Could the NRL soon take games to Asia? They could if the CEO of the competition\u2019s newest club has his way \u2013 with Singapore mooted as a possible destination.<\/p>\n
Perth Bears enter the NRL in 2027, but they are already proposing plans to continue the rapid spread of the sport in the southern hemisphere. That would include a revolutionary idea to move games to Singapore \u2013 with Bears CEO Anthony De Ceglie insisting it could be \u2018Perth\u2019s version of Las Vegas\u2019.<\/p>\n
With Perth sitting in the exact same time zone as Singapore, De Ceglie believes it is an obvious and logical move for the sport to try and test the water in Asia, while also ensuring core supporters in Australia are not short changed.<\/p>\n
De Ceglie told City AM: \u201cWe are in a very different time zone to Sydney and Melbourne. We are in the economic Asian powerhouse time zone and that\u2019s really handy for us.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d love to take the NRL to Singapore, it could be the Perth version of Las Vegas. There\u2019s so many opportunities because of the time zone of Perth, not just into the east coast market, because it means we can play that late game, but also taking the game into Asia could be huge.\u201d<\/p>\n
The plans would be the latest associated with the NRL\u2019s game to take rugby league worldwide, with De Ceglie insisting he is a big fan of what the likes of Peter V\u2019landys have delivered thus far with trips like Vegas becoming hugely popular and successful.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cThey are very impressive. They always think about what\u2019s good for the game and what\u2019s good for the viewer. I can\u2019t imagine them doing anything that isn\u2019t going to, at its heart, maintain those two goals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re the most watched sporting code in Australia and we have a monopoly on it in Western Australia. It\u2019s a pretty easy selling point, but we\u2019re capitalising on the growth of the game. We\u2019re very lucky to be doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Could the NRL soon take games to Asia? They could if the CEO of the competition\u2019s newest club…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568],"tags":[64,63,761,762,158,85],"class_list":["post-449719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nrl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-national-rugby-league","tag-nationalrugbyleague","tag-nrl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449719","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=449719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449719\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}