Tag Archives: brisbane

A Shallow Dive into the 2021 Brisbane Broncos

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The Broncos didn’t finish last. They didn’t even finish second last. The Broncos wound up in fourteenth, 7-17 with a -249 points difference. Their points difference was only third worst in the league. The attack was also third worst, somehow behind the seventh placed Knights, and the defence an astonishing fourth worst. 2020 was so bad that all of these are actually positive things. As a bonus, the retiring has-been didn’t use the final game of the season as an opportunity for a gender reveal.

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The Victory Lap

From the pre-season deep dive:

The Broncos aren’t going to get the spoon again. Sorry, it’s just not how football works. They probably will not make the finals but there is literally only a single direction that the sport’s biggest franchise can take coming off a 3-17 season that included a 59-0 flogging, somehow breaking the previous year’s record flogging.

*tweet of Brodie Croft playing halfback pre-season*

Never mind. It looks like the Kevolution might take a little longer than initially anticipated.

While I didn’t have particularly high hopes for the Broncos, I thought they might improve somewhat on last year… So be it, although if Walters can’t get it sorted, the squad will have to be scattered to the four winds for their own good and Brisbane will have to start again with a bunch has-beens while the farm system replenishes… The alternative is teaching the younger players to play eighty minutes of football and winning some – it doesn’t even have to be a lot! – games.

Brodie Croft’s spectre has finally been vanquished from Red Hill, off to Salford per my prophetic meme.

The rest more or less came to pass. The Broncos were travelling poorly, with a roster that was worse than 2020’s and results that were better, and started offloading almost whoever they could get rid of. Matt Lodge, gone. Tevita Pangai, gone. Tom Dearden, gone. Reece Walsh, gone. That last one was probably not the smartest decision but we can blame the old front office, who are almost all gone as well, for that.

Then they started getting better and in a prime example of nature healing, debuting children again. And they won some more games – it wasn’t even that many! – and finished above the Cowboys, which is all we ever really wanted.

What happened

Let’s check in and see how our new coach is doing.

It’s an interesting strategy to crash the team even faster than your most loathed predecessor, especially if one wants to retain one’s job.

The rule of thumb is that once a coach loses 50 points, irrespective of their starting point, they end up losing their job sooner or later. It is extremely rare to be given the opportunity to turn it around after that kind of performance, although there are exceptions (see Catalans below). Walters’ sits at -31, having bottomed out at -38. While there’s currently no real pressure, a bad start to next season will almost certainly seal his fate. He will have to work extremely hard to break even and even that might not be enough to get a contract extension. A career season is what’s required.

Now let’s check in with how he went during his only other head coaching appointment.

I see. One could also use this chart to compare Walters’ performance to that of, say, Trent Robinson. I’m sure it will be fine.

There’s always next year

Adam Reynolds. Kurt Capewell. Jordan Pereira. If at least two of those names don’t fill the Broncos’ rivals’ hearts with dread, then I don’t know football.

The Broncos appear to have made the right moves to re-balance the roster but then that’s been ostensibly the case the last couple of off-seasons. The promise of high performance and, even laughably, a premiership window dissolved into the mirages they always were under the twin tyrannies of incompetent coaching and incompetent administration. I’ll believe that the Broncos have improved when I see them improve. Rationally, it should be the case but irrationally, I’ve sat through 58-0 and 59-0 and a combined 10-34 record over those seasons and, like dental surgery, I’d honestly prefer not to have to do that again.

Ben Ikin and Dave Donaghy should be good for it and Kevin Walters might not be. It’ll take time as every NRL rebuild project over the last decade has generally shown. Finals might be on the cards if everything goes well but I suspect just getting out of the basement will be achievement enough. Best case scenario is that football will go to pot again and a 10-14 record will be enough to qualify for the post-season with the Broncos on the right side of it this time. Worst case scenario is probably more of the same as this year which will be bearable but might only speed up my disengagement with the sport. There are so many other sports teams out there.

BNE2.3: What is the point of it?

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Previously, in our series on Brisbane expansion:

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A football club has an identity. Three things comprise a club’s identity: purpose, mythology and reality. Let’s explore those ideas with some NRL case studies.

The mythology of the Brisbane Broncos is that these were excellent footballers that were assembled from the Brisbane competition and wider Queensland to go south and show the Sydneysiders how it was done. From the first game, a record thrashing of the defending premiers, and through many premierships, the club’s success was a reflection of Queensland’s innate quality. The reality of the Broncos is that they had enormous financial and other advantages that enabled them to maintain a deep roster of talent and dominate the sport for nearly twenty years. Now that those advantages have been eroded, the reality of the club is much clearer.

Indeed, the reality of most NRL clubs is much the same. They get $13 million from the NRL each year and spend nearly $10 million on player salaries, have the same football department cap and, with a few exceptions, are run by some of the worst managers in Australia. But without the sales and admin and cleaning staff, there is no club. It’s always interesting to me to see people who, despite spending a lot of time thinking about football, are unable to separate the myth from the reality.

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The purpose of the Gold Coast Titans is clear. They represent the people of the Gold Coast in the premier rugby league football competition in the country and give that city a national presence that no other sports teams can or have or maybe will. The reality is that, barring a few preliminary final appearances, the club has been mediocre to poor for its entire existence, brought to the brink of financial destruction and rescued by the NRL. The Titans have no mythology. There are no star players with long careers at Robina, no premierships or even really any interesting stories. They’ve existed but not lived. Consequently, its tough for the Titans to find wider acceptance within their community because they feel incomplete. We can speculate that if the name or the colours were different, whether that would have a different outcome but you can dress inferiority up however you like but it still sucks. That’s hard to invest in and doubly hard to sit through.

In contrast, the Wests Tigers almost have too much mythology. The combination of Balmain, brimming with a long history of success with one obvious home, and Western Suburbs, decidedly less successful and far more nomadic but with at least a patina of working class battler, has yielded more questions than answers. Specifically, who are the Wests Tigers and what are they for? Who are their people? While the exploits of Benji Marshall and company go some way to establishing a uniquely Wests Tigers mythology, the recent lack of success offers little to either side of the merger. You could accept some compromise on the club’s identity if it meant winning but to live in a subpar limbo satisfies no one. So despite the historical success, it’s the lack of obvious purpose that means that the Tigers will never be the darling of the so-called ‘City Fathers’ who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards and wonder, “Whats to be done with these Wests Tigers?”

The Newcastle Knights hit the trifecta. Their purpose is to represent Newcastle on the national stage in a way no other institution could. Their mythology is that of the 1997 grand final and the Johns brothers and then the 2001 grand final and more. Their reality is not that dissimilar to the Titans since 2007 but the mythology makes all the difference. They are a real and complete football club.

