NRL Expansion: New Clubs and How They Are Added

NRL expansion is, for the first time in a generation, an active programme rather than a talking point. The competition has run with seventeen clubs since the Dolphins entered in 2023, and that is where it sits for the 2026 season. Two more licences have been granted: the Perth Bears are scheduled to enter in 2027 as the eighteenth club, and a Papua New Guinea club based in Port Moresby is scheduled for 2028 as the nineteenth. If both land on time, the premiership will be larger than at any point since 1999.

That is the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, because NRL expansion has never simply been a matter of finding a city with people in it. The competition tried Perth and Adelaide in the 1990s and lost both within four seasons. It shrank from twenty clubs to fourteen in two years, excluded a foundation club, and spent the following two decades so scarred by the experience that it added exactly one team between 2000 and 2022. What has changed is not the appetite so much as the funding: the two clubs now on the way arrive with state and federal money attached, on a scale no private consortium has ever offered.

This page sets out how a club actually gets into the NRL — who decides, what a bid has to contain, what the money looks like, and what happens to the draw, the cap and the player market when the field grows. For the seventeen clubs already in the competition, our NRL clubs guide runs through each of them; for the contracting rules that a new club has to work inside from day one, see NRL contracts and recruitment.

Where NRL expansion stands in 2026

Three dates matter. The competition reached seventeen clubs in 2023. It is scheduled to reach eighteen in 2027 and nineteen in 2028. Both new licences have been granted, both have boards, both have named a head coach, and both have started signing players — but neither has played a game, and both remain subject to conditions that could still move a season.

The Perth club is the more conventional of the two: an Australian city, a rectangular stadium, a state government willing to write cheques, and a heritage name pulled out of the competition's own past. The Papua New Guinea club is unlike anything the game has attempted. It is the first NRL licence outside Australia and New Zealand, its funding is a foreign policy instrument of the Australian federal government, and its home ground is in a country where rugby league is the national sport but where the commercial market for a professional club is small.

Both projects were signed off against a backdrop of scepticism from parts of the existing seventeen, because central distributions are shared and more clubs means more claimants. That tension runs through everything on this page.

Season-by-season club counts for the NRL from its formation in 1998. The 2027 and 2028 figures are scheduled entries, not results. Intermediate seasons between the labelled years are omitted.

Show the numbers

Clubs in the premiership by season

Item	Value
1998	20
2000	14
2007	16
2023	17
2027	18
2028	19

How the competition got to seventeen clubs

The NRL was formed in 1998 out of a settlement. Two rival premierships had been running in 1997 after a corporate split tore the game apart, and the merged competition inherited every club from both sides. That produced twenty teams, eleven of them in Sydney, chasing a supporter base and a sponsorship market that had comfortably supported around twelve.

The correction was brutal and fast. By the 2000 season the field was fourteen. Some clubs folded outright, some merged, and one was excluded and had to fight its way back through the courts and the streets. Nobody involved remembers it fondly, and it explains why the Australian Rugby League Commission spent so long treating expansion as a risk to be managed rather than an opportunity to be taken.

The Gold Coast Titans came in for 2007 as the sixteenth club, filling a market the competition had already tried and lost once. Then nothing for sixteen years. The Dolphins arrived in 2023 as the seventeenth, and the competition finally had a structure that could accommodate growth: a strong broadcast deal, a functioning Queensland pathway, and a Commission willing to run a competitive licence process.

The clubs that did not survive rationalisation

It is worth setting out exactly what was lost, because the expansion debate is still shaped by it. The competition did not merely trim; it removed entire markets and has spent thirty years trying to get back into some of them.

