The year 2026 could prove to be a landmark for rugby league in the Pacific, with the organisation behind the Auckland-based bid to establish a Polynesian owned club in the NRL set to step up their campaign.<\/p>\n
With a fresh round of TV rights negotiations set to begin in 2027, the Mana Pasifika bid team believe they can play a key role in helping the NRL to secure a bigger deal, if they are granted a licence.<\/p>\n
On the field, they say they have a big name coach ready to go, and connections with a raft of Pasifika players who would be keen to be part of their squad.<\/p>\n
And now New Zealand’s hip-hop icon, King Kapisi, has come on board, to promote the bid which he views as the start of a cultural movement to celebrate and solidify the Pacific’s role in rugby league’s future.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The year 2026 could prove to be a landmark for rugby league in the Pacific, with the organisation…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,198974,198975,761,762,158,3755,85],"class_list":["post-366659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-king-kapisi","tag-mana-pasifika","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-podcast","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}