What do you think is going on behind the scenes now between the NRL and key stakeholders like Channel Nine?

I think it's worth acknowledging that this discussion's being framed as if there's just gonna be, like, dead time, and everyone's just gonna be sitting quietly and attentively waiting for a kickoff to start.

So I think to describe this as there being no grand final pre-game entertainment would probably be wrong.

I'd be shocked if they didn't put something on.

It's just probably not gonna be in that same main event headliner format.

So there will certainly still be music, there will certainly be entertainment, and there will certainly be something.

And so I think we've slightly mischaracterized how this will play out in practice.

Am, am I correct in thinking that?

Do you think the games will still be relevant going forward, though? Like, in the decades ahead, are the Commonwealth Games going to lose relevance? And is it worth us putting as much effort into getting to these games and succeeding at these games if maybe the competition for our athletes isn't as great as it could be in other competitions?

Yeah, there's probably a couple of key points there, and as the Commonwealth movement, uh, heads to 100 years in, in 2030, uh, it is, of course, a sort of existential question.

I think certainly the games does have a place, but its place has evolved, and one that has to probably be a little more cost-effective and scaled down to sort of reflect the Commonwealth Games' positioning in the broader sport ecosystem.

So I think it will survive.

It will simply have to find probably a, a potentially more, um, economical and, um, efficient model.

Um, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of value for athletes.

You know, for some sports, the Commonwealth Games is the, the pinnacle, and for others, it's a st- transition, a stepping stone to higher honors.

Okay, so this scaled-down event that we saw because Australia decided that we couldn't host them and, and they went to Glasgow, you don't think that's gonna be indicative of the Commonwealth Games in the future necessarily?

Is this an ongoing issue with the World Cup?

It is certainly an ongoing issue, but it is certainly exacerbated and taken to another level in this particular World Cup.

And so the issues date really all the way back to the beginning of being awarded the World Cup in 2018.

FIFA refused to release any information about tickets or pricing until September of 2025.

And so the opacity around the tickets themselves, it was unusual.

When they finally did release tickets, they basically became the most expensive tickets in history of any World Cup.

And then the third level of craziness around the situation is the dynamic pricing.

Is there a real concern about the commercialisation of the

For someone like myself, an outsider, are you able to sort of just help me understand why Australia is so unusual when it comes to football codes?

Absolutely.

Australia is fundamentally this really unique, uh, sport landscape in a global context.

There are more similar contexts, particularly something like the US, um, uh, is, is, is a little similar.

But really, Australia is unique in the globe in that it has a really contested sport landscape.

There's four football codes, but even beyond that, we manage to have a commercial basketball league, a commercial netball league, and a commercial cricket league.

So we have basically seven sports that all operate at the commercial level, um, in a country of about 26 or 27 million people.

What does it mean to have a sport that is a global game versus the more sort of d- cultural dominant sport being only played here? What does that mean for a country like Australia?