This brings us to the three Brisbane bids to be the seventeeth team in the NRL. My thinking on this has changed a lot over the last two years. Where I was excited by the novelty of it, I am now quite apathetic to the outcome of this process. It lacks purpose and it lacks an overall strategic context. What is the point of it?

Nonetheless, we wait with bated breath to see if Peter V’Landys, and anyone else who he deigned to allow speak in his presence, decide to add a new team to the competition (probable) or two new teams (unlikely) or no new teams (possible). I will admit the novelty still has some appeal and we may never get to analyse an opportunity like this again.

The key here is to not fall into the trap of thinking that Brisbane’s rugby league landscape is the same as Sydney’s. Sydney rugby league is like playing Risk: the map has been thoroughly divided into territories, with imperial suburb-states all butting up against each other, and the only way to grow is to march into the neighbouring land and take over. The new Brisbane team will need to play Monopoly: they will want to find property wherever they can on the board, bring it together into a portfolio with enough nous to generate sufficient revenue for them to survive.

The idea that the new Brisbane club has to represent a particular patch of suburbia is a foreign one. Our teams – the Broncos, the Roar, the Lions and even the Reds – represent far bigger expanses of land than that. You could make an argument that the Brisbane the Broncos represent stretches from Beenleigh to Rockhampton.

Consequently, discussions about juniors catchments and population growth seem a bit redundant. If you have the scouts, there’s nothing stopping anyone from scouting juniors in south-east Queensland and signing them to a scholarship. If you have the marketing, there’s nothing stopping your fans from coming from the north side and the south side of the river.

In any case, suburban clubs don’t necessarily make for good NRL clubs (c.f. most of Sydney’s teams) but they do bring a mythology and a geographically narrow notional purpose. That’s what appeals about the Dolphins’ and the Jets’ bids. They’re just missing the reality of being able to operate a NRL franchise and can probably bridge that gap with enough money.

Of course, this mythology helps gloss over the other reality. The Dolphins were far from the most successful BRL club, winning in 1965 with the next coming long after the Broncos had suffocated that competition and more recent wins coming thanks to partnerships with NRL clubs.

As the Broncos were to the Brisbane Rugby League, so the Jets were to the Ipswich Rugby League. Having only existed since 1985 and won a single premiership in that time (with the infamous Walker Brothers at the helm), I don’t know if the Jets have really offered the people of Ipswich all that much and perhaps nothing compared to their own, earlier established clubs. Some of that is moot as the nominal Jets bid is basically the Bombers bid but with a different aircraft moniker. There’s been little discussion about the so-called Western Corridor and more discussion about their potential financial shortcomings.

The Firehawks have divorced themselves from their own mythology with a new name and tweaked colours, partly involuntarily due to the pre-existing Tigers in the NRL, but still hoping to strike out and create something new. In some ways, this is sensible. No one really knows what the appetite is going to be for the second Brisbane team or what the expectations will be and to not marry yourself too tightly to a singular vision offers some flexibility to react what the market actually wants and not what extremely online footy nerds think.

The fact is that we just don’t know a lot about the bids. We can react to colours and logos and nicknames but these things don’t matter so much and certainly not over the long term. That the online reaction is almost overwhelmingly negative tells me nothing. These people aren’t the target demographic and what they think is immaterial to the success of a new franchise.

Easts Tigers unveiled a strategic plan in 2020 to take them through to 2022 which hinted at some things normally discussed in boardrooms that that might be relevant to their bid (this, of course, has gone unnoticed by the media). Nick Livermore is happy to offer quotes in the media but is light on detail or, for that matter, lip service to the idea of the Western Corridor, let alone an Indigenous spin on the club’s branding. The Dolphins haven’t said much other than to suggest they might be the Brisbane or Moreton Bay or Sunshine State Dolphins.

If the NRL is expanded, I don’t have any particularly great hopes for the new franchise. I’d like there to be a (good) local derby partner for the Broncos. I’d like there to be a greater Queensland presence in the professional ranks of rugby league. I’d also like to see the NRL get bigger and richer and use that power to go to strange new places. But the NRL won’t do that.

The broadcasters have signalled minimal interest in a new team that doesn’t provide any additional content or offer a panacea to declining ratings. The incumbent clubs do not want to share their money or resources or spotlight or fans with a new intruder. Given that, the question remains as to where the NRL will find the new team’s central distribution payments. Surely they won’t follow Super League’s lead and allow teams to operate without central funding (see Toronto, Leigh) and surely there aren’t that many development officers left at HQ that can be let go. Then who will fund Gus Gould’s dreams of world (rugby league) domination?

It’s not even clear that the people of Brisbane are that interested in having a second team. The crowds for the plethora of games in late 2021 have been underwhelming, a far cry from the festival of footy that is Magic Round. There’s no grassroots wave of support, online or in the real world, to indicate that anyone is actually excited by the prospect of a new team, other than those who have given up on their current teams getting any better.

Perhaps we are all just exhausted by the never-ending pandemic. Perhaps it seems so inconsequential compared to the swirl of six agains and ping-ponging from reckless abandon to martial law and back again when it comes to acceptable tackle technique. Perhaps it’s just not that interesting.

The new team will be a goth in a school of jocks, unable to reconcile its place in the league because its not really wanted or needed but is there anyway, to serve a purpose that is not at all clear. This is because the NRL cannot reconcile its place within the national culture and refuses to even acknowledge that it needs to do so.

So we go around and around and wait for something to break.

BNE2.2: The Gemba Report

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Previously, in our series on Brisbane expansion:

*****

The short version is that twelve NRL clubs have chipped in to get a study (that the ARLC probably should have commissioned themselves) to look at the impacts of expansion on the competition. They have engaged Gemba Sports Group to do this and The Australian has actually published the report in full (not paywalled).

That the existing NRL clubs, who may have to face another competitor and who stand to have their ARLC voting power mildly diluted and potentially lose future funding, commissioned the report to make a specific point needs to be kept in mind. That I want to make a different point probably also needs to be considered.

This has not generated much interest, largely because the content has been paywalled at The Australian and the articles are largely made up of quotes from the heads of Manly, Penrith and the Gold Coast talking their own book.

It is common knowledge that the player talent is not there. If there is enough talent for another team, you wouldn’t have the Bulldogs trying to get (Matt) Burton or the Wests Tigers wanting Dane Laurie. It doesn’t pass the pub test.

Brian Fletcher, Panthers CEO, 26 March 2021

On that basis, a club should be worth $50m. So what I am saying is … if a club wants to come and have a seat at the table, they have to be stumping up.

Scott Penn, Manly owner, 1 June 2021

But if expansion is done quickly at the cost to the game and the existing clubs, then we need to pause and think it through.

