Match-Fixing in the NRL: Is Anyone Really Surprised?

As another round of match-fixing allegations hit the National Rugby League, following the late-Ryan Tandy's shock admission back in 2011, you have to wonder whether anyone is really surprised.

It's hard to think of a professional sport more ripe for the rigging than the NRL. For too long the game has languished in a strange limbo between amateur and professional. Underpaid, incredibly dangerous, and with an average career span of just 43 games (there's 26 games in a season, excluding finals) players routinely find themselves spat out the wrong end of a system they entered when they were 15. What are they left with? No skills, no job prospects, a badly battered body, and little in the pocket.

Despite multi-billion dollar broadcast deals and a gambling industry that blankets the sport in exotic betting options and advertisements, the minimum wage for an NRL has remained a paltry $55,000—which is barely enough to survive in a major Australian city, let alone set yourself up for life. The average league salary is around $200k, but that's distorted by the handful of exceptional players that eat up the salary caps on most teams. Take the Sydney Roosters for example—a club renowned for its wealth due to its many associations with high-profile businessman. Currently they have a 28-year-old garbageman playing back row.

Such stories are celebrated within the culture. The blue-collar, working class player is a folk hero in the NRL. He provides a direct link to our rugged, working class origins, and that's something we're proud of. The characters that play rugby league are some of the most underpaid, physically imposing, violent weapon-heads on the planet and the result is one of the great tests of courage and physicality in existence. But a perfect storm of low wages, high injury tolls, and geographical positioning has put the game squarely in the sights of organised crime and betting syndicates. And little is being done to counter it.

A rugby league player's career trajectory typically goes like this: born into a rural rugby league town, housing commission belt, or other variation of the nation's underclass (this is not a game typically played by people with money. They play rugby union or aussie rules). He is scouted by a club at the age of 14 or 15 and given the chance to be a part of a NRL club's development system, thereby relegating school and career ambitions to the backseat.

If he makes the grade he will crack heads and rub shoulders with the grizzled vets from whom he'll learn the harsher realities of the trade.

Reality #1: you're not here for a long time, so make it a good time—i.e say yes to everything.

Reality #2: don't get too comfortable at this club because even if you do have a couple of bumper seasons, and survive the 43-game career average, salary cap restrictions will likely force you out. You will then start from scratch in a city where you know no one on a deal that might, if you're lucky, get you to the age of 25.

Reality #3: all those little and not so little head knocks you've been getting at training and in the games might be leaving you with permanent brain damage.

Reality #4: your mates are your mates, never forget them. Even if they've graduated from the brutal country town or houso clump you grew up into an organised crime syndicate/outlaw motorcycle gang. Now, again, remember lesson one: you're not here for a long time so make it a good time.

Growing up playing rugby league in Sydney's south-east, one of the country's premiere talent nurseries, you hear some shit. It's pretty underworldy in its way, rugby league, and if everyone has their price, the price for the services of an NRL player are comparatively low on the global scale of professional sports. As it happens, the world's biggest illegal betting syndicates operate of Singapore and China just to our north. To get an idea of how far they'll go, one figure from a Singaporean syndicate was found to be linked to a third-division Italian goalkeeper who drugged his teammates in a bid to rig a match and repay debts. Their track record for rigging football matches around the world has earned the attention of Interpol. Rugby League, with its low salaries, existing connections to organised crime, relative obscurity, and rampant betting culture, must make it enticing (not to mention the fact we share a timezone with them allowing them to follow NRL matches in daylight hours).

In a bid to clean up the game, the NRL formed the NRL Welfare Unit back in 2013 comprising a number of former players and officials. One of them, Paul Heptonstall, recalls the time former Origin Star Owen Craigie paused before taking the field to ask if his pay had gone through yet. Craigie is reported to have gambled $3 million dollars away in the course of his career and told Heptonstall he had some debts to pay. By the end of his career, Craigie had lost $3million on the punt.

Or take the ongoing case of New Zealand international and Parramatta Eels playmaker, Kieren Foran. Foran was rushed to hospital recently following a prescription drug overdose, amidst reports he'd lost $75 000 dollars in a two hour betting splurge. Foran has also been linked to the infamous former brothel-owner and renowned gambler, Eddie "Everywhere" Hayson, who is renowned for keeping the company of several high profile rugby league players, both past and present. This is in no way suggesting Foran is linked to match-fixing but you get an idea of the kind of culture we're dealing with.

Stories like this abound in rugby league. At roughly the same time Foran is going through all this, his pairing in the Parramatta halves, Corey Norman, finds himself being warned by the NSW Organised Crime Squad after being caught with MDMA capsules at a Sydney casino following dinner with a number of convicted criminals.

Rugby league's blessing is also its curse. The flawed characters—the no-frills, exceedingly accessible, all-Australian (and Kiwi, and Indigenous, and Polynesian and Melanesian) hardmen—that play it have always been its biggest selling point. It's just that there's another buyer in the market now.

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