Club	Region	Last top-grade season	What happened
Perth Reds	Western Australia	1997	Folded after the 1997 season
South Queensland Crushers	Brisbane south	1997	Folded after the 1997 season
Hunter Mariners	Newcastle	1997	Played a single season and folded
Adelaide Rams	South Australia	1998	Folded after the 1998 season
Gold Coast Chargers	Gold Coast	1998	Excluded from the 1999 competition
Balmain and Western Suburbs	Sydney	1999	Merged into Wests Tigers from 2000
North Sydney	Sydney	1999	Merged into Northern Eagles from 2000

Two of those markets are now back or coming back. The Gold Coast returned in 2007. Western Australia returns in 2027, and the club going there carries the name of a Sydney club that disappeared in the same wave. That is not an accident of branding; it is the competition trying to settle two debts with one licence.

What expansion actually means in the NRL rulebook

There is no promotion and relegation in the NRL. A club does not earn its way up from the New South Wales Cup or the Queensland Cup by winning things. It is granted a licence by the Australian Rugby League Commission, and licences are granted rarely, on the Commission's own timetable, usually after a formal expressions-of-interest process.

That structure has consequences. It means a strong second-tier club — and the Dolphins were one for decades — can be excellent for fifty years without getting anywhere near first grade. It means the criteria are commercial rather than sporting: catchment, stadium, funding, junior pathways, broadcast value and the effect on existing clubs. And it means the decision is fundamentally political, in the small-p sense, because every existing club has an interest in the outcome.

The counterpart of no promotion is no relegation, which is why the exits in the table above required folding, merging or exclusion rather than finishing last. The system has no gentle way to remove a club, which is precisely why it is so careful about adding one.

Who has to approve a new club

Formally, the Australian Rugby League Commission grants the licence. In practice the process has more gates than that.

The Commission assesses and approves the bid. The existing clubs, whose central distributions are affected, are consulted and their agreement matters — reporting through 2025 and 2026 consistently described sign-off from the seventeen as a required step for the move to nineteen. The Rugby League Players Association is also part of the conversation, because expansion changes the number of contracted positions, the size of the collective payment pool and the travel burden on players.

Then there are the parties outside the game. A state or national government putting up nine figures will attach conditions. A stadium owner has to agree terms. A broadcaster has to be willing to carry the extra fixtures, since a new club is only worth what its games are worth on television.

1. 1Expressions of interestThe Commission signals that a licence may be available and invites formal bids from interested consortia and existing second-tier clubs.
2. 2Bid assemblyA consortium puts together funding, a stadium agreement, a board, a junior pathway plan and a business case for its catchment.
3. 3Commission assessmentThe Commission and an expansion committee test the market size, the money, the venue and the likely effect on existing clubs.
4. 4Stakeholder sign-offExisting clubs and the players association work through the effect on distributions, squad numbers and the collective agreement.
5. 5Licence grantedA conditional licence is issued, usually with an entry season two or more years away and obligations attached to funding and facilities.
6. 6Build phaseThe club appoints a coach and football staff, signs a foundation squad, fits out a stadium and training base, and sells memberships.
7. 7Entry seasonThe club plays its first premiership season, usually with concessions on recruitment that expire after an agreed period.

A general sequence drawn from the Dolphins, Perth and Papua New Guinea processes. Individual bids have varied in order and in how formal each stage was.

The Dolphins and how the seventeenth licence was won

The most recent completed expansion is the best guide to how the process works now. In 2021 the Commission ran a competitive process for a second Brisbane licence. Three bids made the shortlist: the Redcliffe Dolphins, the Brisbane Firehawks and the Brisbane Jets. The Dolphins were confirmed in October 2021 for a 2023 entry, and reporting at the time described the expansion committee's recommendation as unanimous.

The winning argument was not glamour. It was that the Dolphins already existed — a Queensland Cup club with a long history, a leagues club behind it, a ground, and an administrative structure that did not have to be invented. The bid also identified a specific catchment in the northern Brisbane corridor with a large population of rugby league followers who did not have a club of their own, rather than proposing to take supporters from the Broncos.

The club opened with Wayne Bennett as inaugural coach, which bought instant credibility with players considering a squad that had never played a match. The competition also moved to a 26-round regular season to accommodate the seventeenth club. That combination — an existing organisation, an unclaimed catchment, and a coach who could recruit — is now the template every subsequent bid has been measured against.