Steve Mitchell, Titans CEO, 23 June 2021

The basic breakdown of the report is that there’s four “sprints” (?):

  1. Impact on Fans
  2. Impact on Revenues
  3. Impact on Operations and Football
  4. Investing in NRLW and Participation

The executive summary covers the most important information over about the first 40 pages or so and then goes into more depth in the remaining 160 pages of the report.

My inclination is not to document every item of interest. You can read the report for that. My goal is to look at the arguments being made, not as the words of Gemba Group but as those of the incumbent NRL clubs, to see if they hold water.

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Sprint One: Fans

This sprint boils down to the following key points –

  • The Queensland market has had declining interest in NRL over the last few years
  • The Queensland market is pretty well saturated, as measured by self-declared interest in the NRL and self-declared support of existing NRL teams
  • Therefore, for a new club to survive, they will need to convert the small group of uncommitted NRL fans (approx. 22,000 in south-east Queensland) and cannibalise the existing fanbases to get to the 150,000 or so the smallest NRL clubs have to sustain them

Fundamentally, that’s a more or less sound argument and not one that I dispute, other than to note that the declining interest in NRL in Queensland over the last few years can be easily correlated with the performance of the three Queensland clubs, having peaked in 2015 with the all-Queensland grand final.

There is, however, some issues with the numbers. This slide shows what Gemba estimates to be the fanbase of each team.

pp13

They’ve got some of the clubs right, although I have no idea about the accuracy of what they’re measuring, but there’s some obvious exceptions that don’t really square with the other big source of fan data: TV ratings. The idea that the Roosters are the third most popular club in the NRL is laughable, as evidenced by any other data point you care to name. The Storm are big – and bigger than most would credit them – but not Broncos big. The Rabbitohs are not less popular than the Raiders.

Some of the discrepancy can be explained by using point in time data in 2020, rather than over a longer time frame and factoring in other sources of information to synthesise a more wholistic view of the size of fanbases.

More of the discrepancy can be explained by the difference between what people say they do and what people actually do. The point of a new team is to get eyeballs on TV and, to a lesser extent, attend games and buy merchandise. Having people identify as fanatics is great but does not necessarily align with what the NRL are looking for. It might also mean their methodology has misestimated the number of casual or uncommitted fans, which changes the business case if some supposed fanatics are actually more malleable in their allegiances.

Half of NRL Fanatics that reside in Greater Brisbane currently support the Brisbane Broncos

The risk of fan cannibalisation is not limited to Queensland Clubs, with there being more NRL Fanatics in candidate locations that support interstate teams than the Cowboys or Titans

pp16

Cannibalising the existing Broncos fanbase is inevitable and perhaps even desirable. After all, the fans of the Cowboys came from somewhere and the same applies to the Titans. Indeed, the Broncos fanbase is made up of people who either were or would have been self-declared fanatics of the BRL clubs. People can change.

Gemba notes that they have not undertaken the bespoke research – code for the clubs didn’t stump up the fees – required to draw any conclusions here.

The Broncos have been awful of late and, as evidenced by the increasing ratings and attendances of the Lions now and in the early ’00s, the people of Brisbane prefer to follow a winning team. If the new team comes in and is successful, they will find fans (if they aren’t successful in the medium term, they will be another Titans). If the fans come from the Broncos, the Broncos have fans to spare. Having one team in the league loom commercially over the rest has its drawbacks, specifically forcing the country to watch a terrible Broncos team get pasted on free-to-air most weeks, lest the commercial base of the sport collapse.

The most important point this section could make is actually irrelevant to expansion but incredibly important to the future of rugby league (so will be ignored), which is the slowly dwindling interest as other global behemoths invade the market, especially among younger fans. These globalisation risks are something I highlighted earlier in the year.

Sprint Two: Revenue

Gemba have suggested that a seventeenth team would add twelve matches a season and modelled revenues improvements based on that. The total audience would grow but its likely, in their view, that average ratings per match would remain stagnant.

They seem to be working from the assumption that their estimate of the fanbase size is correct but the ratings don’t correlate well.

pp71

I think they have this backwards. The ratings are the goal and the number of fanatics is largely immaterial except as a means to generate ratings. In fact, I think ratings give you a better estimate of the fanbase size than whatever data they’ve used. Gemba probably would have been better spending the money on buying an Oztam subscription than commissioning a survey.

Their assumption is that the new club will have a small fanbase is probably valid and consequently will generate minimal ratings (similar to that of Penrith or Cronulla), excepting for the newly created Queensland derbies and additional matches, and this underpins their subsequent analysis. Given that averages remain about the same and the increase to total audience is driven by the additional matches, the implication is that another team is not required to play more games to generate that revenue.

This is not a view I subscribe to. I think it’s likely that a new Brisbane team will have reasonable-to-good ratings because people in Brisbane like watching football and want skin in the game, even if it’s not their preferred team. Most weeks, the new Brisbane team will play in lieu of a below average team and raise the average ratings for each round and that, even without extra games, average and total ratings will rise in the short to medium term.

I’d be surprised if broadcasters or the players’ association agreed to a longer season. While there is scope to amend the value of the broadcast deal based on expansion (but who knows whether or how this will be triggered), I think any uplift in average and/or total ratings would only accrue to the broadcasters under the current deal. I talked about this in BNE2.1.

Overall, Gemba forecasts small benefits for the league as a whole. They do this in a logical way with some evidence but I think they’ve understated the upside. You can make up your own mind.

Sprint Three: Operations

In summary –

  • NRL costs are going up, which is largely because the new team will be entitled to the central distribution plus some additional costs to move the morass of Sydney clubs to south-east Queensland more frequently (estimated by the report at $345,000).
  • Based on the AFL experience, promoting existing clubs into established markets results in league-average contributions to the new clubs. Starting new clubs from scratch in new markets requires significantly more investment.
  • It costs about $23.6 million per year to run an average NRL club, so a new club needs to find about $10 million a year over their distribution to break even.
  • A new mouth to feed means less sponsorship revenue for everyone else.
  • With a new club increasing the total salary pool from $147 million to $156 million, salary inflation will result in putting existing clubs under pressure to manage their lists.

Cap management is a challenge that clubs currently face, but may be compounded in the short term with the addition of a new team

pp139

It would be a shame if clubs had to do their jobs better, a wholly unprecedented situation not found anywhere else in society.

After that, it starts to get maddening.

If you’re not familiar with corporate risk analysis, it’s largely about identifying qualitative concerns and less about quantitative analysis and that’s how this sprint largely runs.

There will be dilution of talent as a result of more players entering the league, but there are concerns that the quality of talent will not be up to NRL standard.

pp26

There’s no evidence for this, simply the assertion which is backed by a logic but its a logic that suits the needs of the existing clubs. Where benefits are noted for balance, there are considerably fewer bullet points when compared to the risks.

