The NRL is close in 2025: but is it any good? Here’s what the data tells us

This weekend marks the exact halfway point of the NRL regular season, with Round 14 tipping us into the second part of the 27 round campaign.

On the surface, it’s been quite a good year: lots of upsets, tries, hits and all the good stuff that keeps the fans coming back. Assessing whether it’s been a good season comparatively to others is a bit of a different question.

In NRL HQ, they’ll happily point to the viewing figures and attendance – up, up and triple up – and leave it there. The public have spoken, and they like it.

Popular acclaim, however, is quite unreliable. To quote Super Hans from Peep Show: “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis, you can’t trust people.”

In essence, this boils down to a question about aesthetics and preferences: what do we want from our rugby league?

Tens of millions watched Paris St Germain thrash Inter Milan in the Champions League final 5-0 last weekend with a devastating display of attacking brilliance – but anyone who tuned in for a contest was disappointed.

Then again, tens of millions also tuned in to watch Tottenham Hotspur squeak past Manchester United 1-0 in the Europa League Final in a nail biter, almost all of them left thinking that it was one of the worst games they’d ever seen (even if the subset that supported Spurs didn’t care).

Origin last week managed to be neither close nor good, which left a lot of people cold. It’s the sort of thing that would have been improved by a massive fight, which nobody can condone but secretly everyone wishes had taken place.

Multiplying this value judgement across 100 games – we’re at that round number now, by the way – and then trying to judge it is even more nebulous.

Ask a Canterbury or Canberra fan and they’ll tell you it’s a great season, and indeed, the game between the pair might have been the best of the lot so far.

We’ve sat through Newcastle v Gold Coast twice, however, and you’ll struggle to remember anything about either. (Well, unless you’re a Titans fan, as victories over the Knights form two thirds of all their wins this year.)

We can assess the two key areas that most fans want: competitiveness and attractiveness.

The positive for the NRL, compared to other seasons at least, is that this year is very competitive.

The gap between the bottom four and the top four is three wins, with Parramatta, Newcastle and Penrith on four each and Melbourne and Cronulla on seven. Given the Origin disruptions and generally unpredictability of the NRL this year, that’s nothing.

If we take byes out the ladder, this becomes more stark: only five teams have a winning record at all, and while that sounds like it should be impossible in a 17-team comp, it is a reflection of how often everyone is beating everyone else.

Manly, North Queensland and Souths are at 50%, but everyone else has lost more than they have done.

The spread is 6th-8th, whereas at the same point in 2024, a 50% record was good enough for 9th-12th place.

The difference then was that we had two standout bad teams on just two wins at this point – the Tigers and Souths – whereas the worst this time around is the Titans on three.

The positive spin on this would be that the floor has been raised. There’s not as much outright dross, as the Titans have been for years and the Tigers and Bulldogs have been in recent years. Theoretically, that makes for a better chance of a good game, whichever fixture you tune in for.

The negative would be that the middle class has dropped in quality.

Where there were previously two very good teams (Penrith and Melbourne) and five to eight decent teams to duke out the top four and finals berths; now there are five good teams, one or two terrible ones and a whole lot of whatever in the middle.

This is only the halfway point, of course, and really, competitiveness week-to-week is more about keeping the already interested, interested.

The NRL’s chief marketing success in recent years, no matter how they spin it, has been in making people who already liked footy like it more, consolidating and incrementally increasing viewership and attendance among NSW, Queensland and New Zealand supporters.

In that sense, having more sides with competitive interest in the backend of the year, as looks like will be the case here, is useful.

What remains to be seen is the impact when the whips get cracking.

It might pan out well, in that all the best teams are sufficiently flawed that the knockout games are meaningful.

In 2024, only two of the nine were competitive contests, so the most lucrative club games of the year were largely damp squibs that existed to fast-forward to a Panthers-Storm Grand Final.

