The Immortals: Rugby League's Highest Honour

There are fourteen rugby league Immortals. That is the whole point of the honour — fourteen names in more than a century of the game in Australia, added at a rate of roughly one every three years, and never removed.

It began as a magazine feature in 1981 and it is now the NRL's highest individual designation, sitting above a Hall of Fame that contains hundreds of members. Getting into the Hall of Fame is a career achievement. Getting past it to Immortal status has happened to fourteen people.

This guide covers where the concept came from, every Immortal and what they did, how the NRL took the honour over when the magazine folded, exactly how a player is selected now, the 2024 rule change that reset the waiting list, and the arguments about who is missing.

What an Immortal actually is

It is a permanent designation rather than an award. There is no annual Immortal, no runner-up, and no ceremony for defending it. A player is elevated once and remains one for good, including after death — most of the fourteen were named while alive but several were honoured posthumously.

It also carries no formal privileges. There is no prize money, no vote on anything, and no role in the game attached to it. What it carries is a place at the top of a very short list, and in a code where argument about the best player is close to a national pastime, that has proved to be worth a great deal.

The honour applies to players only. Coaches, referees, administrators and contributors are recognised in the Hall of Fame but cannot be elevated to Immortal status, even where the same person had an outstanding career in both roles.

Where the honour came from

Rugby League Week was a Sydney weekly magazine that covered the code from 1970. In 1981 it created the Immortals concept as an editorial exercise: assemble a panel, argue about the greatest players the game had produced, and name a small number of them.

The magazine's panel named four. It then did not name another for eighteen years, which turned out to be the decision that made the concept work. Had it added one every year, the list would have become a hall of fame with a better name. By naming four and then stopping, the magazine established that elevation was rare, and every subsequent addition inherited that scarcity.

One restriction was built in from the start and lasted for the magazine's entire tenure: only players from after the Second World War could be considered. The reasoning was practical — the panel felt it could not fairly judge players it had no footage of and few living witnesses to. The consequence was that the first four decades of Australian rugby league were excluded entirely.

The original four, 1981

Clive Churchill. South Sydney fullback from 1947 to 1958, known as The Little Master. Five premierships as a player, three more as coach of the same club, 38 Tests and 24 as captain. He is credited with converting fullback from a defensive position into an attacking one, which is why the grand final best-on-ground medal carries his name.

Bob Fulton. Manly centre and five-eighth through the club's first great era, winning premierships in 1972, 1973 and 1976, and finishing his playing career at Eastern Suburbs. Thirty-five Tests for Australia. He later coached Manly to premierships and coached the national side, which makes him one of the small group who reached the top as both player and coach.

Reg Gasnier. St George centre from 1959 to 1967, part of the club's eleven consecutive premierships, and Australian captain. Thirty-six Tests. He was quick enough and elusive enough to be nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon, and his career was cut short by injury while he was still in his twenties, which is one of the enduring what-ifs of the code.

Johnny Raper. Lock forward, briefly at Newtown and then at St George from 1959, where he collected eight premierships across the club's run. Thirty-nine Tests. Raper is the player usually cited when people argue that lock, not halfback, is the position from which a match is genuinely controlled.

Three of the four came from clubs that dominated their eras, and two came from the same St George side. That is not favouritism so much as arithmetic: a team that wins eleven premierships in a row contains a lot of great players.

Graeme Langlands and Wally Lewis, 1999

Eighteen years passed before the list grew. In 1999 the panel could not separate two candidates and named both.

Graeme Langlands, known as Changa, was a St George fullback and centre from 1963 to 1976, with four premierships and 45 Tests, many of them as captain and later as captain-coach of Australia. He arrived at St George in time for the tail of the eleven-premiership run and stayed long enough to lead the club afterwards.

Wally Lewis was the five-eighth around whom Queensland built State of Origin. He captained Queensland in 30 of his 31 Origin appearances and was named man of the match eight times, a record that stood for decades. He played 33 Tests and captained Australia, and he did it while playing club football in Brisbane rather than Sydney, at a time when that was widely assumed to be a career limitation. The history of Origin is in large part his story.

