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Can rugby league survive the global play for the hearts and minds of its fans?

Date: 21/09/2006

It's enough to make a die-hard footy fan weep into their beer. Sex scandals, a global playing field and media baron tug-o-wars threaten to relegate the once mighty game of rugby league to the permanent wooden spoon position behind Australia's other football codes, according to a University of Western Sydney sports expert.

Professor David Rowe, Director of the UWS Centre for Cultural Research, is set to look at the future for rugby league when he delivers the 2006 Tom Brock lecture this evening (Thursday 21 September) in Sydney. He will present his paper 'The stuff of dreams or the dream stuffed? Rugby league, media empires, sex scandals and global plays'.

Professor Rowe is a highly-respected researcher, and author of many books about the media, sport, and popular culture.

He says rugby league might still be alive and kicking, but it is fast confronting a diminished place in the hierarchy of Australian sport.

"Rugby league in Australia is not so much threatened with extinction as sporting subordination," explains Professor Rowe.

"It is now over a decade since the Super League war confirmed all the worst fears of those who see contemporary sport as a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate commercial media.

"The game did recover on the surface - a unified league, open competition, and respectable crowds, television ratings and sponsorships in the usual places.

"But despite official assertions that the house is in good order and the Super League cataclysm is a thing of the past, it continues to stalk the code like Banquo's Ghost at a Macbeth family dinner.

"The scars of the Murdoch-Packer collision are still visible - a constant reminder that the 'people's game' can be turned upside down at any time if media capital with big ego so decrees."

Professor Rowe believes off-the-field ructions in the NRL - such as the fight to keep the South Sydney Rabbitohs in the competition, and a steady stream of player sex and drug scandals - have also given free kicks to rival football codes like soccer and AFL.

"In recent times we've seen a number of off-field dramas and sleazy boys-behaving-badly scandals tarnish the game's profile," says Professor Rowe.

"Frequent sexual misconduct scandals have required the code to resort to gender re-education, and financial improprieties around the salary cap commend similar courses in business ethics.

"The iconic South Sydney club has been re-instated to the competition, but on public relations rather than firm legal grounds, and the club is subject to mutually destructive warfare, with few of its 'big day out' demonstrators now witnessing their frequent losses.

"In comparison, the truly 'world game' of association football - once known as soccer - is resurgent. It's in the strongest position it has ever been in Australia - it has backing from Frank Lowy as a Packer for the new millennium, a recent ticket to the 2006 World Cup finals and the Asian Football Confederation, and a shiny new multi-million dollar pay TV contract.

"Similarly professionalised rugby union - once considered the poor amateur cousin to rugby league - now has abundant cash and impeccable city connections, and regularly raids the ranks of League's best players with the promise of serious international competitions.

"It's very difficult for rugby league to claim to be 'international' beyond eastern Australasia, south west France and northern England.

"And the now genuinely national Australian rules football - which has even less of an international presence than rugby league - successfully brandishes its socialistic draft and a massive $780 million, five-year TV rights contract."

Professor David Rowe is a frequent commentator in print, electronic and online media. He has published many books and academic journal articles on the subject of sport and media, including 'Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity' (second edition, 2004) and the co-authored 'Globalization and Sport: Playing the World' (2001).

The annual Tom Brock lecture is an initiative of the Tom Brock Bequest, together with the Australian Society for Sports History and the NSW Leagues' Club.

Those who have delivered previous years' lectures include Alan Clarkson, Tom Keneally, Roy Masters, and the late Alex Buzo.

Where: NSW Leagues' Club, 2nd floor, 65 Phillip Street, Sydney
When: Thursday 21 September 2006
Time: 6.00 for 6.30pm

Note to journalists: An edited version of Professor Rowe's paper is available on request.

Ends

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