National Rugby League

Click for Brisbane Broncos gear!

The Brisbane Broncos are the most successful club in the history of the competition in terms of percentage of total games won, having won 65.80% of their games since their inception. This is more than 5% better than the second-placed club. In their nineteen completed seasons, the club has made a total of six Grand Finals, winning each time, and have made the finals for the past fifteen seasons. They are one of only two clubs to have won the World Club Challenge twice, and were the first club to do so on British soil. They also won the now defunct Panasonic Cup in 1989.

Click for Bulldogs gear!

The Bulldogs predominantly draw on a support base in and around the suburbs of Canterbury and Bankstown in South-Western Sydney and regularly attract home match attendances that are above the average level for National Rugby League clubs, with attendances at Stadium Australia averaging more than 18,000 for the 2006 season.

Click for Canberra Raiders gear!

The Raiders were admitted to the New South Wales Rugby Football League premiership in 1982, along with the Illawarra Steelers, as part of the league's first expansion outside Sydney. Within five years, the Raiders had made the semi-finals, winning their maiden premiership in 1989. This heralded a period of great success for the club, with four grand final appearances and three premierships.

Click for Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks gear!

Arguably the Sharks' best season ever was in 1999, when they again won the minor premiership in convincing fashion. The Sharks easily accounted for the Brisbane Broncos in the quarter-final, and led 8-0 in the grand final qualifier against the St George Illawarra Dragons before eventually losing 8-24. The Dragons went on to lose the 1999 grand final against the Melbourne Storm 20-18.

Click for Gold Coast Titans gear!

The 2008 NRL season will be the Titans' second in the National Rugby League. A major boost for the Titans has been the signing of past Queensland representative Ashley Harrison from the Sydney Roosters. The Titans played their first official match at their new Stadium, Skilled Park against the North Queensland Cowboys with the final score being 36-18. Rookie Jordan Atkins became the second person in Australian rugby league's 100 year history to score four tries on debut. The only other player to score four tries on debut was Canterbury's Tony Nash in 1942. The sellout 26,974-strong crowd assisted the Titans in firmly establishing that they are force to be reckoned with in 2008.

Click for Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles gear!

Since winning their first premiership in 1972, the club has won a total of six First Grade titles along with a number of other competitions. The Sea Eagles have never won the wooden spoon in their 61-year existence.

Click for Melbourne Storm gear!

The Storm have had a fiery start to the 2008 season. Drawing a crowd of 20,084 for the first round clash at Telstra Dome against the New Zealand Warriors, they won 32-18 with Billy Slater scoring a hat-trick of tries.

Click for New Zealand Warriors gear!

In 1988, serious investigation into an Auckland team entering the Sydney competition commenced, encouraged mainly by the Mt Albert club. On 17 May 1992, the announcement stating an Auckland-based team's entry into the Australian Rugby League competition, the Winfield Cup in 1995, was made. This followed very good turnouts to a number of NSWRL club games played in Auckland. The new team was to be called the Auckland Warriors and run by the Auckland Rugby League organisation. The original colours selected were blue, white, red and green. Blue and white are recognised as the colours of Auckland, while red and green were the colours of the Warriors' original sponsor, DB Bitter.

Click for Newcastle Knights gear!

Following further injuries and a lack of experienced players, the club failed to win a single match in the first half of the 2005 premiership, losing 13 consecutive matches -- the worst start to a season by any club since the 1960s. That losing streak finally came to an end with a win away from home over the Penrith Panthers in late June. In a tribute to the club's followers, crowds remained high throughout the losing streak, and while the Knights were unable to avoid finishing last, fans were rewarded for their stoicism as the team managed to win eight of their last eleven games, including a six game winning streak brought to an end in round 26 by the St George Illawarra Dragons.

Click for North Queensland Cowboys gear!

The Cowboys name and team colours were decided by public competition in 1994. Their initial jersey was red and green, with grey polkadots and yellow cowboy in the middle. The club have never won a premiership, however, finished as runners-up in 2005. On 28 August 2007 it was announced that after 6 years of ownership, News Limited had sold the team to the Cowboys League Club.

Click for Parramatta Eels gear!

Like most clubs established before the 1980s, Parramatta was established with no official nickname or mascot. The only nickname Parramatta had ever been known by was the "Fruitpickers", a reference to the orchards spread throughout the District and surrounding suburbs in the first half of the 20th century. As the competition and the clubs themselves became more focused on marketing in the 1970s, Parramatta adopted an official club mascot. In the mid-1960s, Peter Frilingos, a Sydney rugby league journalist, suggested that the club should be known as the "Eels". This reasoning was based on the name of the Parramatta, anglicised from the Aboriginal dialect "Barramattagal" meaning "place where the Eels dwell". After this, the team was commonly called "The Eels" and it became an official nickname in the late 1970s.

Click for Penrith Panthers gear!

Penrith struggled for almost twenty years before finally reaching their first finals series in 1985. Penrith achieved their first Grand Final appearance in 1990 but were beaten by the Canberra Raiders 18–14. The next year the Panthers met the Raiders again in the 1991 Grand Final, this time winning the game 19–12. The Panthers most recent premiership achievement was over the Sydney Roosters in the 2003 Grand Final where Penrith were considered 'under dogs' but came out on top with a 18-6 victory.

Click for St. George Illawarra Dragons gear!

The Dragons started the 2008 season by winning the Mercury Challenge match against the Bulldogs 40 - 30 at WIN Stadium in Wollongong and winning their first Toyota Cup match against Bulldogs at 30 - 22. The following week the Dragons went down to the South Sydney Rabbitohs in the annual Charity Shield clash 24-20 at ANZ Stadium. The club lost its Round 1 match against the Wests Tigers 24-16 but bounced back to defeat the Gold Coast Titans In Round 2 by 30-12.

Click for South Sydney Rabbitohs gear!

The South Sydney Rabbitohs continue to have a large supporter base in their traditional areas of South-Eastern Sydney, despite having moved from Redfern Oval two decades ago, whilst also enjoying wide support throughout other rugby league playing centres around the country. The main South Sydney supporters group at matches is known as "The Burrow." By the start of the 2008 season, membership of the Rabbitohs amounted to over 11,500 (including over 6,500 season ticket holders).

Click for Sydney Roosters gear!

The Sydney Roosters have a large support base across Australia in South East Queensland, Canberra and Newcastle, and its traditional location in Sydney. Moreover, the Sydney Roosters have two popular internet forums for supporters: "The Wall", the official message board in operation since 1999; and the unofficial "The People's Wall". In 2004, the club tallied the second highest home crowd attendance (behind the Brisbane Broncos) with an average attendance of 18,514 at the Sydney Football Stadium, compared with an average attendance of 3,389 in 1984. However, a drop of 25.2% in crowd figures from 2005 to 2006 led the news agency Australian Associated Press to state "crowd figures suggest many Sydney Roosters fans have been fair-weather friends." Nevertheless, despite finishing second to last in 2006, the Roosters attracted the ninth highest home crowd average.

Click for Wests Tigers gear!

The Tigers were admitted in 2000 to the NRL competition after the merging of two Sydney based clubs: the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies. Their maiden premiership was won in 2005. Although this is the Wests Tigers' only NRL premiership to date, the club has a heritage of eleven premierships won by Balmain and four by Western Suburbs. When the clubs' individual histories are considered, the Wests Tigers have the second most successful history with a combined tally of sixteen premierships. The Tigers also won the World Club Sevens in 2004.