The 1999 pair is the moment the honour stopped being a purely Sydney-centred list. Lewis is a Queensland figure first and an Australian one second, and his elevation acknowledged that the game's centre of gravity had moved.

Arthur Beetson, 2003

Big Artie was a prop who played for Redcliffe, Balmain, Eastern Suburbs and Parramatta, winning premierships with Easts in 1974 and 1975. He was the first Indigenous Australian to captain a national team in any sport, leading the Kangaroos in 1973.

He is also the man who walked out for Queensland in the first State of Origin match in 1980, having played the previous decade in Sydney. The image of Beetson, a Queenslander playing his club football in New South Wales, leading a Queensland side against players he trained with every week, is the founding image of the concept.

As a player he was a ball-playing front-rower at a time when that was close to a contradiction in terms, and the modern offloading prop is a direct descendant. He became the seventh Immortal in 2003 and remains the only prop on the list.

Andrew Johns, 2012

Newcastle's halfback from 1993 to 2007, with premierships in 1997 and 2001, three Dally M Medals and 249 first-grade games for one club.

Johns is the most recent player by career end to be elevated, and his 2012 selection is the one that most clearly showed the old process's limits. A judging panel of thirteen — coaches, commentators, historians and the living Immortals — deliberated at a gala dinner. The result was widely supported, but the process was ad hoc, which is precisely what the NRL later formalised.

His case rests on a claim that is easy to state and hard to dispute: for about a decade he was the best player in the world in the position that most determines results, in a side that was not otherwise dominant.

When the magazine folded

Rugby League Week closed in 2017 after forty-seven years. The Immortals concept, which had never had any legal or institutional home beyond the masthead, was suddenly ownerless.

The NRL took it over in 2018. This was not simply a change of stationery. Three things changed at once.

First, the honour was formally tied to the NRL Hall of Fame, so only Hall of Fame members could be considered. Second, a written selection process was published for the first time. Third, the post-war restriction was removed, opening up the code's first four decades to consideration.

57%43%

• Named by Rugby League Week, 1981 to 20128
• Named by the NRL, 2018 onward6

Counts the 14 Immortals by the body that ran the honour at the time of elevation. Rugby League Week named the 1981, 1999, 2003 and 2012 groups; the NRL has run it since 2018.

Show the numbers

Who has named the Immortals

Item	Value
Named by Rugby League Week, 1981 to 2012	8
Named by the NRL, 2018 onward	6

The class of 2018

The NRL's first act was the largest single expansion in the honour's history: five players elevated on 1 August 2018.

Dally Messenger was the star who made the breakaway code viable in 1907 and 1908, switching from rugby union and touring with the first Kangaroos. Without him the 1908 split might have failed outright. The Dally M Medal already carried his name; the Immortals list finally caught up.

Frank Burge played for Glebe and later St George between 1911 and 1927, and scored 146 tries in 158 first-grade games as a forward. He once scored eight tries in a single first-grade match. Those numbers belong to a different era of the game, but nothing in any era looks like them.

Dave Brown was an Eastern Suburbs centre in the 1930s who was known as the Bradman of League, and the comparison was not loose. In 1935 he scored 38 tries and 285 points in a season, figures that have never been approached since.

Mal Meninga was a centre for Souths Brisbane, St Helens and Canberra across sixteen seasons, made four Kangaroo tours, captained two of them, and played 46 Tests. He then coached Queensland through eight consecutive Origin series wins and later coached Australia. His is the strongest combined playing-and-coaching record on the list.

Norm Provan played 256 games for St George between 1951 and 1965, won ten premierships and captain-coached four of them. He is the taller figure in the photograph taken after the 1963 grand final that became the model for the premiership trophy, and he holds the record for most Clive Churchill Medals with three, all awarded retrospectively.

Elevating five at once was a decision the NRL took some criticism for, on the reasonable grounds that scarcity is what gives the honour its weight. The counter-argument was that three of the five had been ineligible for thirty-seven years through no fault of their own, and that a single corrective batch was better than dripping them out one per decade.

