, and every sport is squeezed by the commercial reality of being on pay TV.

If you don’t believe it, go look up the current British boxing world champions or who is in the England Test team, then compare their name recognition to that of a Chris Eubank or Ian Botham. Are they more or less well-known? Is that boxing or cricket’s fault?

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If we can assume that the relative lack of superstars compared to previous eras might have more to do with society than rugby league, the question Super League might instead ask itself is how much superstars contribute to the success of clubs commercially.

While, obviously, having better players helps to win more games, which does help individual clubs financially, it is a zero sum game within the competition. Some clubs have to win and some have to lose regardless.

Did any Wigan fan stop going because Kai Pearce-Paul left? Are any Warrington fans boycotting due to the departure of Matty Nicholson? Will Saints fans miss Morgan Knowles at the gate? Does anyone no longer watch the Super League because that talent departed the competition?

Plaintively, the answer is no. The best players leaving, if anything, creates space for the next hero to arrive. KPP went, Nsemba came in. That should be the goal.

Fans love their clubs because they love their clubs, not because of the rotating cast of players that come through.

Birmingham City fans would love to still have Jude Bellingham, but it’s better for England that he plays for Real Madrid. It’s an ecosystem that feeds upwards to get the best playing the best.

There is a wider discussion about where Super League might be in a decade, or two decades, relative to the NRL, but realistically, the best chance for the competition to grow collectively, with the rising tide lifting all boats, is for England to be the best version of themselves that they can be.

Nearly 850,000 viewers watched England’s victory over Samoa last year, a number one would expect to grow for an Ashes Test against Australia, and would grow yet further if England were to defeat the Kangaroos.

The job of Super League is to take mass market moments like that and convert the fringe, casual viewers into more regular customers. Winning would be the best marketing strategy possible.

It’s not mutually exclusive that the Super League can improve itself commercially, as the IMG protocols are doing, while also becoming a talent factory that produces players for the highest level of rugby league that exists at the moment, which is the NRL.

If Wane had 30 NRL players to pick from, all playing week-in-week out, he’d be dealt a much stronger hand.

When Mikey Lewis and Junior Nsemba take to the field against the Kangaroos at the end of the year, they would be better prepared for the challenge if it wasn’t the first time that they were facing Nathan Cleary and Payne Haas.

Given the infeasibility of a Champions League or IPL style tournament in our sport, we should face the realities as they are and attempt to get more players in the England team playing at the best level possible as often as possible.

The unfortunate reality of that, for Super League clubs, is being feeders to the NRL. If Peter V’landys wants to invest in the Northern Hemisphere and bring both sides of the sport closer together, then we might see this sooner than later.

Super League should not stand in the way. In fact, they should be driving their players to the airport. For the long-term health of rugby league in England, it makes sense.