The season typically runs from March to October, with each team playing 24 matches. The first-placed team at the end of the regular season awarded the minor premiership. This is followed by a finals series contested between the eight highest-placed teams from the regular season.
The season culminates in the premiership-deciding grand final. Following the introduction of a new format for interstate rugby league, the State of Origin series in , the decade of the s brought about expansion of the NSWRL premiership , with the introduction of commercial sponsorship, the Winfield Cup , and the addition of non-Sydney-based teams, Canberra and Illawarra in Following the season, Sydney foundation club Newtown Jets were ultimately forced to withdraw from the competition because of financial difficulties.
Further expansion of the league followed in , with another three teams based outside Sydney introduced to the competition; the Newcastle Knights and the first two Queensland teams, the Brisbane Broncos and Gold Coast-Tweed Giants. Ultimately this competition failed, but in its demise the National Rugby League was born, incorporating the traditional Sydney clubs, successfully coompelling the Sydney market to follow the newly created national competition.
The prospect of a truly national rugby league competition in addition to the introduction of pay television in Australia attracted the attention of global media organisation, News Corporation , and it followed that professional rugby league was shaken to its very foundations in the mids with the advent of the Super League war. Initially a conflict over broadcasting rights, it became a dispute as to who controlled the sport and which traditional clubs would survive into the new national era, as News Limited formed their own Super League and admitted some former ARL clubs, poaching players from the original ARL league with high salaries.
With twenty-two teams of highly varying quality playing in two competitions that year, crowd attendances and corporate sponsorships were spread very thinly, [ 11 ] and many teams found themselves in financial difficulty. The ARL undertook moves to invite the traditional clubs that had moved to the Super League competition back into a re-unified competition.