What the Dolphins' first seasons showed

The Dolphins mattered beyond Redcliffe because they were the test case. The fear before 2023 was that a new club would be uncompetitive for a decade, dilute the talent pool and hand out free wins. That did not happen. The club was competitive early, took scalps in its first season, and did not spend years anchored to the foot of the ladder.

The lesson the Commission took from it was that a well-funded expansion club with recruitment concessions and a credible coach can be viable quickly. That directly shaped the confidence with which the Perth and Papua New Guinea licences were granted. The counter-lesson, which gets less attention, is that the Dolphins entered an already saturated south-east Queensland market where rugby league infrastructure, junior numbers and broadcast habits were all in place. Neither of the next two clubs has that advantage.

Perth Bears: the eighteenth club

Western Australia returns to the competition in 2027, thirty years after the Perth Reds folded. The club is the Perth Bears, and it takes its name and its red-and-black colours from the North Sydney Bears, with North Sydney continuing as a feeder club in the New South Wales Cup.

The path was not smooth. A Western Bears proposal from a Western Australian consortium and North Sydney was put to the Commission in 2024 and rejected as insufficient, with reporting describing a bid in the region of twenty million dollars falling short of expectations. Negotiations resumed with the state government, a substantially larger package was assembled, and the revised proposal was agreed in 2025.

Mal Meninga was appointed inaugural head coach for the club's first two seasons, with a successor already named to take over from 2029 — an unusually explicit succession plan, and a signal that the appointment was as much about the recruitment pull of a well-known name as about the coaching itself.

The intended home is Perth Rectangular Stadium, the inner-city rectangular ground shared with the city's A-League club and its Super Rugby side. That is a deliberate choice over the much larger oval on the Burswood peninsula, which is set up for cricket and Australian rules and is covered in our Optus Stadium guide. A rectangular ground of moderate size suits the sport and looks better on television when it is full.

The money behind the Perth Bears

The Perth deal is the clearest illustration of how NRL expansion is now financed. The state government package was reported at about 85.6 million dollars, broken up rather than paid as a lump sum: roughly 35 million towards grassroots rugby league in Western Australia over about seven years, around 25 million towards content over five years, about 5.6 million towards the costs of establishing the club, and about 20 million for a centre of excellence.

The league itself committed a further amount reported at around 50 million dollars. No licence fee was charged to the club — a significant departure from previous expansion rounds, and an acknowledgement that the hard part in Western Australia is not extracting an entry payment but building a rugby league base in a state where Australian rules dominates.

That grassroots component is the part most likely to determine whether the club survives. Perth's previous attempt failed partly because it never developed local juniors and remained a transplanted eastern-states operation. Thirty-five million dollars over seven years into Western Australian rugby league is an attempt to fix the underlying problem rather than the symptom.

• 86WA government package
• 50League commitment to Perth
• 600Australian government support for the PNG club
• 10Years the PNG commitment runs

Headline figures in millions of Australian dollars as reported at the time of announcement, plus the duration of the Papua New Guinea commitment in years. These are announced totals spread across several purposes and several years, not payments to a club in a single season.

Why the Bears name came back

Reviving a defunct Sydney club's identity for a Western Australian franchise looks strange until you work through the alternatives. A brand-new name in a state with almost no rugby league heritage starts from zero. The Bears name arrives with a supporter base that never stopped organising, a century of history, a well-known jersey, and a network of former players.

It also settles an old grievance. North Sydney were forced into a merger in 2000, that merger collapsed within three seasons, and the club spent twenty-five years campaigning for readmission — most persistently through a Central Coast proposal that the Commission rejected more than once. The Perth arrangement is not readmission, but it gives the name a first-grade presence and gives North Sydney a defined role as the feeder club.

Whether Western Australian supporters adopt a Sydney club's identity is the open question. It is the sort of thing that either seems natural after three seasons or never stops feeling borrowed.

