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Ahead of the 2026 NRL grand final, a personal reflection on the Sydney Roosters' fanbase, their history, and the universal suffering of rugby league fandom.
As the 2026 NRL season culminates in the grand final, a personal reflection on the Sydney Roosters and their fans offers a nuanced perspective. The author recalls attending a Roosters home game in round 19 against the Parramatta Eels, a scrappy win that kept the club in the top four. The experience revealed that Roosters supporters, often perceived as entitled, are human too, bound by the shared suffering of rugby league fandom.
Roosters' Reputation and Historical Context
The Roosters are often hated for reasons old and basic: too much money and influence, similar to the Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles and the Brisbane Broncos. Their shiny new home, funded by NSW taxpayers, and their self-arrogating of the name Sydney add to the resentment. A cosy relationship with Fox Sports provides post-career employment for players, circumventing the salary cap. Coach Trent Robinson, a well-meaning deep thinker, is barely sufferable to some. The near-universal belief that the Roosters rort the salary cap is tempered by the possibility that they do not. Let us agree they have made the cap work for them.
When the entitled get their way by legal means, it feels worse for outsiders. It means the rules favour those clever and industrious enough to use their financial head-start. There need not be any corruption, and this masthead does not suggest there is. None of this is new, but how to come to terms with it? How to still enjoy rugby league without boycotting Roosters matches? Is it worth placing money on the Roosters for the grand final as an emotional hedge? V'landys might agree: there is always another good reason to have a flutter.
The answer for the author was to confront it. Many close friends support the Roosters, and they are loved. If you were a league-loving kid in the 1970s, and you picked your team based on exposure, you chose Manly, Easts, St George or Souths, who won every title between 1970 and 1979. Today's cartel is nothing new.
Fan Nostalgia and Defining Moments
The author attended the round 19 game with two Roosters-supporting friends, feeling it would be their year. They discussed pertinent rugby league matters and were sucked into the past. What struck the author was how nostalgic the friends were for the 1980s and 1990s, when Easts were often dismal. Many of their favourite players were from those years: Craig Salvatori, David Trewhella, Marty Gurr and the eternal Kevin Hastings. The friends were still bruised by the mid-1990s, when they feared Easts would be lost to amalgamation. During the Super League war, it was the big end of town, notably Politis and Kerry Packer, that stopped the club from jumping ship to the rebel league or merging, and set in train its rise to most-hated, or at least most-envied.
This will be forgotten if they win the grand final, but Roosters fans spent much of the season despairing over Daly Cherry-Evans and shouting in frustration at Siua Wong or Sam Walker or one of the Butcher brothers, gloomy about errors and another wasted year. For much of that game, among the faithful, the author felt like the only one thinking they did not need to worry. As Brisbane showed last year, you do not have to be brilliant all season, just for three weeks in spring with a bit of luck. Conversely, as Penrith discovered, the Roosters ground out a scrappy win, turning on enough power for 30 minutes to dispatch the injury-depleted Eels, gleaning another two points that kept them in the top four.
The Essence of Rugby League Fandom
Throughout the match, the author kept looking at one man in a Roosters jersey. He must have been 85, maybe 90. He had pale, almost translucent hair and cheekbones that shone through his thin skin. He had come on his own, a pretty good effort. What kept drawing the author to him was the complete bliss in his face. He was so glad to be alive, to be out on a Saturday night with his beloved team. He had lived through the ordinary 1980s and 1990s, and other awful eras. The author felt great solidarity with him. His face expressed the truth of rugby league: fandom is all about suffering, punctuated by the briefest flashes of ecstasy. The author would have given him a hug, except for that damned jersey.
It is uncertain if the case has been made, and if Sunday's grand final goes the way the odds predict, most fans will have switched off before full-time. Yet the shared experience of suffering and fleeting joy unites all rugby league supporters, even those of the Sydney Roosters.
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