Across the towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, rugby league binds communities together like almost nothing else.
The sport is more popular than football or cricket in many towns and smaller cities across the two counties and in places such as St. Helens, Wigan, Widnes and Warrington, rugby league is tantamount to religion.
These communities have been the bedrock of Super League’s fanbase since the competition was launched in 1996 alongside its long-time broadcast partner, Sky. It was a modern, made-for-TV league designed for contemporary tastes, introducing cheerleaders, fireworks, hardcore techno and state-of-the-art production.
Older fans, including my dad, didn’t care much for it at all.
Fast forward to 2024 and Super League finds itself in an eerily similar position as the dated, parochial Rugby Football League did in 1995. Super League’s on-pitch action is still good and the people that have always loved it, still love it. But everyone involved in the sport – fans, clubs and even the league itself – know that it is overdue for a refresh.
Enter IMG, the sports marketing agency tasked with making Super League Great Again.
Hired in 2022 by the league’s trading arm RL Commercial on a 12-year deal, IMG’s vision to ‘reimagine’ rugby league in England and beyond will start to be realised in 2025 when its controversial ‘grading’ system comes into play.
‘Grading’ will replace the traditional promotion and relegation system between the Rugby Football League’s three tiers, awarding Super League status to the 12 highest-graded clubs each year.
Each club governed by the Rugby Football League will receive a grade from A to C, awarded in accordance with their on-pitch performances, the size of their fanbase, the strength of their finances, the quality of their stadium and their commitment to serving the local community.
Many fans, including my dad, don’t care much for it at all.
“Grading was never going to please everybody, but the clubs voted in favour of it,” Rhodri Jones, managing director of RL Commercial, tells SportBusiness. “Grading has hastened improvements in certain clubs that we have been wishing for over a number of years – new owners, new investment, new stadium upgrades and refurbishment.”
He continued: “Every club has had to do something with their facility, whether that be access areas, LED boards, big screens, or amenities, facilities has definitely been the busiest pillar in terms of visible improvements.”
Jones is keenly aware that Super League’s next generation of fans – and even some of those among its current congregation – may not want to spend every Saturday afternoon being drenched on a dilapidated, uncovered terrace.
There is a clear and present danger that the Generation Z of Castleford, Wakefield and Widnes could drift away to other more glamourous, polished, globally-relevant sports properties. It is a major concern that the sport’s fanbase in England has not meaningfully grown in almost 30 years – a key sticking point for its primary funder, Sky.
Sky has now reduced the fee it pays for Super League’s domestic TV rights in two consecutive deals, taking the league’s earnings from £40m per season in 2021 to £21.5m in 2024. In short, Super League has entered a recession.
Matt Dwyer, vice-president of sports management at IMG, was heavily involved in brokering Super League’s latest deal. He says that Sky’s concerns about Super League’s lack of growth were reflected in the latest result, which saw the league’s income reduced by a further 10 per cent until the end of 2026.
“Sky said to us: ‘Look, you’ve been very steady for a long period of time and you need to be growing the fanbase.’ We need that critical mass to start moving the needle, and that takes time. That’s why this is a 12-year deal.”
The funnel
Super League and IMG’s first major task is to build that critical mass beyond the faithful tens of thousands that attend matches every week.
It will be done in all the ways you might expect: social media account revamps; content creation plans and pushing its star players across timelines and feeds as much as possible.
“Our priority is growing audience, attendance, but a growing number of young people are following players as opposed to clubs,” Jones explains. “We need to know what is going to entice that seven-year-old to take an interest in rugby league. Is it Wigan Warriors, or is it going to be [Wigan Warriors star] Bevan French?”
Jones and Dwyer firmly believe it will be the latter. Super League has initially focused this strategy on a small group of players and coaches, bringing their stars to other Sky- and IMG-backed properties, such as the UFC, the DP World Tour and Wimbledon, for content creation purposes.
This content is being pushed out across central and club social media accounts, which Dwyer says have seen strong aggregate increases across follower count and engagements in 2024 compared to last year.
“The challenge for us is commercialising that,” Jones says. “Ultimately, it’s great having an engaged digital audience but we need to commercialise it. There has been a focus this year with those 12 Super League clubs, with grading in mind, to go through the same [social media development] process that we went through 18 months ago.”
Commercialising Super League is a different challenge for IMG, which must treat the property in a very different way to some of its other rights-holder partners.
The average fan of Wimbledon and The Open – IMG’s longest-standing rights-holder partnerships – tends to have far more disposable income than the average Super League fan. Rugby league is a predominantly working-class sport in England, with top teams based in some of the country’s poorest communities.
This is not lost on Dwyer or Jones, who know that Super League’s place in a family’s weekly budget is not to be taken for granted.