In reality, if there’s a shortage of talent, it’s in the club offices, not on the football field. It is particularly galling to hear these sentiments echoed by the Panthers, while they were undefeated in first and second grade football at the time of the report’s writing, forcing Matt Burton to either play in reggies or as a first grade centre, because they are just so overladen with talent. That he can go elsewhere for an opportunity to play first grade in the halves is considered a failing of the current system, which is baffling.

There is a concern amongst interviewed clubs about the quality of the players that would be entering the league to fill the additional spots created by a new team. However, there is a general sentiment that there are enough players to fill an additional team of 34 players.

pp143

The corollary is the fate of the 2019 Sunshine Coast Falcons and how other NRL teams just allowed Melbourne to keep their most talented members, which included at various points Harry Grant, Justin Olam, Nicho Hynes, Tui Kamikamica, Tino Fa’asuamaleaui and Ryan Panehuyzen, without a fight. Instead, Melbourne’s rivals preferred to wait until their market value had risen beyond cheap before showing any interest.

Feedback from current NRL clubs suggests there is currently a lack of incentives and structures in place for clubs to prioritise the development of junior talent. If a new club does not take a development mindset towards building junior talent, there is a risk that current Queensland based clubs will be negatively impacted as they may lose junior talent for little compensation

pp161

For mine, it’s clear that the talent is there but the scouting and development structures are not, which is ironic considering the report states that clubs are concerned that there’s no reward for developing talent. It pays huge dividends because the rest of the league won’t scout outside their postcode. This self-serving analysis is not a useful contribution to the discourse.

It may become increasingly more challenging for a new club to establish talent pathways, as existing teams continue to grow their presence in Queensland from a talent identification perspective (e.g. Melbourne Storm’s affiliation with the Sunshine Coast Falcons and Brisbane Easts, and the NZ Warriors’ affiliation with Redcliffe Dolphins)

pp34

The report notes that clubs who rely on Queensland talent will have to spend more to maintain their pipeline. There are three unaffiliated clubs in the Queensland Cup, two of which will sign up with any NRL club that will have them. Of the three clubs that might come into the NRL, they all exist in some form in QCup, meaning the Storm might have to shift partners from Easts (or rely solely on Sunshine Coast), the Warriors might re-enter the NSW Cup with their own side (which might happen anyway) in lieu of using Redcliffe and the Jets would obviously link up with their currently unaffiliated namesakes. There are still substantial opportunities for more clubs to utilise Queensland in their pathways.

The report rightly identifies that there are unanswered questions about how the new team will operate. Will they be given cap dispensations? How will the draw be structured? What’s going to happen to distributions? That’s on the NRL to address. But if the result of expansion is player salaries going up and additional playing and coaching jobs being created, this is presented in the executive summary as a bad thing (the body is more balanced). It is, of course, bad if your business is running a football club but it is less so if you are ordinary fan who simply wants to see the people responsible for playing the game rewarded for their efforts.

Outside consultants are unlikely to publicly publish a report which states that their clients could and should actually be a lot better at their jobs. What’s irritating is that this has been relayed, verbatim, with little to no analysis or interpretation or context, by the media. Fortunately, it’s been paywalled so no one else seems to have picked up on these extremely lazy talking points.

Sprint Four: Women/grassroots

The final sprint talks about the current risks and opportunities for the women’s game and grassroots. This seems like a non-sequitir, given the report is notionally about adding another NRLM team in Brisbane, but there is an opportunity cost. The money that’s invested in a new team is money that can’t be invested in the NRLW and women’s game.

To a level that’s true. Of course, the unstated assumption is that the existing clubs’ central distribution is to be left untouched, even though a large number of clubs do not generate sufficient commercial return to justify such a generous grant and their existence is largely subsidised by the Warriors, Broncos and other big clubs. Perhaps we should cut the men’s club distribution by $1 million a year and reinvest that in the women’s game? We could then have our cake and eat it. That this would come at the expense of a number of precariously balanced legacy clubs wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.

One strange thing to note is that the report states that the NRLW has the fewest passionate fans but also shows that it rates better than Super Rugby, A-League, AFLW and NBL. Gemba seems to have again confused their fan metrics with what actually matters. The NRLW has the least ability to drive subscriptions, because it is bundled with the NRL rights. What is not stated is the commercial impact if NRLW gets its own broadcast deal. The competition could become self-funding and realise its potential. When you think about the NRLW in terms of the failure of the current administration to capitalise on its potential, then this negates the opportunity cost and makes this entire line of argument redundant in the context of expanding the NRLM.

pp 182
pp 194

Personally, I find it gross that a number of NRL clubs have shown little to no interest in the women’s game, not even bothering to pretend to want a NRLW franchise, but will use it as a distraction to further their case that they should not be subject to any further competition in the men’s league.

The real opportunity cost is using this time and money to put another team in Brisbane, presumably at the behest and benefit of Nine, when the report notes that the demand for a team in Western Australia or South Australia is about the same as it is for a second Brisbane team. Of course, that would cost the NRL a lot more money.

Conclusion

Consultancy, irrespective of the discipline, is fundamentally about giving the client what they want within the legal and ethical bounds of the profession. Most reports of this nature are used by C-suite executives to bludgeon their counterparts on the opposite side of the board room table, rather than being works of science. Many simply go unread, their heftiness being the primary goal.

Gemba’s brief was to develop a report that highlights the heretofore unexplored impacts of the second Brisbane team, with an emphasis on commercial and quantative analysis, and they’ve hit it out of the park. It’s clear that sprint one and two is their own work. As I get older, I realise in these grey-scaled scenarios, there’s not a right or wrong, so much as a more defensible or a less defensible position and while I could quibble here or there, their arguments are sound. I disagree with their conclusions but that doesn’t make me right and if I had done a similar report, not only would it look terrible but it would have had a very different goal in mind.

Where it falls down is where Gemba have been guided by their clients, the football clubs. Sprints three is about repeating the club’s concerns, dressed up in the language of corporate risk management. The implication is that the clubs see what’s good for them as being what’s good for rugby league.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The sport would greatly benefit from not only removing these lunatics from control of the ARLC but also shedding several or more from the top tier of the sport and redirecting their central funding to support expansion and the women’s game and grassroots or country football. On that basis, it’s difficult to swallow the conclusions reached in this part but it’s created the most talking points in the media, so in that sense it’s mission accomplished.

Still, it’s better to have some information out there, than not all, as long as we understand the context in which it was created, which is that most of the existing clubs do not want any further competition. There are a lot of interesting bits of information that I have not covered.

The ARLC pursued something similar under the Greenberg administration and this was subsequently buried in a dark hole by V’Landys. It seems unlikely that we will ever see that report.