PNG Chiefs: the nineteenth club

The Papua New Guinea licence, confirmed in December 2024 for a 2028 entry, is the most unusual decision the Commission has made. Rugby league is the national sport of Papua New Guinea in a way it is not in any other country — a genuinely dominant cultural presence rather than one code among several. The supporter interest is not in doubt. Almost everything else about the project is unprecedented.

The club is based in Port Moresby, was given a seven-person board in mid-2025, was named later that year, and appointed an experienced head coach with Super League and NRL assistant experience. Through 2026 it began signing established first-grade players, which was the first hard evidence that the project could compete for talent rather than simply fill a squad.

There is also a trademark dispute over the chosen name with a New Zealand rugby union body, which is the kind of administrative snag that gets resolved but is a reminder of how much of a new club has to be built from nothing.

The funding behind the PNG Chiefs and its conditions

The Australian federal government committed funding reported at about 600 million dollars over ten years, structured inside a Pacific rugby league partnership that covers the club, grassroots development and community programmes across Papua New Guinea and the region.

The condition attached is what makes this different from every other expansion in the game's history. The funding sits alongside a security arrangement between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and reporting at the time of the announcement indicated Australia reserves the right to withdraw it if it judges that arrangement to have been breached. Withdrawal would remove the club's financial base. In other words, a rugby league club's continued existence has been linked to a diplomatic relationship.

Supporters of the arrangement point out that rugby league is the most effective soft-power instrument Australia has in Papua New Guinea and that the grassroots and community spending is worthwhile regardless. Critics point out that no sporting competition should have a member club whose funding can be turned off by a foreign ministry. Both positions are defensible, and the argument will not be settled before 2028.

Port Moresby as a venue

The intended home ground is the National Football Stadium in Port Moresby, with a capacity expansion planned before entry from roughly fifteen thousand towards the low twenty thousands. It is a rectangular ground already used for international rugby league, including Test matches that have drawn full houses and an atmosphere visiting players describe as unlike anything in the domestic competition.

The practical questions are the ones every away club will ask: accommodation standards, medical facilities, flight schedules, security and heat. Port Moresby sits close to the equator, so the Australian winter season removes the humidity problem only partially. Expect the draw to cluster Papua New Guinea home games and to give visiting clubs a bye or a soft fixture on either side.

For comparison, the two established rugby league venues in Australia are covered in our guides to Suncorp Stadium and Accor Stadium. Port Moresby will be smaller than both and louder than either.

What a new club does to the salary cap and the player pool

Expansion does not change any club's salary cap, because each club has its own. What it changes is demand. Two new clubs mean roughly sixty additional full-time first-grade positions, and those positions have to be filled from a talent pool that does not grow at the same speed.

The effect lands hardest in the middle of the market. A genuine top-ten player will always be paid; what expansion does is lift the price of the twentieth-to-thirtieth player in a squad, because there are suddenly two more clubs bidding for exactly that player. Existing clubs have complained about this in every expansion round, and they are not wrong about the mechanism.

New clubs are also normally granted recruitment concessions — extended windows, relief from some restrictions, sometimes cap flexibility — because a club with no players cannot compete under the same rules as one with a settled roster. Those concessions expire, but while they run they distort the market. The mechanics of the cap itself are set out in our NRL salary cap explainer, and the squad-list rules a new club has to satisfy from its first season are covered in the Top 30 squad rules.

What expansion does to the draw

An odd number of clubs forces byes into every round. Seventeen clubs has meant exactly that since 2023, with one club idle each week and a slightly awkward ladder to read because clubs have played different numbers of games at any given point in the season.

Eighteen clubs in 2027 fixes it. Nine matches a round, no bye, a clean symmetrical structure. Nineteen in 2028 breaks it again. That is not a reason to stop at eighteen, but it is a real scheduling cost and one of the arguments used for moving straight to twenty.

