Super League – 10 Years Too Soon: Part 1 - The Beginning
November 30th 2009 01:28
Super League – 10 Years Too Soon
Part 1: The Beginning
Part 1: The Beginning
When retracing the history of rugby league in Australia, the Super League War of the 1990s will undoubtedly be viewed as a dramatically damaging period for the code. It unrelentingly swept across the sphere of the game at the height of one of its most promising and successful periods in this country and beyond. The formation of Super League tore at and contorted the very fabric of the game, as its histories, traditions and club loyalties were eroded, lost or discarded completely.
In 1994, the ARL was enjoying a boom time for the code; built on top of the tremendously successful decades of the 1970s and 80s. However, the majority of clubs, and to an extent the league itself, had not capitalised on this success and were still locked in the past generations mentality of meat raffles and leagues club funding for their income, in turn rejecting the approaches by big business.
In particular, foundation clubs such as South Sydney, Balmain and Western Suburbs, were relying on the traditional values of club loyalty and community pride to entice their players to remain at their club. This made it extremely hard to attract players when compared to their cashed-up opponents such as the Broncos, Sea-Eagles and St. George Dragons.
The whole purpose of Super League was to introduce professionalism to the code, values in which are evident at most clubs today. However, moves to revolutionise the NSWRL were well underway as way back as the early 1980s when the league omitted Newtown and Western Suburbs from the 1984 competition. Wests would prove to successfully fight for their survival through court action and be re-admitted however.
In 1986, NSWRL Chairman, Ken Arthurson proposed what he called, even back then, as a ‘Super League’, to which the Daily Telegraph reported in July of that year as ‘comprising four or five teams from Sydney, two from Brisbane, three New South Wales Country teams (assumingly which would be Newcastle, Canberra and Illawarra) , Queensland Country and Auckland. You could amalgamate Manly/Norths, Eastern Suburbs/Souths, Parramatta/Penrith and so on.’
Despite the groundwork already laid by Arthurson himself, no significant action was taken until April 9th, 1992, when a ‘Blueprint for the expansion of Rugby League’ was tabled by the Premiership Policy Committee of the NSWRL, followed in August by an ‘Organisation Review’, by Dr. G Bradley.
The Bradley Report, as it became known, was the core material responsible for the ARL replacing the NSWRL in 1995. More importantly however, it concluded that:
‘...to reduce the number of clubs in Sydney, will be very hard for the League to implement given the long playing traditions of some of those clubs. In the long term, however, it is likely that Sydney is not going to be able to support eleven clubs as it does at present. Therefore in the long term this is the only viable solution. Sydney based clubs are going to have to move to new areas, merge or be relegated from the League. This is going to be a painful process. In the long term I believe that the ARL should be looking to reduce the number of clubs in the National Competition to fourteen, thus allowing clubs to play two complete rounds. This will mean, assuming that only four new clubs are admitted from areas outside Sydney, that there will be only five clubs based in Sydney.’
It is interesting to note that the issue of reducing clubs in Sydney is yet to be resolved and is continuously discussed today, somewhat displaying the complexity of the matter.
It can be said that both the ARL and Super League had similar objectives in mind when it came to reducing the competing teams in the Sydney district. It was Super League, however, that proved to be far more ruthless in its intent. This may have largely been due to the fact that Super League was born outside of Sydney, in an area in which its own local competition and its traditions had been savaged by the introduction of the Broncos by the NSWRL – the area of course was Brisbane.
The seed of Super League was planted in a sponsorship deal between the Brisbane Broncos and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, in November 1993. From its inception, the Broncos were immediately separate from its club-controlled rivals in NSW; as they were the league’s first privately owned club. It also created tensions with the game’s hierarchy, which became primarily evident when the News Corporation deal was struck.
By that stage News Corporation was certainly no stranger to the code. It had been involved with Rugby League since 1985 when a News subsidiary took charge of the merchandising division of the NSWRL, increasing the net income of the marketing division from $700 in 1982, to $700,000 in 1991.
The benefits of the sponsorship deal were limitless, with Mike Colman, who penned the book, ‘Super League: The Inside Story’, saying, ‘It was a meeting of the minds. If ever there were two groups with an eye on the bottom line, it was these.’
News Limited owned the only newspapers in Brisbane, the Courier Mail and the Sunday Mail, which gave the Broncos endless promotional scope. Meanwhile, as they were in charge of the merchandising division, News Corp. was already profiting from the Broncos’ merchandising success, but could see further vast commercial opportunities opening up.
Needless to say, the situation was not looked fondly upon by the NSWRL, who took steps to block the deal. Obviously the deal with News would see the Broncos emerge as even more powerful than it already was, when compared to its struggling rivals, something that the league was not willing to tolerate. Coupled with this the NSWRL had also blocked other moves by the club relating to player contracts and a proposal to move the 1995 Grand Final to Brisbane’s ANZ Stadium.
The Broncos, with its CEO John Ribot, had naturally become frustrated with what it believed to be the stagnating progression of the code. In the events that followed, a heated argument between Ribot and ARL General Manager John Quayle outside the NSWRL’s headquarters in Philip Street, sparked the Broncos’ CEO into action.
Ribot said of the confrontation, ‘By the time I reported back to my board I was at the end of my tether…So many things which we had tried to do for so many years, knocked on the head. And these were things that weren’t just good for us (Broncos); they were good for the game. I almost felt like throwing up.’
Fuelled by his obvious disdain for the way Ken Arthurson and John Quayle were handling the game, Ribot decided to strongly pursue the Super League concept, of which he submitted a blueprint of to News Corp. on March 23, 1994. He soon had the company’s full support.
The events from that moment, and the dubbed ‘Super League War’ that followed, sparked undoubtedly the most tumultuous and destructive period for Rugby League, not only in Australia, but around the world.
Apart from the resulting flow of events and the resulting developments, the most critical element of the Super League War was the money and resources wasted. It is said that $1billion was spent collectively by both the ARL and News Corp. over the three years. Of which was a $22million nest egg that the ARL had saved over the years for a ‘rainy day’. In the resulting court cases at the time, Ken Arthurson was quoted as saying, ‘The money we spend on lawyers could fund the development of the game for a year.’
Obviously that money would have been better saved to be used in the challenges that face the code today. But the question remains; what would the league look like today if Super League had never happened?
NEXT POST: Part 2: The War
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