It’s time for rugby league to have a difficult conversation about Wembley

It may not have been a momentous occasion for England on the field on Saturday afternoon but for the sport off it, there was certainly a feeling of being present for something significant occurring.

The highest-ever crowd for an Ashes Test in the United Kingdom of 60,812 is no mean feat, and credit must go to the organisers and indeed those who turned out at Wembley Stadium to be part of history – even if the end result wasn’t quite what English supporters would have hoped for.

But it still didn’t feel quite as momentous as it should have done – and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. Forget the result for a moment, not least because there could be no arguments there. Australia were worthy winners and the gulf between the two nations – a debate for another column – is certainly sizeable on the evidence of game one of the series.

But Wembley just does not feel as though it ticks the boxes it should do for occasions like these. Rugby league has a long and rich history with the national stadium, as any montage building up to games like these will remind of you. The problem is that most of that history is with the old stadium, which was demolished over 20 years ago.

So it’s time for the sport to have an honest conversation about its relationship with Wembley.

Rugby league has an obsession with the stadium that in the modern era, just isn’t really needed for multiple reasons. First and foremost.. the atmosphere at Wembley is generally pretty horrific. It is a venue not conducive to loud and partisan atmospheres, especially when it is routinely only two-thirds full.

Since it reopened and staged its first rugby league game in 2007, it has attracted a crowd in excess of 80,000 on just four occasions. Three of those were in 2010 or earlier, with the exception still a full decade ago: the 2015 Challenge Cup final. Even for big international rugby league games, Wembley is nowhere near full.

60,000 was a great effort on Saturday but when you saw an entire top tier sitting empty, it didn’t feel as great a result as it should have done. The Times‘ rugby union correspondent Stephen Jones – who was drafted in to cover league on Saturday – has ruffled some feathers only with his report in suggesting there were ‘only’ 60,000 fans there in the intro.

Whether he is right, wrong or being provoking with his choice of words, it’s understandable why Jones would choose to use the word ‘only’ when he looks around and sees an entire tier of Wembley Stadium empty. But had this game been at somewhere like Tottenham Hotspur, where the capacity of 62,850, you can be sure a crowd of 60,814 would have looked, felt and sounded a whole lot different.

Rugby league is not in a position to fill Wembley Stadium like it used to for Challenge Cup finals of days gone by. The reasons for that are long, winding and complicated – it is not a simple solution. But the sport now has to accept that and look to create mentalities around these occasions where you simply can’t afford to miss out on a ticket.

That’s what we’ve got at Everton this Saturday. There will be thousands of rugby league fans clamouring for tickets, scouring resale websites and desperate to be inside the Hill Dickinson Stadium. It’s a simple supply and demand process; fill smaller venues, and more people panic to get tickets. The reality is that on Saturday morning, the day of the first Ashes Test in 22 years, you could buy a ticket. That isn’t right.

The Rugby Football League still rely on clips of Great Britain from the 1950s at Wembley to inspire people born in the 1990s to pick up a ticket. They aren’t interested. And the beauty is, we don’t have to leave London behind. Wembley isn’t the pinnacle in the city anymore: there are other magnificent venues to have a go at.

Tottenham, one of the greatest sporting venues in world sport – genuinely – is perfect for rugby league’s needs right now. It’s tragic that the game hasn’t gone back there since the 2022 Challenge Cup final. Ask anyone who was there, or anyone that has been to a sporting occasion there since, and they will tell you it is world-class.

Size-wise, it’s perfect for rugby league. The numbers surrounding Wembley games tells you that alone. 60,000-plus for a Test match is tremendous for the game in this country – so do we want it to feel like a big occasion, or feel like it did at Wembley on Saturday afternoon?

If you can get nearly 10,000 more for the Super League Grand Final, then that might illustrate to you that the public are ready and receptive for a change.

Few sports are as proud of its history like rugby league, and rightly so. But it doesn’t mean the game has to be chained to it unnecessarily just because there is a statue outside of it. Perhaps it’s time to think about what we can do away from Wembley, even just for a brief period.

Fill some venues, create some demand for tickets, and if the Ashes materialise here again, who knows how strong a position we’ll be in.