Of course it is not objective, it is a story we tell ourselves as a way of understanding our own history.
It is the whole idea of nations; they create this historical narrative that make you say "yeh, i wanna be a part of that". It doesnt really matter if its true or not, what matters is whether you can make people believe it.
Sports create this story as well. Baseball and American Football fight over being "THE American Game", we forfeited "THE Australian game" to VFL, Soccer is "THE World Game", etc.
RL sort of acts as "THE working class game" but we are also super embarrassed of this. This is actually on of the reasons i ask the question; if we dont want to be "the working class game", maybe we should be telling a different story. Because right now we are not telling any story at all....
To me that is different to the “spirit”. The “spirit” concept exists just beyond the border of the definable otherwise it would be redundant. In most games it is literally a rule to capture that which cannot be objectively defined!
The “nations “ concept is case in point you can’t, with any accuracy, define what a nation is outside of its geography.
Most professional sport is pure luck. A century plus ago a group of people decided to care about whether or not X number of blokes in a park beat some other area’s blokes under X set of rules. We didn’t create the NRL it organically happened with no real intention to be a mass media product and we’re at massive risk of losing it if we continue on the current vein.
At present the NRL is a capsule ill advised self denial. The most horrific betrayal you can commit is to one’s self and the NRL wakes up and does that every. single. day.
We are a working class game, sit in a board room in Sydney or Melbourne (different in Brisbane, but then Brisbane based companies are different) and you’ll only ever hear about the NRL from the proud self made (which due to the nature of capital is a small percentage of the “made” population) person. Otherwise it’s rugby, cricket or AFL.
I had an English friend who got pitched by the NRL when she was at a TV network.
She isn’t a sports fan so she asked can you give me the 101 on the NRL.
My lead off was the NRL is a working class game that wants to pretend it isn’t, it’s like a geezer in a board room – they’ve got two choices play down the accent and try and do what they think everyone wants or embrace it and rhyming slang the jesus out of it. The first never works and the second… well if it fails you at least failed being yourself. I told her I wouldn’t touch the NRL from a commercial stand point whilst it pretended to be the AFL. Why sponsor a confused brand as it only confuses your own.
She said the NRL pitched the we’re an emerging game amongst the elite. Why shy away from being working class? Sports is about mass media dove tailed into corporate relevance. The “mass” part is the most critical and it is synonymous with being working class.
That they believe they can, in an incredibly competitive sports media environment that is only becoming more saturated due to streaming, just pivot a business built upon a foundation they had zero input into is an arrogance born out of lack of capability
We’ve got statistics that make 1980s NBA look like it should receive a noble prize.
We have a fan base that thinks access to juniors is burden at the same time as advocating for a draft.
We have TPA’s as an issue whioslt every other salary cap league in the world sees It as a non issue
Our fans never considering purchasing power parity, coaching or even simple stuff like the difference in hotels you stay at for the clubs that are a bigger differentiator than TPAs.
Because of our weak, and intellectually overwhelmed, administration we’ve had more teams cheat the cap than the AFL, A-league, NHL, NBA and NFL combined.
We are Large Big Mac meal with pretensions of being a three hatted restaurant with a our own TV show. We can "tell a different story" that we aren't a big mac but it doens't change the special sauce.
