The confusion between Union and League shows no signs of abating...
Rugby union is rising in the US. That’s bad news for the NRL
Hosting season openers in Las Vegas was supposed to help the NRL grab a slice of the world’s biggest sports fan and betting market. It has not been so simple.
Jessica GardnerUnited States correspondent
Feb 27, 2026 – 8.50am
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Washington | Sports betting analyst Brett Smiley says the NRL has a steep hill to climb before cracking the United States, but it should take heart from the sports’ growth at the college and high school level.
There is just one problem. He is confusing rugby league with rugby union.
“Ah,” he says when alerted to the mix-up. “I appreciate your explanation there, because I’m not that well-versed on rugby, but I understood that there’s a couple of different types.”
This weekend, the NRL will open its season with a costly jaunt to Las Vegas, Nevada, for the third year in a row. Canterbury meets St George Illawarra and North Queensland takes on Newcastle on Sunday (AEDT) as part of a five-year deal with the Nevada Tourism Commission.
The Vegas play was the brainchild of Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys, who reckoned it would allow the NRL to crack the world’s biggest fan market and take a slice of soaring wagering volumes. But it has not been that simple.
“It’s certainly much harder than I expected it to be,” V’landys told
The Australian this week.
Interviews with sports industry observers suggest three key hurdles, and the first one might sting.
Rugby union is certainly a niche proposition in the US, but it already has greater recognition than league. Major League Rugby is in its ninth season, and the USA Eagles will host
the men’s World Cup in 2031 (and the women’s two years later). In the women’s game, Ilona Maher has become a breakout star with millions of social media followers, lucrative sponsorships and a muscular Barbie doll in her image.
Could the NRL’s first hurdle in the US be that it is confused with union? David Hampian, managing director of marketing consultancy Field Vision, asks for a quick primer on the difference before answering that question.
“Okay, okay, that is the version my father-in-law watches,” he says of the union games watched by the Fijian-heritage fan. “I think that your average American consumer does not know the difference right now.”
Gambling the key
What Hampian and Smiley do have a handle on is the betting landscape. A 2018 Supreme Court decision overturned a law that had banned sports betting outside Nevada. Seven years later, in 2025, punters gambled more than $US165 billion ($233 billion) on sports, so there is clearly a big opportunity for the NRL.
The thing is, while many other sports share the same view, they have struggled to compete against the big three. Last year, combined bets on American football, basketball and baseball accounted for 81 per cent of the $US8 billion bet on sports in Nevada (which still leads the industry in betting intensity per resident, but has lost the overall volume crown to the state of New York, whose punters dropped $US26.3 billion).
“Those leagues have just got such a dominance over the sports culture,” says Smiley, the editorial director for sportsbook publication
InGame.
“Niche” sports battle it out for the final fifth of the pie, he says.
Hampian, who helped launch Florida’s first online sportsbook Hard Rock Bet and led online streaming platform Twitch into sports, says the NRL is also grappling with an “enormous broadcast gap”.
TV viewers rising
Last year’s NRL games in Vegas pulled in about 371,000 US viewers on Fox,
a 600 per cent jump on 2024, but still below every established US league.
“The NRL’s peak number is roughly on par with a mid-tier UFL spring football broadcast,” Hampian says, referring to a version of American football designed to keep fans watching during the off-season.
Holding games in the February window, between the Super Bowl and college basketball’s March Madness, is helpful, but the NRL will continue to struggle to gain a foothold while it is offering a one-off spectacle, he says.
The English Premier League’s efforts are instructive, Hampian says. The EPL, which, of course, has games playing in a more forgiving time zone than the NRL, has followed the lead of the National Basketball Association and other leagues to broadcast regular live “moments” each week. Think, Friday night footy, as the NRL does so well at home. “They’re trying to make sure they are planting a seed in every major streaming platform where sports fans consume content,” he says of the EPL.
The league has also worked with online content creators to build up the community of fans who engage in “second-screen” opportunities while watching, including fantasy football, messaging forums and gambling, Hampian says.
Still, despite all of this investment, average viewing figures for EPL matches on its US broadcast partner NBC fell 7 per cent to 510,000 for the 2024-25 season.
“The challenge for the rugby league,” Hampian says, “is, how do you make that one moment in time actually a year-round content slate.”
That is for V’landys to mull in Vegas this weekend.