Nor will we likely ever know on what basis the ARLC makes their decision about the successful expansion option. The information released by the clubs themselves is fairly scant – Easts held a press conference that could have been an email to talk finance and there’s reports the Jets are short on bank guarantees – and I assume the contents of the bids will remain commercial-in-confidence.

Irrespective, I have no doubt that a second Brisbane team will be announced in about a month. I guess we’ll see what happens and if its a disaster, at least the Panthers and Titans will be able to say I told you so.

BNE2.1: The game done changed

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“It is, at the end of the day, all rather stupid”

Last year was an illuminating time for those who closely follow the working man’s game. If, like me, you’ve only been a keen trainspotter for a few years, we might not remember older train wrecks, like Crusaders. Conveniently, the Toronto Wolfpack experience, which saw $30 million pissed down the toilet for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear, brought some truths about the sport into very clear focus.

At a certain point, possibly while mulling things over for too long without live sport or being able to socialise, it clicked in my mind that it didn’t matter how well thought out an expansionist’s plan might be, it will never be implemented. There is no perfect post that will change anyone’s mind. This may be obvious to you but sometimes I can be very dense.

Source

My silver lining on the new Brisbane NRL team is then dubiously reasoned, if not downright naive, in retrospect. While a Brisbane team could be leveraged commercially to take the game west (again), it will not be. Instead, it will be used to shore up Nine’s failing ratings in Queensland, as the three extant clubs flail about hopelessly. That’s just who the people running the game are, especially Peter V’landys and especially Phil Gould. Two shitty suburban culture warriors in the pocket of a free-to-air broadcaster are the Pacific game’s leading lights and that’s why we have two point field goals now.

It is, at the end of the day, all rather stupid. You won’t find a more Darwinian sporting observer than yours truly but even with my complete and utter lack of regard for tradition, introducing a team solely for the benefit of a legacy media organisation in 2023 is too far for me. For the sport as a whole to make money, by all means, do what you got to do. Even the Super League schism had some benefits for rugby league by forcing it to modernise somewhat. Who really gives a fuck if the only benefit is that Channel Nine survives a bit longer?

The thing of it is that there’s barely any risk for the NRL. You personally are not going to lose your team if the new Brisbane team fails, because you are not a fan of that team. No one is because it doesn’t exist. The NRL isn’t investing any money or taking any equity as far as I know, so there’s no financial risk. If the team fails, at worst the resulting quagmire might take out a storied Queensland Cup club (and, as recent events have clearly indicated, no one in Sydney cares about them) and the NRL suffers a bit of reputational blowback. If it works, ratings go up on Nine, the next TV deal is better and the NRL can profit. That money will be recycled on to the existing clubs in the form of higher club grants because Phil Gould believes the NRL is make-believe and the clubs are the only reality, which explains why North Sydney fans didn’t mind their club exiting first class football and we’ve never heard about it since.

The money will be wasted, as usual with Queensland clubs subsidising Sydney no-hopers, instead of being invested in making the sport better because that’s just what happens.

The candidates

Now that nasty cynicism is out of the way, here’s some more. After the Bombers and Western Corridor bids merged, there are now three candidates: Dolphins, Firehawks and Jets, representing Redcliffe, Eastern Suburbs Brisbane and Ipswich, respectively.

You shouldn’t rate the Queensland Cup’s popularity on how much I talk about it but rather based on the fact that it won’t be on TV this year. The idea that each club has community links is not unreasonable but those links represent very few people in the grand scheme of things and a lot of them are going to be conflicted about leaving the Broncos for a new venture. For mine, the three bids are now pretty much the same, so it’ll probably come down to who knows the ARLC best and/or who has the most money.

The recent merger has meant that the Western Corridor bid has dropped the Western Corridor aspect of their bid to become “Brisbane”, which makes much more commercial sense but is questionable if you purportedly represented the hitherto-culturally-non-existent Logan-Ipswich-Toowoomba conglomeration. The Indigenous angle they were taking is gone too. Presumably, the Jets team noticed the stance Peter V’Landys took prior to last year’s All Stars game regarding the anthem and read between the lines on his feelings about black people.

Similarly, the Bombers have dropped their name and replaced it with another imperialist death machine but at least one that has some rugby league history (stolen, like so many things, from the NFL), so kudos. As a result, the Jets have joined forces with an organisation that stands for nothing other than their own gain to give it a light patina of community respectability. In many ways, it is the perfect bid because there is so little to it, it can be moulded into whatever the powers that be want it to be. This will almost certainly be worse than what people could come up with organically (see above re: two point field goals), starting with an incredibly omnious 9/11 themed logo (which obviously may not be real).

Whichever bid is successful, people and specifically, people on Twitter who aren’t fans and will never be fans of the new club, will hate everything about it – logo, name, colours. I note the hypocrisy but I at least know that it won’t matter. Twitter’s usefulness as a barometer on rugby league matters is only as a contraindicator and we wait with bated breath for the exit polls from Facebook and the Daily Telegraph to see which way Peter V’Landys is going to go.

In any case, Brisbane is so starved of NRL, it’ll probably work, especially after a sold out all-Queensland double header at Suncorp results in the destruction of a large part of the city.

The TV deal

The most frequent question asked in relation to BNE2 is “how does adding a 17th team result in higher ratings?” It’s a good one because there obviously isn’t going to be a ninth match each weekend and instead one team will sit on the sidelines with a bye. Here’s the theory that I think Nine, V’Landys and co are working with:

  1. Even if BNE2 is half as successful as the Broncos, it’ll still rate better than most of the league. That means, most weeks will remove ratings anchors like the Knights, Sea Eagles, Bulldogs and Raiders and replace them with an above average team, which will improve the overall ratings across the season, even without adding a game.
  2. The current FTA arrangement has a hard cap on the number of times a team can appear on free-to-air (I believe it is currently 16 for the Broncos and 12 for everyone else) and another cap on how many return fixtures are allowed per club (Nine might show both legs of Broncos-Cowboys, Broncos-Eels and Broncos-Rabbitohs but then wouldn’t be able to show both legs of, e.g., Broncos-Titans). By adding a second Brisbane team, this allows Nine to have more Broncos-equivalent games, with a Brisbane team on FTA every weekend. This also explains the inexplicable increase in Dragons FTA appearances for 2021 because they’d run out of good teams to show.
  3. Nine sells all of its content to regional networks at what amounts to a fixed rate and so doesn’t care how well football rates in the sticks. Its revenue is driven by the five city metro ratings. From Nine’s point of view, the Gold Coast Titans are a regional football team and they probably don’t see them as moving ratings in the Brisbane market. That the Titans are just “down the road” doesn’t factor in.
  4. A second Brisbane team then is likely to uplift Brisbane’s ratings more, and more often, when compared to how a Perth team would lift ratings in Perth.
  5. The recent broadcast renegotiations allowed for the deal to be improved if a new team is added.

