nrl

The National Rugby League (also known as the NRL Telstra Premiership for sponsorship reasons) is a professional rugby league competition in Oceania which is currently contested by 17 teams from New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, the Australian Capital Territory, and New Zealand.

Tracing its origins back to the New South Wales Rugby League, which formed in 1908, premier rugby league competition in Australia had gone through numerous iterations, most notably during the Super League war in the 1990s, which resulted in the NRL being formed in 1998 as a joint partnership between the Australian Rugby League (ARL) and the News Corporation-controlled Super League. The partnership was dissolved in 2012, with control of the NRL going to the re-constituted ARL, which was re-structured with an independent board of directors and renamed the Australian Rugby League Commission.