Super League appears set to go down its own streaming path for 2027.
As reported in The i-Paper last month, the competition has three options for broadcasting the remaining four games, to pair with Sky Sports taking up three games a round. The first is Super League+, the second is Premier Sports, and third would be with the NRL and DAZN.
According to League Express this week, most of the Super League clubs want Rugby League Commercial to broadcast these four games each week on Super League+ next year.
This would, in my humble opinion, be a mistake for many reasons.
The 1895 Cup final, shown live and free on Monday on Super League+, couldn’t handle the level of audience that wanted to watch it. The servers were too busy and it took me 20 minutes to eventually log in. It wasn’t just myself; many, many others suffered the same fate.
And it pissed them off.
This isn’t the first time this has happened with Super League+ either. It’s happened frequently over the years and isn’t built for large audiences.
There seems to be some level of thought that 100,000 people would sign up to Super League+ next year to watch four games, at £50 a pop. But this flies in the face of reality.
Sky will likely have the choice of the best three games each week in 2027. So, if that was this weekend, they would have exclusive rights to Leeds v Wigan, Wakefield vs Warrington, and Leigh vs St Helens.
And then Super League+ would be showing Bradford vs Castleford, Toulouse vs Hull FC, Hull KR vs Huddersfield and Catalans vs York. The prospective audience for the three Sky games would be much higher, I’d wager, than those four on Super League+. And it would be the same most weeks.
Would some people sign up for both Sky and Super League+? Yes, they would. But it’s unlikely to be huge numbers, certainly not 100,000, not even close.
Cost is a major concern. If you subscribe to Sky, you not only get the three best games each week, with full coverage (not the diet version this season on Sky Sports+) and the best pundits, but you get all the other sports programming as well – football, boxing, cricket, union, tennis, darts, F1 etc etc etc, and all the other entertainment. Not every rugby league fan would be interested in those other sports and genres, but many would.
Apart from the four games on Super League+, what else would get? There is a belief that “magazine-style discussion” programs would fill the void.
Sure, the NRL does the same with Fox League. NRL 360 runs three nights a week, they have The Fan with Andrew Voss, The Late Show with Matty Johns, Face to Face with Yvonne Sampson, they show NRLW games, NSW Cup matches and have other programs with Cooper Cronk and other personalities.
If the NRL can do it, why can’t Super League?
Firstly, the audience is much, much bigger down under and they aren’t competing with another pay TV provider who already has a large subscriber base. Secondly, Fox League is run by seasoned TV professionals, with high production standards, decades of experience and high-quality broadcasters, pundits, analysts and talent. Many have come from free-to-air or cut their teeth at other TV and radio operators.
In England, the best talent is largely already aligned with Sky. The RFL can’t magic these people up out of thin air.
Thirdly, one of the reasons Fox League has been a success is because of its editorial independence, because it is not an arm of the NRL and has the full buy-in of the clubs and players. They often push the envelope, editorially, in concert with the mainstream press in Australia. They embrace the soap opera, the warts-n-all approach. It is more like football in England, editorially.
Super League+ would not have that, and it’s difficult to see clubs or owners putting up with being critiqued on an NRL 360-style show each night. There is already a sensitive nature and conservative temperature to the sport in the UK that limits both access and coverage.
Fourthly, is the talent out there to provide content 24-7 that people not only want to watch, but would pay to? Considering many already consume this type of content – video, podcasts and the like – online for free?
That’s massively doubtful.
Fifthly, how much would the charge be? Currently, Super League+ is £19.99 per month. RL Commercial won’t say how many subscribers it has. To increase the price and make it £50 a month, it’s hard to see many people paying for that at all.
Rugby league’s fanbase, by and large, is not wealthy and the cost of living in the UK is a real struggle. Supporters don’t like to shell out. Piracy is also huge in England and many fans use dodgy sticks. If you already have Sky, and possibly Watch NRL as well, are you going to sign up for a third provider too? And attend games regularly? The actual audience would be much, much smaller than some insist.
Even if Super League+ spent £15,000 per game on production per game, and that is a basic level of production featuring only a handful of cameras, it would cost them £1.62 million a year. And that is for 108 Super League games in a 27-round season, over a seven- or eight-month period. If Super League+ wanted to televise Championship and Women’s Super League fixtures too, not to mention the Challenge Cup, the figure would be a lot greater.
And that doesn’t cover the cost of all the staff and employees they would then need to create all the other associated “magazine-style discussion” programs – producers, directors, assistants, stage crews, on-air talent, writers, directors and the like.
Churn is another factor. Some people might sign up to Super League+ in February but at the end of September they are unlikely to hang around and pay for another four months, when the season is over, when there are no games and no other programming to keep them entertained.
Each weekend in Super League this year, around 70,000 people on average go to games in England and France. In the Championship, that average is around 7000 per week. In 2025, national participation in the sport was less than 70,000, according to Statista.
There is a major misconception about the real size of the rugby league audience in the UK, not to mention those amongst it who are willing to pay.
Going behind two paywalls – one with a significantly large audience in Sky, and the second with a tiny audience at present in Super League+ – for all of Super League’s games would be a crazy gamble. The chance of new fans being converted would be almost non-existent.
To make a sports streaming service work, you not only need the right infrastructure and equipment, but also the quality, exclusive content and rights that people will pay to watch, and the correct platform and tech to make it work. And the expertise to bring it all together.
One can hope common sense prevails.
But at the moment, it appears some are living on Fantasy Island when it comes to Super League+.