I think its extremely likely that ratings will go up in the short term (or, more accurately, go down less quickly) after BNE2 comes in, even just for novelty purposes. Even if it doesn’t last or the broadast deal doesn’t go up by enough to cover the club grant, I’m sure the ARLC will just boot the Warriors or Storm to compensate.

BNE2 or, On Expansion and its relationship with Brisbane

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Six months ago, the Titans were on the chopping block to keep the Sydney clubs alive and some think still should be. With the NRL’s footprint study having presumably been delivered to the ARLC, if not the general public, Peter V’Landys has let drop that he’s not interested in taking the NRL to Perth and is far more interested in adding a seventeenth NRL team in Brisbane.

In recent weeks, as the NRL edges closer to admitting it will admit a second Brisbane club to the competition, the media has been prolific in its coverage. There’s no surprise about that. The prospect of the NRL adding its first new team in – by the time 2023 rolls around – sixteen years is seriously exciting and interesting.

Even as a staunch Broncos fan, I don’t have a problem with it. I’m genuinely looking forward to the prospect of a full blown Brisbane derby twice a year. It will make the Hull derby look like the Roosters and Rabbitohs playing in a three-quarters-empty ANZ Stadium. It would also mitigate the need for all Broncos games to be scheduled on a Thursday or Friday, lest the commercial base of the sport collapse. It might be nice to go to the football on a Saturday arvo for a change.

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Naturally, the questions of how, why, when and what follow, along with approximately a million opinions. If this sounds like an exaggeration, I can assure it is not because I’ve read them all.

Some Broncos fans don’t want the incumbent’s prestige to be challenged. Others question the viability of a new team when all Brisbanites are rusted-on Broncos fans. Still others don’t want Brisbane to follow Sydney into a saturated quagmire of competing interests that cannot be resolved for the good of the game. Most people want to see what’s being offered first.

Refreshingly, there’s some but not a lot of entrenched history and nostalgia and feelings that have to be challenged. Brisbane arguably obliterated a lot of its own rugby league heritage when the Broncos were formed. It will be sad for the city to lose a symbol of its unity but the Maroons have done a far better job of bringing people together over the last ten years, with more success and far fewer scandals.

For me, the ideal bid is one that adds enough value to the league that it can pay for an eighteenth team in a non-traditional market. The pap about securing the Brisbane market for rugby league and providing another pathway to Origin is rubbish. The NRL’s ratings in Brisbane were 30% higher on a per capita basis than Sydney in 2019. While you consider that, I’ll try to find a player who is missing out on a Maroon jersey because there are only three professional teams in Queensland.

A seventeenth team in Brisbane doesn’t expand the game but it should make money. The ideal bid would add $100 million to the NRL’s coffers, either through a licence fee or extra dollars for the next broadcast deal or both, because that’s how much it cost to get the Storm going. Melbourne remains rugby league’s only successful expansion in to a new market since World War II. If we are actually going to go to Perth again or Adelaide or further into New Zealand, it won’t just be funded on chook raffles, gate receipts and pokie revenue.

In Brisbane, trying to carve off a portion of the city’s geography and/or play out of a suburban stadium is far too limiting and offers no space for the franchise to grow. The 2.2 million people in the Brisbane metropolitan area are not going to broadly identify with a team named after a peninsula in the far northern suburbs or a western suburb of 200,000 people. More people live in the Sutherland Shire and the Sharks’ recently announced $3 million loss indicates how well that’s going in 2020.

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If the Titans and Sharks can draw 18,000 to Suncorp on a Thursday night, then a new Brisbane team should expect a gate averaging at least 20,000. The same is not true of a team playing at Dolphin Oval (capacity: 11,170) or North Ipswich Reserve (5,500). A new stadium might only be funded if it can be used for the Olympics in twelve years and that assumes Brisbane wins the bid, which won’t be announced until it is too late to start planning a team. More to the point, no one in their right mind would leave that kind of money on the table.

To be viable, the team is going to need to name itself “Brisbane” (or maybe “Moreton Bay” or “South-east Queensland” or similar) and play its home games out of Suncorp Stadium. There are no alternatives to this, it’s just the way it has to be for the team to maximise its potential and have the remotest chance of succeeding to deliver the value the game needs out of a seventeenth team. If this sounds a bit too ‘corporate’ or even suspiciously ‘Super League’, it’s because I live in 2020.

Those that fear the creation of a franchise in the mould of the Titans haven’t been paying attention. The Gold Coast side are the worst rating team on Foxtel, ranking dead last in average viewers over the last three regular seasons, 20% lower than the leading Broncos. However, free-to-air is different matter, where the Titans are 3,000 average viewers shy of the two-time premiers over the same period and out-rated Penrith, Canterbury, St George Illawarra, Wests Tigers, Canberra, Manly and Newcastle. While I haven’t accounted for time slots, it’s also fair to say that the Titans have not been a drawcard during that time.

In attendances, despite being wooden spooners, the Titans got more fans through the gates than the Dragons in 2019. In 2018, the Titans’ gate was better than the Raiders, Sharks, Sea Eagles and the Eels, despite playing several games in regional areas because of the Commonwealth Games. In 2017, the reigning premiers couldn’t attract as many patrons as the Titans, nor could the Warriors, Panthers, Bunnies, Dragons or Tigers.

Memberships are an issue, with the Titans trailing the league since 2016 and falling further behind. On the other hand, the Dragons supposedly had 21,000 members in 2019 and averaged fewer than 10,000 at their games, so perhaps Titans fans are just savvier?

In other words, given that the Titans are terrible and still have better metrics than a big chunk of the league, a Titans clone would be the least we could hope for. Imagine what they could do if they started winning.

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So I’m not concerned we’ll add another Titans to the competition. I’m concerned we’ll add another Sydney club.

Sydney and Melbourne are exceptions in world sport, not the norm. No other sports has top level professional teams so heavily concentrated in one city. The closest analogs are La Liga clubs in Madrid and baseball teams in Tokyo and neither meet the same density on a per capita basis. American sports and, to a lesser extent, European soccer find themselves roughly distributed to maximise returns and optimise density. This can happen either organically, as soccer’s promotion and relegation system seems to work, or inorganically, via the American franchising system. As a result, their sports teams are in a less precarious position financially, which has obvious benefits.

In that context, it seems silly to look at Sydney as the only or even a desirable model of rugby league, when it is a crucible unlikely to be repeated elsewhere. It is sillier still to take Sydney’s rugby league culture and assume all markets have already been divied up into the exclusive fiefdoms of existing clubs, comprising fans attached like barnacles to a set of colours chosen for arbitrary, geographical or familial reasons that would rather die than adopt another set of colours that might actually be more meaningful. But you don’t need me to remind you of Australian rugby league’s inherent Sydney-centrism.

