To provide context, I am a Rugby League journalist living in the USA and have been following and reporting on the local Rugby League scene in the USA for many years. This question comes from someone who knows the local game and has been trying to find coverage of the NRL’s Las Vegas adventure in the North American media in the build-up to the 2026 event.
The National Rugby League has come and gone for the third time in Las Vegas. It was the latest stage of the league’s five-year plan to promote rugby league in the United States, but the glaring question that begs asking is, has the NRL made any headway in achieving its goal? And the clear answer is no; it has not, and here’s why.
For starters, and in what’s perhaps the biggest letdown of the NRL’s plan this year, the games were not on TV in the US. FOX Sports 1 didn’t air any of the three matches, nor did FOX’s other news or entertainment channels, mainstream media in general, or even any cable sports channels. Yet from the outset in 2024 the NRL, and its boss Peter V’landys in particular, has touted the league’s much vaunted ties with the Murdoch-owned media giant, but if the games aren’t on TV no one is going to see them, right, so why weren’t they televised?
One possible explanation could be that they were up against a lot of other weekend sports, including college basketball, Nascar racing and NHL ice hockey. Those are sports that Americans are very familiar with, as opposed to one that most have never heard of. And that’s a separate issue all to itself.
Another questionable decision is why the NRL felt it was necessary to include a Super League game between Hull Kingston Rovers and Leeds Rhinos? The NRL doesn’t run Super League, at least not yet anyway, so promoting what is in essence a rival competition would appear to be a free kick for Super League. Maybe some cost-sharing was involved or the NRL is trying to assist the Super League with cross-promotion. Could it be that the main aim is to get more eyeballs on the event and make it more attractive to potential future TV deals for both competitions. I am just speculating here, but on face value, I can’t see how it benefits growing rugby league in North America.
However, to cut the NRL some slack, highlighting its own season-opening games between Canterbury-Bankstown and St George Illawarra and the Newcastle Knights versus the North Queensland Cowboys made a bit more sense than pushing Super League. The problem was if American sports fans had heard about them and were in any way interested in watching the games, they would have had to sign up to Watch NRL because that was the only option.
As a side note, the only reason I knew the games were on was that I’m part of the rugby league media, so I received all the NRL’s media advisories and general information in the lead-up to the event. The public had no inkling though because the NRL did minimal media promotion. Apparently, it must have at least promoted the event on Facebook as a rugby union coach in Phoenix advised that’s how he knew it was happening.
One other thing that the Australian media, and specifically TV reporters from Sydney and Brisbane who covered the event, did, as they’ve done before, was to talk up the number of fans who were in Las Vegas for it. The thing is that most of the fans who were there were actually from Australia and the UK. There was a small contingent of American fans which comes back to the promotion of the game here is the USA, as previously noted in NRL Vegas editorials on this masthead.
In conclusion, despite all the hyped-up media reporting from Australia since the NRL started its Vegas campaign in 2024, rugby league still is, and always will be, a fringe sport in the US that’s hardly even a blip on the American sporting landscape. If the NRL want to have real exposure and grow any sort of following, they need a real TV deal in North America.