Ron Coote, 2024

The fourteenth Immortal was announced on 21 August 2024, at a Hall of Fame dinner at the Sydney Cricket Ground, with the announcement made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a lifelong South Sydney supporter.

Ron Coote was a lock forward. He won four premierships with South Sydney between 1967 and 1971, moved to Eastern Suburbs and won two more in 1974 and 1975, and scored 13 tries in 23 Tests for Australia. He was judged Australia's best player in the 1970 Ashes series.

Six premierships across two clubs in a nine-year window is the headline, and it is a genuinely rare thing: most players who move clubs at the peak of their careers move away from a winning side, not into another one. Coote's elevation also ended one of the longest waits among post-war candidates, since he had been eligible under every version of the rules since 1981.

The full list

Immortal	Elevated	Position	Main clubs
Clive Churchill	1981	Fullback	South Sydney
Bob Fulton	1981	Centre and five-eighth	Manly, Eastern Suburbs
Reg Gasnier	1981	Centre	St George
Johnny Raper	1981	Lock	Newtown, St George
Graeme Langlands	1999	Fullback and centre	St George
Wally Lewis	1999	Five-eighth	Brisbane clubs, Gold Coast
Arthur Beetson	2003	Prop	Balmain, Eastern Suburbs, Parramatta
Andrew Johns	2012	Halfback	Newcastle
Dave Brown	2018	Centre	Eastern Suburbs
Frank Burge	2018	Lock and second-row	Glebe, St George
Mal Meninga	2018	Centre	Souths Brisbane, Canberra
Dally Messenger	2018	Centre and five-eighth	Eastern Suburbs
Norm Provan	2018	Second-row and lock	St George
Ron Coote	2024	Lock	South Sydney, Eastern Suburbs

How the list has grown

Plots the running total at each year an elevation took place. Years with no elevation are not shown, so the gaps between plotted points represent long periods with no additions.

Show the numbers

Cumulative rugby league Immortals, 1981 to 2024

Item	Value
1981	4
1999	6
2003	7
2012	8
2018	13
2024	14

The shape of that line is the honour's whole character. A flat start, three decades of almost nothing, a step change in 2018 when the eligibility rules changed, then a return to slow growth.

The eighteen-year gap between 1981 and 1999 is the longest, and it happened because nobody was obliged to name anyone. The magazine added Immortals when it felt there was a case, and for most of the 1980s and 1990s the players who would later qualify were still playing.

How an Immortal is selected now

The NRL published a process when it took the honour over, and it runs in two stages.

1. 1Retire and waitA player must have been retired for at least three full seasons, reduced from five in 2024, before any consideration begins.
2. 2Enter the Hall of FameOnly members of the NRL Hall of Fame are eligible, so induction there is a compulsory first step rather than an alternative honour.
3. 3The screening committee sitsA seven-member committee drawn from across the game reviews the full Hall of Fame register and reduces it to a provisional list of twenty through deliberation and provisional balloting.
4. 4The Final Five is setThe committee narrows the twenty to a final ballot of five candidates, known as the Final Five, which is the shortlist the decision is made from.
5. 5The selection panel votesA twelve-member panel, again drawn from across the game, convenes on the eve of the Hall of Fame induction night and votes on which of the five is elevated.
6. 6The elevation is announcedThe new Immortal is named at the Hall of Fame dinner, and the designation is permanent with no mechanism for withdrawal.

Describes the process the NRL published after taking the honour over in 2018, including the 2024 change to the retirement requirement. Panel membership is not published in advance and the ballot itself is not made public.

Two features of this are worth pulling out. The first is that the shortlist comes from the Hall of Fame register rather than from open nomination, so a player who is not already in the Hall of Fame is not in the conversation at all. The second is that the panel is convened rather than standing, so there is no permanent electorate whose preferences can be tracked from cycle to cycle.

The 2024 rule change

Until 2024 a player had to have been retired for five full seasons. The NRL cut that to three.

The practical effect was immediate. It brought a group of recently retired players into eligibility all at once, including Cameron Smith, who retired after the 2020 grand final, along with Johnathan Thurston and Billy Slater, who both finished in 2018, and Cooper Cronk, who finished in 2019.