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The Broncos represent a broad church. Going by revenue, membership numbers and average attendances, there probably aren’t than many more hardcore Broncos supporters than any of the big Sydney clubs, despite being a one town team. These people aren’t leaving the Broncos but they might only be a few hundred thousand people.

There exists, outside of the Broncos’ direct sphere of influence, a larger fanbase of casual footy fans who go to or watch Broncos games because that’s what’s available. It would be a mistake to assume that they won’t be agnostic or switch teams, especially if the new team is more successful, just because that’s what extremely online NRL monomaniacs think they would do in that situation. It is worth remembering that projecting what you think you would do in a particular situation on to millions of people you’ve never met is a risky basis for decision making.

If you look at million-or-so ratings for Friday nights, the two million-plus population of Brisbane, State of Origin, the reception of Magic Round and the scale of the south-east Queensland economy, there’s clearly an opportunity to meet the latent demand for NRL that the Broncos can’t or won’t.

For example, outside of Magic Round, there are only twelve Broncos home games a year, which are predominantly on Thursday or Friday night. If you can’t make those specific nights, you can’t go to a NRL game unless you’re willing to get a on a train for an hour and a half from Central plus whatever time it takes you to get there or get on a plane. A new team doubles the opportunities available.

Ultimately, tribalism or rust have nothing to do with this because Brisbane is not Sydney.

As we edge closer to reality, we can consider what options are actually available. Far from my idealistic notions of enriching the NRL to expand the game, we’re left with a handful of bids, none of which are perfect.

(Despite the above, I acknowledge that I may never regard any bid as ideal because I subconsciously don’t want a second Brisbane team)

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North Sydney Bears

As officially endorsed by the Peanut King himself, Paul Kent, bringing back the Bears is the ultimate Sydney boomer nostalgia move that screams “Fuck your history and ideas, I’m forcing mine on you and you will like it” (Peter FitzSimons could only commit to bringing the Bears back to the Central Coast, an even more baffling proposition).

Notwithstanding the extremely obvious fact that the AFL would own all of the intellectual property related to the ‘Brisbane Bears’, Queenslanders are not going to follow a relocated Sydney team. Pre-Origin, that strategy might have worked but you can’t make Queensland-versus-New South Wales the game’s central commercial proposition and then expect one half of that rivalry to accept a cast-off from the other. To cite precedent, in 1999, the Bears took a home game against the Cowboys to Lang Park. The match attracted a paltry 3,382 attendees.

The point of relocating a team is that they will have an existing fanbase in the original city to fall back on while they build a bigger one in the new city. The problem is if you have not played first grade as a standalone club since 1999, and there are kids who have been born since then that can legally buy alcohol now, how many fans are still around to fall back on? How many were there to begin with?

“How good would it be though?” Fuck off.

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Redcliffe Dolphins

The Redcliffe Dolphins are the strongest Queensland Cup club, with a soon-to-be 10,000 seat stadium, a big leagues club, a storied history and are firmly entrenched in their local community, which is a hard-to-access peninsula at the northern end of Moreton Bay. If you wanted a Brisbane version of Manly, you couldn’t look past the Dolphins.

If I knew more about AFL, I’d draw a comparison to Port Adelaide, which I think is the only top level sports club in Australia that has been brought up from a lower tier. It would seem the idea has 100% success rate, compared to the dicey 50-50 chances of creating new franchises from scratch, so they’ve got that going for them.

Dolphin Oval isn’t quite big enough for the NRL which, despite never aiming up, should be forcing clubs to play out of minimum 25,000 all-seater stadiums. The Dolphins have acknowledged this and reckon they’ll play out of Suncorp. They’ve also acknowledged that Redcliffe won’t have widespread appeal, so they will also adopt a generic Brisbane/Queensland moniker (“Moreton Bay Dolphins” has a nice ring and might engage the people of the Moreton Bay Regional Council) but focus their marketing more on the Dolphins brand.

Bringing up a second tier club isn’t ideal but at least the Dolphins have shown the right thinking about it.

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Easts Tigers

The Easts Tigers bid runs on the same logic as the Dolphins’, which means it has the same strengths and weaknesses. The main differences are that Langlands Park is nowhere near NRL standard, so home games must go to Suncorp, and the club already acknowledges it will need to change name and colours if it is to join the NRL because of the Wests Tigers.

No suggestions for what the new brand might be have been forthcoming, other than an interesting idea that they will form the ‘south’ Brisbane counterpart to the Broncos’ ‘north’. This is an insulting suggestion as a Souths Logan fan, but at least makes some sense, given a million or so live above the river and a similar number below.

The Tigers previously experimented with being the East Coast Tigers in 2001-02, a throwback to a potential merger with the Gold Coast Chargers and/or Balmain Tigers before that resolved itself by both teams ceasing to exist. With no attachments to their current identity, they could get permission to revive the South Queensland Crushers marque, a nod to millennial nostalgia instead of boomers’, as if that would somehow be preferable and not at all unbearable. That would be interesting to see how popular opinion swings to or away from them.

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Western Corridor

The Western Corridor bid is basically the same as the Tigers’ and Dolphins’ and builds on the Ipswich Jets. The Western Corridor nominally covers the area from Logan, west to Ipswich and then out to Toowoomba, which I’ll grant you is growing very quickly but is generally extremely low density suburbia with no discernible identity other than “we’re not Brisbane, I don’t care what the ABS says” until you get to Toowoomba, at which point Brisbane ended about forty-five minutes ago.

There’s no stadium along the M2, so games would either have to go to Suncorp or QSAC, which would need a massive refurbishment and is still in the Brisbane LGA, until North Ipswich Reserve can be developed. Loganers would likely find it easier to still attend Suncorp than Ipswich, given the way public transport is set up in this city. If that’s the case, then the catchment for the Western Corridor bid would be quite limited. A ‘west Brisbane’ approach – like the airport at Toowoomba – might be more generic but loosens the connection to Ipswich.

They’ve yet to be interviewed by the Courier Mail this time around, perhaps doing some preparation, so this bid still has more details to come.

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Brisbane Bombers

While the above has not dated well from their launch in 2011, the Bombers’ biggest advantage is that they exist. At least, in the sense that they have a logo and presumably an ABN. Their sole decision made to date, to name themselves the Bombers, really brings a lot of doubt on the organisation’s decision making. Naming yourself the ‘Bombers’ in 2020 will be like naming yourself the ‘Predator Drones’ in 2070, provided that professional sport still exists then. It probably should have been knocked on the head when Essendon got done for doping.

