Bit hard to know exactly what's going on with the very fudgey "participation" way of recording who is playing RL. Wish the NRL and State bodies would be more accountable and publish actual registered players numbers again as opposed to now where they've abandoned any quantitive reporting! This article starts with participation numbers then considers if the games increased push to get blokes gambling on it is impacting player numbers.
The biggest challenge facing rugby league, according to its club chief executives and everyone knowledgeable about the game, is player numbers.
Yet this is not translating into enough young and teenaged boys playing the game to assure its future. (Female participation is still rising, off a lower base.) From 2015 to 2021, participation in male tackle rugby league in Australia declined by 12,000, or eight per cent. In Parramatta, Penrith and south-western Sydney, it fell by as much as 26 per cent.
At the current rate, rugby league’s destiny is looking more like America’s NFL, a sport watched by many but played by an ever-diminishing gladiatorial fraction, with a future that resembles
The Hunger Games.
The trend is not peculiar to rugby league. Most sports see a drop-off in their male playing ranks from about the age of 13. Other attractions and commitments compete for time; playing the game gets more serious from that age; Mum and Dad are no longer so influential. With a contact sport like league, there is the added factor of increased awareness of the dangers of concussion, as well as other career-ending injuries. But mostly, as boys become men, they find other things to do.
Codes respond by bolstering numbers through getting more girls and women onto the field and spreading spin-off versions such as LeagueTag. But rugby league also has another, slightly weird relationship with its young male “participants”, a mixed message if ever there was one.
Peter V’landys, the chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission who enjoys Bob Hawke-like approval ratings for his management through the COVID-19 pandemic, says the ARLC has spent “tens of millions of dollars” on strategies to stabilise the fall in player numbers. This money flows down through the state organisations and the NRL clubs into local areas. The ARLC is the provider of those funds and the setter of that strategy.
Yet it’s a bizarre strategy that sources that money from an industry that is closely tied up with the social changes that have seen such a precipitous fall in participation. Rugby league is robbing Peter to pay Paul, only Peter and Paul are both busy losing all their money at the pub and on their betting accounts and won’t be registering with their teams to play this year. By creating more young male gamblers, rugby league is helping to accelerate the fall in its own player numbers.
V’landys, who runs Racing NSW when not at work running rugby league, is not just a supporter of gambling. He is an evangelical. Gambling is not, in his view, a necessary evil that accompanies sport but a welcome and enjoyable part of it.
Increased gambling revenue helped the ARLC make a $43 million surplus last year. Put another way, the league-watching population’s expenditure shifted from buying boots and mouthguards and registering for clubs to losing on bets. League’s response? Find new populations to tax.
OVID-19 was a boon for gambling. Australian spending on wagering has
trebled since 2020, according to an analytical study by Accenture and Illion. A survey by the Australian government found that the big rise was among males aged 18 to 34, whose individual spend rose by more than 50 per cent and who were at most risk of gambling-related harm.
So the very same demographic that rugby league is losing from its playing ranks it is successfully turning into sports bettors.
In racing, which recirculates money between gamblers and participants, it hardly matters. Newly converted gamblers were never going to turn into jockeys. But in rugby league, those young men are making an active choice each weekend. Pub or play? Do I spend my money on registration fees and gear and fitness and getting out? Oh no, I don’t have any spare cash any more, it disappeared somewhere.
It doesn’t have to be that way – there’s nothing stopping anyone from playing amateur rugby league and betting on it as well – but if you have anything to do with young men, you might want to consider the actual reality. Their gambling losses are circulating into the sport that they are choosing, in record numbers, to stop playing.
The South Sydney Rabbitohs and Canterbury Bulldogs deserve an ovation for refusing to take gambling money any more as jersey sponsorship.
They have seen a truth that the governors of the game are still blind to: the prominence of gambling, the styling of rugby league as a conveyance for getting more and more young people to gamble, the reconception of rugby league as if it is racing, is an active turn-off for many parents and an unsavoury attachment to a sport that should have at least something to do with health and fitness. Those two clubs, the Rabbitohs and Bulldogs, are seeing their fans as people, not just a source of potential income.
There are numbers and there are numbers. A dollar of betting income is just a number. A person who has dropped out of playing the game is “a number” in a census, sure, but he’s also a young man who has made a decision. The higher-ups, in their obsession with one type of number, have overlooked how much harm they are doing to their own cause.
Rugby league’s fate is fast looking like the NFL, watched by many but played by an ever-diminishing gladiatorial fraction. And it will have itself to blame.
www.smh.com.au
