In Vegas, there is at least some awareness of the occasion. Ashenafi, my Uber driver from the airport, says rugby league fever has hit town. “Oh yeah,” he says as we drive towards the bright lights of Sin City. “It’s a big deal.”
After 24 hours on the Las Vegas strip, I’m not quite convinced. The place is full to the brim with Aussie accents but their presence here is a mystery to many.
Bulldogs skipper Stephen Crichton leads the way at the NRL fan event at the Fremont Street Experience.Credit: Getty Images
“Why are there so many Australians here this weekend?” a young American woman asks a group of four Aussie blokes as they exit the Cosmopolitan casino. They dutifully inform her about the NRL before she heads into a marijuana store.
At OzFest, a pop-up rugby league festival on the grounds of NRL base camp Resorts World, Australian fans in team jerseys line up for a meet-and-greet with their sporting heroes. It takes a while to find an American: 45-year-old Jason Pudleiner from Philadelphia, who says he got hooked on the game during a trip to Australia several years ago.
“I have the [Watch NRL] app, so I literally watch just about every game,” he says. He is a Panthers fan: last year, he even nabbed a selfie with Nathan Cleary in Vegas.
What Pudleiner doesn’t have are fellow fans in the US. “It’s very frustrating because I literally don’t know one single person who knows anything about the sport. My wife is the only person I’m able to talk to about it.”
“I literally don’t know one single person who knows anything about the sport”: Philadelphia lawyer Jason Pudleiner and his wife Tasmin.Credit: Michael Koziol
He says if rugby league is going to work in the US, Fox will have to get on board with free-to-air coverage and promotion, otherwise, “nobody’s going to watch it”.
“I think soccer is starting to gain some momentum in the United States, but I don’t think people are too open-minded to sports that they haven’t seen before,” Pudleiner says. “It’s a tough market.”
Neither has the NRL had much success in attracting American gamblers. V’landys acknowledged it was also going to take a lot longer than anticipated to make inroads there and blamed the betting companies.
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“We have a different system in Australia where we charge for the use of our product, and the sports over here don’t,” he said. “I think the bookmakers are a bit frightened of us introducing a new model.”
The NRL has two more years of Vegas matches contracted. But the rugby league boss is unfazed about the slow progress abroad, saying what Vegas has really achieved is to boost the sport’s fanfare at home. “Our first game is the highest rated game of the year, and we’re now making a profit out of the franchise,” he said.
In another Uber, I talk to my driver, Razvan, a Romanian migrant who has lived in Las Vegas for 13 years. He is a big rugby union fan, and bought tickets to the 2024 NRL launch. But it was not the game he knows and loves.
He is pessimistic about the NRL’s chances of ever convincing Americans to follow the sport. “Americans, they don’t [even] like the real rugby,” he says. “They like baseball.”
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