1998 NRL season
rugby league competition
The 1998 NRL season was the 91st season of professional rugby league football in Australia, and the inaugural season of the newly formed National Rugby League (NRL). After the 1997 season, in which the Australian Rugby League and Super League organisations ran separate competitions parallel to each other, they joined to create a reunited competition in the NRL. The first professional rugby league club to be based in Victoria, the Melbourne Storm was introduced into the League, and with the closure of the Hunter Mariners, Western Reds/Perth Reds and South Queensland Crushers, twenty teams competed for the premiership, which culminated in the 1998 NRL Grand Final between Brisbane and Canterbury-Bankstown. It was also the final season for the Illawarra Steelers and the St. George Dragons as their own clubs prior to their merger into the St. George-Illawarra Dragons for the 1999 NRL season
Pre-season
The National Rugby League was formed after an agreement was reached between the two rivaling competitions from 1997, the Australian Rugby League and the Super League. In December 1997, the two parties formed a joint board to run the new Australian rugby league club competition. The vast majority of the 22 clubs that contested in 1997 across the split competitions also contested the first season of the National Rugby League, with the exception of the Hunter Mariners, the Western Reds and South Queensland.
The National Rugby League imposed a $3M salary cap on each of the clubs.
Advertising
Super League's ad agency VCD in Sydney successfully kept the account post-reunification. The 1998 ad featured the song "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba with its theme of rising against adversity:
I get knocked down!
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1998 NRL season” is rugby league competition. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through season, rugby and league, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4593832. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 1997 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “1998 NRL season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.