As a club-independent consortium of businessmen who have operated in the real world, along with Billy Moore and Scott Sattler, the Bombers are actually closer to what I think is required but it’s hard to tell if they are actually rich enough to make it work. They are not popular with the Twitterati and seem incapable of making an argument for why they specifically should get a licence that isn’t couched in the most generic corporate-speak imaginable, which means they make a lot of the same arguments that I’ve just made. Thinking about it, they’d be a lot more popular with me if they just changed the branding. I have an idea:

The NRL will get more information than we will ever be allowed to see on which to base their decision. I’d like to think that the due diligence will yield the best possible outcome but we’ll have to wait and see.

If it doesn’t pan out for BNE2 and the NRL insists on another team in south-east Queensland, I know a city up the road that hasn’t got any pro men’s sports teams that could grow into a NRL team, like Brisbane did with the Broncos, Canberra did with the Raiders and we hope the Gold Coast will do with the Titans.

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Rugby league’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t know what it wants. Historically, the sport has knee jerked in response to challenges and more or less weathered them intact, but has really failed to make a significant mark outside of the territories it held circa 1939.

The point of expanding the game is to make it bigger. The bigger it is, the more talent it attracts, the better it gets; it’s a simple equation. It also ensures the sport’s survival. With a greater distribution and diversity, the scale of disaster required wipe rugby league off the map becomes less and less likely.

In Australia, NRL should strive to be the national code that represents its citizens as equally as possible. Rugby league is poised to do this in a way that rugby union and AFL cannot. The sport has four cultural values to impart:

  • Get paid for your labour
  • Rugby should be entertaining to watch
  • Your class, race, religion, sexuality or other identity won’t hold you back if you play well enough
  • Represent your people, not the arbitrarily defined country into which you were born

Despite what those on rugby’s frontiers in the New World would tell you, these ideas are important. If they weren’t, we may as well fold the NRL and get behind the Wallabies.

Expansion is hard, expensive, has to be well planned and above all, has to have a clearly identified purpose. None of these have been rugby league’s forte. The NRL has money now and it is as popular as it has ever been. The slightest modicum of intelligence applied to planning and decision making will go a long way to securing the sport’s, and its ideals’, future.

The young forwards are not to blame for the Broncos’ demise

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To not put too fine a point on it, the Broncos have been shockingly bad in 2019. Riding the hype train in this year, they were touted as premiership contenders (disclosure: including by me).

The Broncos have won just two games. One was against a Cowboys side that is facing similar struggles and another against a Sharks team bereft of its star power. The other six games have been losses, ranging from a late field goal from Corey Norman sealing the win for the Dragons, to thirty-two point demolitions at the hands of Easts and then again from Souths.

The finger pointing has begun. The Broncos’ extremely youthful pack has come in for criticism, both for a lack of go-forward and a lack of consistency.

The statistics tell a different story.

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Analysis – Stocky vs Reality: Did your team outperform? (Pt II)

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The Stocky is the main forecasting tool driving the analysis on this site. It’s a simulator of the season ahead, using the Monte Carlo method and based on Elo ratings, that gives insight into the future performance of each club. My main interest has been the number of wins, as it determines ladder positions which in turn have a big impact on the finals. The Stocky might not be able to tell you which games a team will win, but it is good at telling you how many wins are ahead.

But how does a computer simulation (in reality, a very large spreadsheet) compare to reality? To test it, I’ve put together a graph of each team’s performance against what the Stocky projected for them. Each graph shows:

  • The Stocky’s projection for total wins (blue)
  • Converting that projection to a “pace” for that point in the season (red)
  • Comparing that to the actual number of wins (yellow)

It will never be exactly right, particularly as you can only ever win whole numbers of games and the Stocky loves a decimal point, but as we’ll see, the Stocky is not too bad at tracking form and projecting that forward.

This week is Part II, from North Queensland to Wests Tigers. Part I, from Brisbane to Newcastle, was last week. Also see this week’s projections update for some errors in the Stocky.

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Analysis – Stocky vs Reality: Did your team outperform? (Pt I)

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The Stocky is the main forecasting tool driving the analysis on this site. It’s a simulator of the season ahead, using the Monte Carlo method and based on Elo ratings, that gives insight into the future performance of each club. My main interest has been the number of wins, as it determines ladder positions which in turn have a big impact on the finals. The Stocky might not be able to tell you which games a team will win, but it is good at telling you how many wins are ahead.

But how does a computer simulation (in reality, a very large spreadsheet) compare to reality? To test it, I’ve put together a graph of each team’s performance against what the Stocky projected for them. Each graph shows:

  • The Stocky’s projection for total wins (blue)
  • Converting that projection to a “pace” for that point in the season (red)
  • Comparing that to the actual number of wins (yellow)

It will never be exactly right, particularly as you can only ever win whole numbers of games and the Stocky loves a decimal point, but as we’ll see, the Stocky is not too bad at tracking form and projecting that forward.

This week is Part I, from Brisbane to Newcastle. Part II, from North Queensland to Wests Tigers, will be next week.

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Analysis – Another bloody mid-season review (Part I)

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With the conclusion of round 13, it’s half time in the 2017 NRL season. It’s the ideal time to do what everyone else is doing and look back at the season so far. This week we’re looking at the first eight clubs that come up in alphabetical order.

Part II to come next week.

Benchmarks

There are some important benchmarks to consider when looking ahead to the end of the season.

Firstly, let’s look at the regular season. I’ve tallied up the average number of wins for each position, the average for-and-against and the number of teams with a negative for-and-against for each spot on the ladder. The dataset covers 1998 to 2016, so there are some inconsistencies from seasons which had twenty or fourteen teams and where points penalties were applied to the 2002 Bulldogs, 2016 Eels and 2010 Storm.

The main takeaways are that twelve wins should get you into the finals and eighteen should get you the minor premiership. Six or seven wins will still only get you the bottom spots on the ladder (unless the 2016 Knights are playing).

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Club Report – Brisbane Broncos

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bne-badgeBackground

The Brisbane Broncos have been one of the consistently strongest teams in rugby league since their inception in 1987. Having the relatively massive rugby league-loving Brisbane market to themselves, the Broncos have taken a slew of premierships in 1992, 1993, 1997 (albeit a Super League title), 1998, 2000 and 2006. Besides a grand final appearance in 2015, it has been a dry spell for Brisbane despite making all but two finals series since the NRL began in 1998.

The Broncos have been the incubator of a slew of rugby league’s stars, including Wally Lewis, Allan Langer, Darren Lockyer and former senator Glenn Lazarus (who thought they’d ever have to say that?), not to mention long-serving coach, Wayne Bennett. The 2017 Broncos vintage looks as promising as ever. They can never be written off but are they premiers in the making? We will have to wait and see.

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