by It started with a speculative email sent late at night almost a year ago, but on Saturday evening, Kris Radlinski’s vision for the Super League will become a live and lively reality in the lively lights of Las Vegas.
The CEO of Wigan Warriors was at home, like so many others, looking at the inaugural company of the National Rugby League (NRL) in the United States at the alleging stadium just outside Las Vegas. Is her immediate thought: how does the British rugby league muscle on the opportunity? And thus went the email which could potentially change the landscape of the Super League for the years to come: or at least, it is provisional hope, anyway.
This was a two -game event last year has now doubled. On Saturday, two LNR – Canberra Lights against New Zealand and Penrith against Canterbury – as well as the first Super League game played in North America, between Wigan and Warrington, as well as a female test, will be played in front of more than 50,000 – including many existing fans of the rugby league, but some of them new.
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It is rare that the Super League and the LNR work hand in hand like this, but there is a shared objective to collectively break the American sports market and to exhibit the rugby league to the masses of the world. The Super League has already tried to expand its net, taking the Ligue Nou and Wollongong Ligne matches and even pushing the North American story with the Canadian franchise Toronto Wolfpack.
All this, in the end, has left little on the way to an inheritance. So Wigan against Warrington in Las Vegas can be different? Well, potentially: in particular because the marketing budgets of the LNR and the aggressive media reader automatically make it bigger than anything that Super League has tried itself.
“I have already said, it’s the biggest game in the history of the Super League, but I think I was wrong,” said Warrington CEO Karl Fitzpatrick. “I think it is actually the biggest match in the history of the British rugby league, dating back to 1895.” This is a daring affirmation, and the cynics would say that we have been here before and that we have seen a stay in a new territory serve more than one-off.
But the very presence of the LNR makes it a big problem for the British rugby league. It was not until the second year of a five-year arrangement to take matches in Las Vegas and, with nearly 10,000 Super League fans crossing the Atlantic this weekend, it seems certain that they will be invited to the party next year, with clubs that were already lining up to follow the steps of Wigan and Warrington.
When we hear about executives talking about public growth, we automatically assume that the conversation revolves around new fans abroad. But Australia – where the rules of the Supreme League – experienced a huge boom after the Vegas last year, the supporters displaying the LNR. Fitzpatrick hopes that this weekend can produce something similar in England, where large parts of the country still have little or no presence of a league.
“They recalled the halo effect in Australia,” he explains. “The interest in the LNR has increased in a way that they did not think at home after last year’s Vegas matches. The whole Super League promotes this because they know that the advantages could be astronomical. It looks like nothing we have ever done. We are entering the largest sports market on the planet, armed with LNR finances. »»
Sky Sports, as a Super League partner, also buys. He has invested enormous sums to promote this and, while waterfalls such as the invitation of the boxing advertiser Michael Buffer at the opening of the season between Wigan and Leigh, as well as for the construction of an interesting vegas style sign. And interest means money, which can only be practical with a renewal of imminent television.
Wigan has a shape to try to be different. This company will actually cost them money because they abandon a home match, but their owner, Mike Darkery, is ready to take the financial blow. They feel it, it is the chance to make things happen, not only for the good of the Warriors, but the competition at a time when IMG, the strategic marketing partner of the English game, urges all the clubs to go out of the beaten track.
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“It’s an absolutely colossal moment for sport in this country,” says Radlinski. “We say a lot, but Sky invests money that we have never seen before. We used to go with ideas; With Vegas, they come to us. What it could do for everyone is something that I did not appreciate when I sent this email for the first time. It is not about us. We will all benefit from it. The success for me is two other clubs next year. »»
Super League and the LNR aligned in Las Vegas this weekend and in the coming years also have training effects. It is about the World Club Challenge, the meeting of the two main champions, which was held there in 2026. Talking about the LNR which bought the Super League and taking it under its profitable and successful wing will not disappear: this, at a time when English clubs also threaten to give up the chair of the Rugby Football League, Simon Johnson, too.
Of course, we have already been here: but not quite on this scale. The British Rugby League has never been so armed with the tools with which to finally disseminate its wings.
