https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league ... c-21854298
While league bosses have been thumping chests another ‘miserable’ picture has been painted.
By Cameron Noakes
Published: 06 Mar 2026
There has been a lot of recent chest-thumping about the NRL’s venture into Las Vegas, with TV figures suggesting viewership was up by seven per cent on last year’s event.
In a recent article on the NRL website, there was some loud gloating about the Vegas round, saying the “NRL’s global expansion continues to gather pace”.
And there is no doubt that the recent games in the US were well watched in Australia, however, the TV figures were based on local data, with little said about the US figures.
Behind the scenes before the games in Vegas, it was quietly reported that the NRL double-header and the Super League match had been dumped from the main US channel on Fox Sports and demoted to the pay-TV channel of Fox Sports 2.
College basketball was given the priority on Fox Sports 1 and also the network’s free-to-air channel.
That relegation, according to US sports TV analyst Manny Soloway, has been costly for the NRL in the US market.
“Australia’s National Rugby League is trying to gain interest in the United States market,” Soloway, who calls himself the ‘SportsOnTVguy’, said on social media.
“Last year, they had a game on Fox from Las Vegas that averaged 370,000 viewers. This year, they had three games on Fox Sports 2 that averaged miserable viewership (12K, 6K, 2K).” Ouch!
The numbers have been sourced from Nielsen Media Research and, to state the obvious, have not been well publicised in Australia.
Meanwhile, Rugby League Commission chair Peter V’landys has been poking the AFL and making many claims about the NRL’s pioneering ways.
Lost among many of his claims is that the AFL used to play games for premiership points overseas, with AFL’s China game coming to an abrupt end when COVID hit.
V’landys did however (again quietly) admit to the SMH that NRL (as a football code) would take a lot longer to catch on in the US “than we thought it would”.
Betting markets in the US also do not have much interest in the NRL.
“We have a different system in Australia where we charge for the use of our product, and the sports over here don’t,” told the SMH ahead of the Vegas round.
“I think the bookmakers are a bit frightened of us introducing a new model.”
In the same article, an American NRL fan in Vegas said he didn’t know a “single person” who knew anything about the sport and believed that would not change unless it got free-to-air coverage.
“(Otherwise) nobody’s going to watch it,” he said .. somewhat prophetically.
NRL CEO Andrew Abdo called this year’s NRL’s Vegas round “a takeover”.
“I’ve loved the integration, rugby league coming together,” he said.
“The Super League fans have been fantastic with their signing, then the NRL fans. The best part for me is seeing the community coming together and the takeover.
“Las Vegas is the sport and entertainment capital of America, so to showcase our game has been fantastic.”
But the question remains, are Americans really turning on, or is this just a short-term gimmick?
In 2024, an average of just 61,000 people watched Manly’s win against South Sydney and only 44,000 watched the Sydney Roosters’ clash with Brisbane.
By comparison, the program on Fox Sports 1 leading into the NRL matches — a college basketball game between Xavier and Georgetown — drew 162,000 viewers that year.
That college basketball went into overtime, which pushed the start of the NRL onto the secondary channel, but over 100,000 viewers turned off once the main channel switched over to the NRL.
As for the AFL’s season-opener on Seven on Thursday night, that got off to a record-breaking start, averaging a whopping 780k across Seven and 7plus Sport.
The number is the highest opening round audience since the AFL’s Open Round concept was introduced three years ago, and the number beat every primetime game from the regular 2025 season.
The TTL audience was 20 per cent up on last year’s season-opener, and 7plus delivered its highest regular season AFL streaming audience ever, averaging 131k (the first time a regular season game has averaged over 100k on BVOD - Broadcast Video on Demand).