“We have an incredibly passionate fanbase and I think that as long as we give them the best possible product and the best sporting experience they can possibly have, they will prioritise rugby league as part of their weekly spend,” Dwyer says. “That was one of the ideas behind the concept of grading: ensuring that every club is offering fans a top-level experience that represents value for money on their hard-earned pounds and pence.”
Bringing back the magic
As Dwyer and his team focus on filling the funnel with new potential fans, Super League has plenty of work to do with its existing fanbase.
The 2024 edition of the much-loved Magic Weekend – a full round of fixtures played at a single, neutral venue – was unanimously panned by fans disappointed by the event being held in Leeds, one of the Super League’s heartland cities.
As the highlight of the regular season and a tentpole event in Sky’s Super League calendar, live pictures of a half-empty stadium did not give viewers a feeling that the competition was in a healthy place, as fans failed to engage with matches involving clubs other than their own.
A bad Magic Weekend compounded feelings among existing fans that Super League could be in decline – something that Jones acknowledges.
“There was a lot of disgruntlement from fans and I think when you look at the purpose of Magic Weekend, a lot of it was around that destination weekend away from the heartland. Clearly Leeds didn’t do that and I guess that was reflected in the ticket sales profile that we had this year.”
Any sign of decline among Super League’s existing fanbase – some of the most loyal sports fans in the world – is an alarm bell worth heeding.
“It needs work to build it back up and to create the weekend that perhaps it once was back in the early 2000s and 2010s. We need to enhance it, we need to make it better. We can only do that with the right destination venue in the first instance and then we’ll go from there.”
London and beyond
With work to do in the heartlands, Super League and IMG are a long way from thinking about expansion. The long-term plan is to eventually expand Super League from 12 to 14 clubs, should enough clubs qualify through the grading process. However, for 2025, the league will geographically shrink as the London Broncos – the only English Super League club based outside Lancashire and Yorkshire – will fail to make the grade.
London is a key strategic region for the growth of rugby league but Dwyer believes that it may be too soon for Super League to properly support a club outside its northern strongholds.
“London is a growth market for the sport of rugby league but it needs to be a focused area that we as a sport invest in. You can’t just leave a team in an area and expect it to grow a whole market for you. That is not how successful expansion happens,” Dwyer says.
“Look at the NRL when they did the Melbourne Storm [founded 1997; NRL Premiership winners 1999]. That was centrally backed for an extended period of time and that is the prism through which we are looking at it. If we are serious about growing the game in London, which we all are, it needs to have full central support to do so.
He continued: “The reality of the game at the moment is that it needs to grow commercially in order to fund the investment required to grow that market. The London Broncos situation is a challenging one. You can see by their current grading score [Broncos are 24th of 35 clubs] just how much the sport needs to do to cut through in the London market at the professional level.”
In contrast, the gospel of Australia’s NRL is spreading like wildfire. The league is trending in an altogether different direction, having doubled its central revenues over the 10 years from 2014 to 2023, earning A$700m last year.
Its expansion into the Australian Rules-obsessed state of Victoria with the Melbourne Storm has been an unmitigated success, and the league is now attempting to repeat the trick with a team in Western Australia – again considered to be solid AFL and rugby union territory.
“The war chest that [the NRL] now have behind them, and to now see their expansion into Perth, a second New Zealand team, or Papua New Guinea, that takes money in order to be successful,” Dwyer says.
“That’s what we want: if you’re going to expand into a new market it needs to have full central support, including the funding.”
Charity begins at home
There isn’t a rugby league fan – or an IMG executive – that doesn’t want to see Super League reach the promised land. Fans want to feel proud of the club and the competition they love and a big part of attracting new fans to any form of entertainment is generating enthusiasm among those that already love it.
Jones knows that the bond Super League has with the communities it serves is unique and should be cherished. Those fans want nothing more than to make their passion bigger, and better.
“It’s well known that the rugby league clubs are at the heart of those communities, so in some ways we need to make sure that we get the benefit from that connection,” Jones says. “It’s for us to look at the commerciality of the sport through a different prism.”
He continued: “Yes, there is the headline sponsorship of competitions based around media value; television audience, digital content etc. But there is also a social impact piece as well. So while we probably aren’t going to blow things out of the water, what we can do is re-purpose our commercial strategy which incorporates more social impact activity.”
For a league that has produced some of the most thrilling gladiatorial entertainment ever seen on UK television, everyone involved in the sport knows that Super League has the potential to grow. IMG believe that grading will help bring the league forward into new glory days, but its impact won’t be fully known until 2026, when a new domestic broadcast deal will be negotiated.
For now, instead of expansion and dreams of Las Vegas, Jones will focus his attention much closer to home.
“There’s an opportunity for rugby league. There are things that perhaps football can’t do because it’s too big; rugby union can’t do because of the perceived demographic around the sport, but we definitely can do these things because we are so embedded in those communities.”