New owners, new coach: but what actually is the point of Gold Coast Titans?

You might be surprised to be reading this. In fact, you should be: this is an article about the Gold Coast Titans.

The Gold Coast isn’t just where sports teams go to die, it’s where rugby league internet traffic does as well, which is why they get such a tiny amount of coverage in the Australian sports media.

Modern journalism is a numbers game and there’s not enough numbers in the Gold Coast Titans. Depending on who you ask, this is either a blessing or a curse.

On the positive, there’s no great clamour for the heads of the many people who have run an NRL club for the thick end of 20 years and achieved basically nothing on the field.

The record tells you everything: four finals series from 18 attempts, one finals win ever, no winning seasons since 2010.

Were a club this bad for this long in, say, Sydney, they’d be the Wests Tigers and therefore the most clickable team in the comp.

We get boardroom dramas aplenty across not just the Tigers, but also the Wests Magpies, the Leagues Club, the principal sponsors and more.

The Titans? They changed ownership last week and nobody noticed. No, really – go Google it.

If you’re the coach, Des Hasler, the lack of interest plays into your hands.

In fact, you could argue that the scrutiny Dessie does get is more personal, in that he’s a long-standing quirky character rather than, y’know, one of just 17 men tasked with coaching rugby league in the most difficult competition in the world.

There’s no analysis of how his team plays or why they’re rubbish, just Dessie did a funny thing, classic Des, the Mad Scientist strikes again.

The negative is that the team can list forever without anyone really caring.

The Gold Coast is a strange place, big and well-populated but with little roots. For Love Rugby League’s large UK audience: the Goldie is basically Australia’s answer to Benidorm, a place built around the beach, tourism little else.

The Dolphins could come into the NRL with an established fanbase, decades of history and a raison d’etre to fill Suncorp when the Broncos aren’t playing.

The Titans have been around since 2007 but nobody really knows what they’re for, other than the vague idea that Queensland’s second biggest settlement seems like the sort of place that should have its own footy team.

On paper, they’re a great idea, and their local demographic is almost too perfect for rugby league.

There’s a huge catchment, two thirds of which were born in Australia, a number high by metropolitan Australian standards.

It’s still, as all Australia is, a place based on migration, which has made the Goldie one of the fastest growing places in Australia, going from 400,000 in 2000 to 750,000 today.

In the Gold Coast, that’s largely migration from other parts of Australia, and their biggest non-Australian group is New Zealanders.

For the junior ranks, that’s great. Two high schools, Palm Beach Currumbin and Keebra Park, are among the great rugby league nurseries, the equivalent of anything that Western Sydney has to offer.

You could play Reece Walsh at fullback, Jahrome Hughes and Jamal Fogarty in the halves, Payne Haas and Mo Fotuaika in the middle, David Fifita and Briton Nikora in the back row still get Cody Walker and AJ Brimson off the bench before you got out of just those two schools in the current NRL. Oh, and you’d have Benji Marshall coaching, too.

For the Titans, the footy mad demographic is a problem. If you have a situation where there’s a groundswell of support for the sport but they’re all from somewhere else, the chances are that they brought their own team with them.

The club was founded in 2007, so it’s reasonable to expect that they were already fans of someone else first, and the Titans haven’t really done anything to convince anyone to change affiliations.

Average attendance at Robina Park is respectable enough at 18,000, but that’s pulled up by huge walk-ups when the Broncos and Warriors are in town. Without them, it drops a lot.

Having 10,000 fans of another club on your doorstep works in your favour when they come to visit, but it does little to assuage the notion that the Titans aren’t even the biggest club on the Gold Coast.

This isn’t an NRL thing either. The AFL’s Gold Coast Suns sold out Carrara Oval last weekend – only it was almost entirely to Collingwood fans.

The point of this all is to exemplify the gap between Titans reality and Titans potential.

Get locals to adopt the club, even as a second choice, and there’s huge upside. Get local juniors to stay on the Gold Coast to play and you’re suddenly cooking with gas talent wise.

Unfortunately, that second part has often been lacking. There’s been a bit kicking around of late about the retention at the club, with the current NRL top four all boasting former Titans in the halves.

Jahrome Hughes debuted on the Gold Coast, while Jamal Fogarty and Toby Sexton were also allowed to walk.

Meanwhile, the Titans themselves have managed to have four playmakers who prefer playing fullback but no recognised seven, and no six beyond the creaking Keiran Foran.

Even that isn’t the main issue. Whatever configuration of playmakers they have picked, attack has rarely been the problem. Defence is an ongoing disaster, and that comes down to retention as well.

In Round 8 of 2023, when Justin Holbrook’s Titans gave away the biggest comeback in NRL history, turning a 26-0 lead over the Dolphins into a 28-26 defeat, their outside backs were Alofiana Khan-Pereira and Jojo Fifita on the wings, Brian Kelly and Philip Sami in the centres.

In Round 8 of 2025, the Titans lost 18-50 to the Cowboys with exactly the same four blokes.

They have averaged 34 against this season, 27.7 against last season and 27.2 in 2023. The defence has declined, but everyone has kept their job anyway.

In fact, of the 17 that played in Holbrook’s last game over two years ago, 11 are still there. Of the Tigers 17 that the Titans beat in Holbrook’s final match, just five remain.

At the Bulldogs, who they beat in the last game of that season, only six are left and at the Dragons, the third of the trio who finished beneath the Gold Coast that season, there are seven.

Where other clubs gutted the roster to force change, the Titans have stood still.

There’s a lot of talk about culture at the club, as if moving to the Gold Coast somehow made you soft, less committed or more blase about life as a rugby league player.

Across a succession of coaches – and indeed, multiple sports, given the paucity of success elsewhere – there’s a through line that could well give that impression.

As discussed above, the fact that nobody really cares or notices how badly you play probably plays into this. If you have a bad game for Souths, you can expect punters in the street to point it out. At the Titans? Less so.

But it could just be that they’ve continually made bad roster choices without consequence.

Brian Kelly has played 183 NRL games and has a 33% winning ratio. His defensive statistics are as bad as anyone to get picked as many times as he has in his position. Throw Phil Sami in and that ratio drops to 30%, and they’ve played together 94 times for the Titans.

Meanwhile, the players the Gold Coast have come closest to losing are actually their most talented, Tino Fa’asuamaleaui and David Fifita. The rest? Still in post, still failing.

With Hasler all-but confirmed as leaving at the end of the year – retiring before he is pushed might be the polite way of putting it – the spotlight is back on the Titans and their trajectory.

It’s easy to point to sacking Holbrook as a bad idea, and in hindsight it probably was. Certainly, distance from the club has only improved his reputation.

The easy answer would be to point, as everyone else does, at the Gold Coast and shrug. This city kills sports teams, and the Titans are but the most prominent example.

Hasler was meant to be the antidote to the slightly holiday camp vibes, but instead, has changed next to nothing and, collectively, the side have regressed.

They’re no closer to working out what their best spine is, or finding some outside backs who can tackle, or getting the best out of the talent available in the roster.

The coaching will change but, unless the back office philosophy does too, don’t expect anything different.

The salary cap is out of whack to keep the likes of Fa’asuamaleaui and David Fifita on board, but in a weak link sport like rugby league, that has to change. You’re only as good as your worst player.

There is the potential for a Ewing Effect – where a team loses their best player and gets better – if the cap space was invested across multiple positions.

Having some clarity over the 1, 6, 7 and 9 would also help, or at least picking four of them and leaving them to sort it for themselves.

If they can get those two things in place, then the Titans might begin to reverse the Gold Coast curse.