In 2025, there’s a solid chance that a team from beyond the top four – especially if Penrith sneak in, the Roosters get bodies back or Manly get going – could go deep, which would be paydirt for the NRL.

It could, however, be another misfire as bad teams make the finals, stink it out and we end up where we did in 2024 all over again.

Competition, remember, is just one part of the bargain. If the games themselves are low quality, fans are just as easily turned off.

That is the major fear at the halfway point, where we have seen topsy-turvy, but often underwhelming football.

This is, at the risk of repeating a well-worn path, largely due to the rules, and the tactical reaction to them.

The set restart has caused massive possession swings to become a feature of the game, with a commensurate change in defensive tactics to accommodate.

Teams are willing to give up multiple sets on their line, as long as those sets are slow, leaving attacks banging their heads against a brick wall without the cumulative pressure that used to come with forced repeat sets, now undermined by the lack of long drop outs.

The monopoly of possession has enabled some big comebacks – that Canberra-Canterbury game had 60:40 Raiders in the first half, 71:29 Bulldogs in the second – but at what cost?

Completion rates are absolute junk as a stat as far as predicting outcomes – tl;dr: they don’t correlate with winning at all, no matter how much commentators reference them – but they are a great proxy for boring football.

In 2025, seven teams have an average completion rate of above 80%, whereas in 2024 that was six, in 2023 it was just three and in 2022, just one.

There’s a bit of noise in this stat as every restarted set is a completed one, but that also speaks to the policy of just holding the footy and letting the ref do the rest – or, as it might be, holding it so that your opponent can’t.

There’s a soccer concept for this: negative possession. It’s where you maintain possession for possession’s sake, even if you’re not really doing anything with it.

It reached an apex in 2010-12, where Spain won the World Cup and European Championships back to back conceding just one goal in seven knockout games, almost all of which were completely dreadful to watch.

This is creeping into the NRL in a big way, despite rugby league’s inherent use-it-or-lose-it mindset.

Where in previous years, the game had moved towards an expansive style based around high off-ball movement and quick shifts, 2025 has been a lot more about the long game.

Sure, you have to give the ball away at the end of the set, but the conditions under which you do so are a lot easier to control if you play very conservatively.

It’s hard to pin this down statistically, but watching analytically, it seems like there has been a conscious decision by defences to slow rucks and pulling back of attacking risk by coaches who know that, if they drop the ball, they might not get it back for ten minutes.

On the former, the referees have, in the last two or three weeks, been a little more active in penalising repeat offenders with sin bins for ruck slowing – almost like that was always the answer, not Six Agains – which, if continued, might improve the product.

On the latter, it’s hard to see improvement. The free hit of short dropouts has discouraged attacking kicking with any risk, and the possession swings have discouraged endeavour with ball in hand.

Teams are much happier to play straight, kick to corners and never contest bombs, for fear of creating a potentially dangerous transition moment.

This was actually pointed out in the commentary of Brisbane’s defeat to Manly last week where, even at 20 points down in the second half, nobody from the Broncos was willing to challenge for high balls.

The rules currently encourage conservatism in attack and negativity in defence, which is the complete opposite of what the set restart was intended to do.

The aesthetic quality of all this might just be subjective. As with every aspect of cultural life, one person’s preference can be totally different to another’s.

Sport’s strength lies in the unpredictability of outcomes, and it’s hard to suggest that the 2025 NRL has not been that.

Rugby league, however, has constantly chased aesthetic value since 1895.

Every rule change is intended to open up the game, to encourage attack at the expense of defence and to promote running rugby. That, in 2025, isn’t happening nearly as much.

Will the punters care? Will the NRL care if they care?

As evidenced by last year’s finals and this year’s Origin, the matches that have drawn the biggest audiences have generally been underwhelming. If the intention is to speak to new people and make them fans, that’s a problem.

That’s why aesthetics matters. At the halfway point of 2025, it might be an argument that the NRL is losing.