NRL 2026 (M)

The competition began in 1908 as the New South Wales championship, and two of the clubs that took the field that first year are still here: South Sydney Rabbitohs and Sydney Roosters, then called Eastern Suburbs. A third founder survives by marriage: the Wests Tigers are the merger of Western Suburbs and Balmain, both also from 1908.

What nearly killed it was a fight over television. In the mid-1990s News Corporation set up a rival league — Super League — and poached players with cheque books; by 1995 there were twenty-two teams of wildly uneven quality spread across two competitions that did not recognise each other. Peace was voted through on 19 December 1997, and out of it came the NRL in 1998, a joint venture between the old ARL and Super League.

The honours board is dominated by the long history: South Sydney have 21 premierships and the Roosters 15. Well behind them, the Brisbane Broncos have seven, the most recent of them last year.

Canberra Raiders finished top of the 2025 regular season and took the J. J. Giltinan Shield, the minor premiership trophy, the second of their history. They did not reach the final. It is the best way to understand this competition: finishing top after twenty-seven rounds earns a plaque, home advantage and a second chance, but not the title.

The title went to the Brisbane Broncos, their seventh, in a match settled by a single try. And the year also handed out its individual prize in Sydney: James Tedesco, of the Roosters, took the Dally M Medal as the season's best player.

Off the field there were two numbers that say plenty about the state of the sport in Australia. The league recorded the highest total attendance and the highest average per match in the history of first-grade rugby league, beating the record it had set itself the previous year. And there was not a single send-off in the entire regular season, something that had not happened since 2017.

The Australian championship opens its year fifteen thousand kilometres from home. The first round of 2026 is played at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, with a triple bill: Newcastle Knights against North Queensland Cowboys, Canterbury Bulldogs against St George Illawarra Dragons and, as a bonus, an English Super League match between Hull KR and Leeds Rhinos. It is played on Saturday 28 February in Nevada, which in Australia is already Sunday 1 March.

It is not a one-off excursion: the NRL has spent several years using that date as a lever for expansion in the United States, and it has grown to the point of dragging English rugby league along too.

Otherwise the line-up does not move. Seventeen teams for a fourth consecutive year: ten from New South Wales, four from Queensland and one each from Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory and New Zealand. A national league that is really, above all, a Sydney league with guests: eight of the seventeen clubs play in the city's metropolitan area.

The regular season is twenty-seven rounds, but each team plays twenty-four matches: with seventeen clubs in the competition, somebody rests every weekend. The side on top at the end of that phase takes the minor premiership and the J. J. Giltinan Shield, and from there something else begins.

The top eight enter a four-week finals series played under the McIntyre system, in force since 2012, which does not treat everyone the same. The top four contest the Qualifying Finals with a double chance: win and they go straight to the penultimate round, lose and they still have another bullet in the semi-finals. Fifth to eighth go into the Elimination Finals with no safety net: lose and the year is over.

That asymmetry is what to keep in mind when predicting. Finishing fourth rather than fifth is not one position of difference, it is the difference between being allowed one mistake and being allowed none. It all empties into Accor Stadium in Sydney on Sunday 4 October: one match, eighty minutes, and seven months of league settled there.