The change is defensible on its own terms — five years is a long time to keep a player who is obviously among the greatest out of contention on a technicality — and it is also the kind of change that creates a queue. Several of the strongest cases in the code's history became eligible in the same cycle, and only one Immortal is named per cycle.

One every four years

The other half of the 2024 relaunch was cadence. The NRL indicated a new Immortal would be considered every four years, aligned to the Hall of Fame induction cycle, which places the next selection in 2028.

• 14Immortals named since 1981
• 4Named on the first night, 1981
• 5Most named at once, in 2018
• 18Longest gap between elevations
• 3Seasons retired before eligible

Counts elevations from 1981 to 2024. The gap figure measures the longest period between consecutive elevations. The retirement figure is the current requirement following the 2024 rule change.

A four-year rhythm is a deliberate constraint. It guarantees the honour cannot inflate, it gives each elevation a build-up, and it means a strong candidate can plausibly wait a decade or more. Whether it holds is another matter, since some reporting at the time of the relaunch suggested more than one player could be elevated in a single cycle.

Every elevation, round by round

Year	Named	Who	Run by
1981	4	Churchill, Fulton, Gasnier, Raper	Rugby League Week
1999	2	Langlands, Lewis	Rugby League Week
2003	1	Beetson	Rugby League Week
2012	1	Johns	Rugby League Week
2018	5	Brown, Burge, Meninga, Messenger, Provan	National Rugby League
2024	1	Coote	National Rugby League

Six occasions in forty-three years, and only two of them under the current owner. The table also shows why the process was formalised: four different panels operating under four sets of informal conventions produced a list that nobody could explain the shape of.

Who is waiting

The Final Five is not published until the night, and the screening committee does not release its provisional twenty, so any list of contenders is inference rather than information. What can be said with confidence is who became eligible when.

The 2024 reduction from five retired seasons to three brought in Cameron Smith, who played 430 first-grade games and captained club, state and country; Johnathan Thurston and Billy Slater, who both finished in 2018 with premierships, Origin series and Dally M honours behind them; and Cooper Cronk, who retired in 2019 having won premierships at two clubs.

Behind them sits Darren Lockyer, who played 355 games for Brisbane in two positions, captained Australia and Queensland, and has been eligible for a decade. Cameron Smith's teammates account for a striking share of the queue, which is a direct reflection of how dominant Melbourne were across two decades — and of the fact that the club still has no Immortal.

Older cases remain live too. Supporters of Parramatta's early-1980s side make a standing argument for Peter Sterling and Brett Kenny, and there is a long-running case for Duncan Hall and other pre-Origin figures who have been eligible since the honour began.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. One elevation every four years, against a queue that plausibly contains half a dozen unanswerable cases and a similar number of strong ones, means most of the players named above will wait into their seventies before a decision is reached. That is a design choice, not an oversight, but it is the aspect of the current rules most likely to be revisited.

The Hall of Fame, and how it differs

The NRL Hall of Fame is the broader institution and it is not the same thing. It recognises players, coaches, referees, administrators and contributors across the whole history of the code in Australia, and it has hundreds of members.

The Hall of Fame was relaunched in 2024 alongside the Immortals announcement, with 25 inductees taken in at the SCG that August. The composition of that intake was 11 men's players, six women's players, two coaches, two referees and four contributors, which is a reasonable indication of how the NRL intends the institution to be balanced going forward.

The relationship between the two is strictly hierarchical: every Immortal is a Hall of Fame member, and Hall of Fame membership is the entry requirement for Immortal consideration. Fourteen of several hundred have made the second step.

Women in the Hall of Fame

The August 2024 intake included the first six women ever inducted: Natalie Dwyer, who captained the Jillaroos in their maiden Test in 1995 and played 26 matches for Australia; Katrina Fanning and Tarsha Gale, both members of that first Jillaroos side; Karyn Murphy, a 28-Test Jillaroo who has since run the NRL's integrity unit and coached in the NRLW; Tahnee Norris; and Veronica White.

Because Hall of Fame membership is the eligibility gate, that induction is also the moment women became eligible for Immortal consideration for the first time. None has been elevated yet, and the four-year cadence means the earliest opportunity is 2028.

