With a doubleheader of games on Saturday night in cavernous Allegiant Stadium, only a few weeks removed from its duties as the Super Bowl venue, the NRL made a hard sales pitch for a US audience.
“I promise – I promise you are going to enjoy what we affectionately call the greatest game of all,” intoned Australian commentator Dan Ginnane at the opening of Fox Sports’ American broadcast of an Australian game being played on an American field in the otherworldly city of Las Vegas.
Many have made such statements over the years. Few have succeeded. Yet on the surface, rugby league may have better chances than most sports to get that elusive US breakthrough.
It’s violent, and the US population loves its violence. The rhythm of play is somewhat similar to American football, with teams compelled to turn over the ball after their opponents make a series of successful tackles. Thanks to the lack of pads and helmets, play is frequently stopped so that players may receive medical attention and TV viewers can grab another beer.
But one lesson we can all take from soccer’s hard-won emergence in the USA is that selling a sport on pyrotechnics, booming music and its commonality to other sports won’t work in the long run.
So what can rugby league offer to stand out?
First of all, baffling rules.
“We will struggle to explain some of the intricacies of our sport to the first-time watcher,” confessed commentator Andrew Voss on the broadcast of Saturday’s second game, in which the Sydney Roosters defeated the Brisbane Broncos.
VAR controversies notwithstanding, soccer benefits from its self-professed status as “the simplest game.” Here’s a ball. You want to kick it into that goal. Enjoy.
In rugby league, the object is to move the ball down the field, stopping each time someone tackles the ball carrier and holds him down long enough to make him relinquish the ball to a teammate, and the attacking team turns it over if they’re tackled six times, and then they’re trying to score a try by touching the ball down, and are you still paying attention?
Sure, American football is mindbogglingly complicated. It has roughly five seconds of action, then maybe 30 seconds in which people with charts, laptops and headsets try to figure out what to do with the next five seconds. But that’s why it’s only truly popular in one country, where all the kids have grown up understanding the concepts of a touchdown and a first down. If they’ve grown up playing the popular Madden video game series, they even understand the concept of a Cover-2 defense or an RPO (run-pass option).
Rugby league has some of the interruptions of US football, but nowhere near as many – . and none long enough to squeeze in the advertising that makes Super Bowl Sunday interesting to people who don’t know who Patrick Mahomes is and only know Travis Kelce because he’s dating the most popular person on the planet right now.
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And rugby league has to suffer comparisons with that other rugby, rugby union. During the Fox broadcast of Saturday night’s festivities, a chyron informed viewers that Major League Rugby, the latest and perhaps best attempt to make the simpler and more globally recognised variant of the game successful in the US, was airing on the Fox Sports app.
Rugby league may not even be the most popular Australian sport in the United States. Back when ESPN had little to feature in its startup days in the 1980s, one of the sports it latched onto was Australian rules football, with its mildly organised chaos and the immaculately dressed guys who ceremonially pointed both hands to signal that a goal had been scored.
Fox is also the carrier in the United States for the AFL, and it would be curious to see whether a typical rugby league game — not just this heavily hyped event in Vegas, with a crowd full of wealthy Australians swinging across the Pacific to see a novel event and maybe catch U2 at The Sphere — comes close in its ratings to the typical AFL encounter.
Granted, if the NRL found it challenging to squeeze its game into a US venue with constrictions based on the narrow NFL surface, it’s difficult to imagine frequent visits from the AFL and its Death Star-sized dimensions.
That’s not to dismiss rugby league’s chances entirely. The US has 330 million people, many of them with more disposable income than brains. And despite various political movements, the general culture here is less xenophobic than in the past, when soccer was denounced in the US Capitol as a “European socialist sport.”
Look hard enough, and you’ll find people who play and watch nearly everything here. We’re hosting a few games of cricket’s next men’s T20 World Cup, and assuming the country hasn’t broken into pieces over the next seven years, rugby union will also bring a World Cup here.
So if Las Vegas and Fox Sports are willing to host the occasional NRL game, well, it’s worth a try. Which, we’ll remind people who’ve watched rugby union or played it in the slowly blossoming collegiate club game here, is only worth four points in rugby league. Still better than zero.