Travel is the other change. Western Australia is two hours behind the eastern states through the winter, which affects kick-off times and broadcast windows in both directions — a Perth home game at a sensible local hour is a late fixture in Sydney, and an eastern-states evening game starts in the Perth afternoon. Port Moresby adds international travel, customs, and a different medical and insurance environment. Expect both to be handled with clustered fixtures rather than fortnightly crossings.

The markets still waiting

Several bids exist without a licence. A third south-east Queensland club has been pushed persistently, including an Ipswich-based proposal reported in 2026 with a substantial funding offer attached, on the argument that the region generates far more players than its three clubs can absorb. Fiji has government endorsement for a licence bid and a strong player production record. There have been South Island New Zealand proposals. Adelaide surfaces periodically. The Central Coast campaign ran for the best part of two decades before the Bears name went west.

None of these is close. Officials have indicated a twentieth club is unlikely to be considered seriously until after the Brisbane Olympic cycle, which puts any further expansion into the 2030s. Nineteen clubs is the realistic ceiling for some years.

Why the NRL has been cautious about a twentieth club

Three reasons, in roughly this order.

The first is the memory of 2000. A competition that had to remove six clubs in two years does not casually add more, and the people who lived through it are still in the game.

The second is the central distribution. Every club receives a grant from the competition, and that money funds the salary cap and the football department. Add clubs faster than revenue grows and every club gets less. The Perth and Papua New Guinea projects work partly because external money is attached; a bid without that is asking the existing seventeen to fund a competitor.

The third is player supply. The pool of players good enough for first grade is finite, and it is already stretched across seventeen squads, representative football and a rival code that recruits from the same schools. The difference between the codes is covered in our rugby league and rugby union comparison, and the recruitment competition between them is one of the quieter constraints on how fast the NRL can grow.

What a good expansion bid contains

From the record of successful and unsuccessful bids, the recurring elements are:

• A defined catchment that is not already served. The Dolphins targeted northern Brisbane rather than proposing to split an existing supporter base.
• A stadium that is available, appropriately sized and rectangular. A half-full large ground is worse than a full small one.
• Funding that does not depend on the competition. State, federal or private money that arrives from outside the existing distribution pool.
• A grassroots plan with money behind it. The Perth package's grassroots component exists because the previous Western Australian club had no junior base.
• An existing organisation where possible. A club with an administration, a board and a second-tier team is a lower risk than a consortium starting from a slide deck.
• Political tolerance from the existing clubs. No licence has been granted over sustained objection from the current members.

The bids that failed generally missed at least two of these. The rejected 2024 Western Bears proposal failed on funding, and succeeded a year later once the state government replaced the shortfall.

How expansion looks from a supporter's seat

If you follow one of the existing clubs, expansion means a longer season structure, two unfamiliar away trips, a slightly smaller share of central money and a slightly more expensive player market. That is the honest ledger, and it is why the reaction among supporters has been mixed rather than celebratory.

If you live in Perth or Port Moresby, it means a first-grade club in your city for the first time or the first time in three decades, with everything that follows: a jersey, a draw, a reason for the local juniors to keep playing past sixteen.

If you are simply interested in the sport, the interesting part is the experiment. The NRL is testing whether a code with a small geographic core can hold a genuinely national and international competition together. It failed the last time it tried, in the 1990s, for reasons that were mostly about money and haste. This attempt is slower, better funded and better planned. Whether that is enough will be visible by about 2030.

What to check before you rely on this page

Entry seasons, funding figures and venues for clubs that have not yet played a game are all provisional. Governments change, stadium agreements are renegotiated, and licence conditions are confidential in their detail. The 2027 and 2028 dates are firm intentions rather than results.

The funding numbers here are announced totals as reported, spread across several purposes and several years. Treat them as the scale of the commitment rather than as a figure any single entity received. If you need a precise number for a specific year, go to the relevant government's budget papers and the Commission's own announcements rather than to a summary like this one.

For more Australian sport explainers, start at our Australia hub or the broader rugby section. For everything about the seventeen clubs currently in the competition, the NRL clubs guide is the place to go, and for how contracts and payments work under the collective agreement see NRL player payments.