The pathway matters more than the timing. Before 2024 there was no route at all — not a difficult one, not a long one, simply none — and the Women's State of Origin generation now has one.

What the list looks like by position and club

Forwards do better here than in any of the game's annual awards. The fourteen include four locks or lock-second-rowers, one prop and one second-row-lock, which is six forwards. Halfback, the position that dominates the Dally M count, has exactly one representative.

By club, St George are the most represented, which is a straightforward consequence of eleven consecutive premierships between 1956 and 1966: Gasnier, Raper, Langlands, Provan and Burge all wore the jersey. South Sydney and Eastern Suburbs are next, and both Coote and Fulton appear against two clubs each.

There are gaps. Melbourne, who have been the most consistently successful club of the past twenty-five years, have no Immortals — though several of their players are now eligible. Newcastle have one. Parramatta's great side of the early 1980s has none, which is the omission most often raised by supporters of the era. A full picture of the modern competition is in the NRL clubs guide.

The arguments about the list

Three recur, and none of them has a clean answer.

The first is era weighting. Half the fourteen played most of their football before 1970, and the list is thin on the 1980s and 1990s despite those decades producing some of the most watched football in the code's history. Defenders point out that the honour is awarded slowly and retrospectively by design, so recency will always look under-served. Critics point out that a list which struggles to reach players who retired thirty years ago is not merely deliberate, it is stuck.

The second is the Queensland question. Only Lewis, Beetson and Meninga have strong Queensland identities, in a code where the Origin rivalry is the biggest thing on the calendar and Queensland has won the majority of series since 1982. Sydney-based panels selecting from Sydney-heavy Hall of Fame registers is the usual explanation.

The third is the 2018 batch. Naming five at once nearly doubled the list overnight, and it is fair to ask whether an honour that had been given to eight players in thirty-seven years should have grown by that much in one evening. The counter is that the pre-war exclusion had produced a backlog nobody else created, and clearing it in one go was more honest than pretending it did not exist.

What the honour is worth

Nothing financially, and a great deal otherwise.

An Immortal becomes a permanent reference point in the game's language. Every debate about a current player's standing is conducted against the list; the shorthand "he is an Immortal" ends an argument in Australian rugby league in a way that no other honour does. Comparable designations exist in other codes, but few are as small or as slow.

It also functions as the code's institutional memory. A sport that has been running since 1908, has been through the Super League war and has reinvented its rules repeatedly needs some fixed points, and fourteen names that everybody agrees on serve that purpose. The differences between how the two rugby codes handle their histories are covered in rugby league versus rugby union.

Where you actually encounter them

The Immortals are physically present around the game more than most honours. Bronze statues, named stands and named awards carry them: the Clive Churchill Medal at the grand final, the Dally M Medal at the awards night, the Wally Lewis Medal for the player of the Origin series, the Arthur Beetson Medal, and the Ron Coote Cup between Souths and the Roosters.

Several also appear on the trophies. The Provan-Summons Trophy handed to the premiers each year takes its shape from a photograph of one of them. That is a reasonable summary of how deep the list runs in the game's furniture: you cannot watch a full NRL season without the names being handed to you several times over, usually without explanation.

What the list actually says

Fourteen players across roughly 120 years works out at one elevation for every eight or nine years of the code's existence in Australia, which is about as restrictive as a sporting honour gets anywhere.

The list is not a ranking of the fourteen best players, and it does not claim to be. It is a record of who a series of panels, working under different rules across four decades, decided belonged at the top. It carries the biases of those panels — Sydney-weighted, forward-friendly, slow to reach the recent past — and it also carries a genuine consensus that almost nobody disputes name by name.

The next selection is due in 2028, with a queue of recently eligible candidates that includes several of the most decorated careers the game has produced. On a one-per-cycle cadence, working through that queue will take until the 2040s, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the honour is meant to work.

More on the code, its competitions and its history is in the Australia section, the rugby index and the wider sports hub. For the origins of the code itself see the 1908 split and rugby league's Australian origins, and for the national side several of these players captained, see the Kangaroos guide.