North Queensland Cowboys
Australian rugby league football club
The North Queensland Cowboys are an Australian professional rugby league football club based in Townsville, the largest city in North Queensland. They compete in Australia's premier rugby league competition, the National Rugby League (NRL).
Since their foundation in 1995, the club has appeared in three grand finals (2005, 2015 and 2017) winning in 2015, and has reached the finals twelve times. The team's management headquarters and home ground, North Queensland Stadium, currently known as Queensland Country Bank Stadium due to sponsorship rights, are located in the suburb of South Townsville. Their women's team, established in 2023, currently compete in the NRL Women's Premiership.
The Cowboys were admitted to the premiership for the 1995 ARL season. They played in the breakaway Super League competition in 1997 before continuing to compete in the re-unified NRL competition the following year. After running into financial trouble in 2001, the club was taken over by News Limited. In 2007, the team was sold by News Limited to the Cowboys Leagues Club.
In 2015, the Cowboys played in the first all-Queensland grand final, defeating the Brisbane Broncos 17–16 in golden point to win their first premiership, in what is regarded as the best Grand Final of the modern era.
The public source identifies “North Queensland Cowboys” as australian rugby league football club. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around North, Queensland and Cowboys.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3344159. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1995, 2005, 2015 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “North Queensland Cowboys” 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.