Everyone loves to hate the Roosters. But we shouldn’t. Their fans have suffered too

My favourite memory of the 2026 NRL season is the night I went to a Roosters home game in order to discover that their fans are human, too.

It’s a difficult case to make this week, when approximately 110 per cent of the rugby league world is wishing for another Newcastle miracle. The Roosters are the appropriate villains, and will embrace being cast as the black princes of this fairytale.

The evidence against the Roosters’ humanity is old and basic: too much money and influence – the same reasons Manly and the Broncos have been rugby league’s most hated clubs. Of course you hate the rich and entitled – that’s the world, and that’s rugby league.

Nick Politis’ billions have helped make the club what it is, but it’s not just the money.

There’s the shiny new home for the club supported by all those Scots College and Cranbrook boys, courtesy of the NSW taxpayer.

There is the self-arrogating of the name “Sydney”. There is the cosy relationship with Fox Sports, whereby Roosters ease from the field to the commentary booth and studio, a promise of post-career employment that falls outside that mythical guardrail, the salary cap.

There is the barely sufferable coach Trent Robinson, a well-meaning would-be deep thinker who brings to mind the poet John Tranter’s priceless line about the scuba diver who keeps adding weights to his belt but can’t help floating back to the surface.

The almost universal belief that the Roosters rort the salary cap is tempered by the possibility that they do not. Let’s just agree that they have made the cap work for them.

When the entitled get their own way by legal means, it feels even worse for those on the outside of the magic circle.

It means the rules favour those clever and industrious enough to put their financial head-start to good use. There doesn’t need to be any corruption, and this masthead does not suggest there is.

None of this is new. But how to come to terms with it? How to still enjoy rugby league without boycotting Roosters matches?

Is it worth placing money on the Roosters for the grand final, as an emotional hedge, so you can have sort of a win either way? V’landys might agree: there’s always another good reason to have a flutter.

The answer for me was to confront it. I have many close friends who support the Roosters, and I love them all. If you were a league-loving kid in the 1970s, and you picked your team based on their exposure, you chose Manly, Easts, St George or Souths, who won every title between 1970 and 1979 (today’s cartel is nothing new).

I went with two of those friends to see the Roosters play Parramatta in round 19. I felt that this was going to be their year. They didn’t.

Before the game, we discussed pertinent rugby league matters, and as usual were sucked into the past.

What struck me was how nostalgic my friends were for the 1980s and 1990s, when Easts were often dismal. Many of their favourite players were from those years: Craig Salvatori, David Trewhella, Marty Gurr and, of course, the eternal Kevin Hastings.

My friends were still bruised by the mid-1990s, when they feared Easts would be lost to amalgamation.

Success in rugby league is just an interruption to the permanence of suffering.

During the Super League war, it was the big end of town, notably Politis and Kerry Packer, that stopped the club from jumping ship to the rebel league or merging, and set in train its rise to most-hated, or at least most-envied.

The glue of rugby league is not only the memory of suffering but the weekly dose.

We took our seats. There was a nice celebration for Daniel Tupou’s 300th game, but then Easts kept dropping the ball. Their attack was clunky. The groans of despair were very rugby league.

This will be forgotten if they win the grand final, but Roosters fans spent much of the season despairing over Daly Cherry-Evans and shouting in frustration at Siua Wong or Sam Walker or one of the Butcher brothers, gloomy about all those errors, another wasted year.

For much of that game, among the faithful, I felt like I was the only one thinking they didn’t need to worry.

As Brisbane showed last year, you don’t have to be brilliant all season, just for three weeks in spring with a bit of luck going your way. Conversely, as Penrith discovered, you can be brilliant all year but lose it all in one catastrophic hour.

The Roosters ground out a scrappy win, turning on enough power for 30 minutes to dispatch the injury-depleted Eels, gleaning another two points that kept them in the top four.

Throughout the match, I kept looking at this one man who was wearing a Roosters jersey.

He must have been 85, maybe 90. He had pale, almost translucent hair and cheekbones that shone through his thin skin. He had come on his own, which was a pretty good effort in itself.

No doubt Roosters regulars know the man.

What kept drawing me to him was the complete bliss in his face. He was so glad to be alive, to be out on a Saturday night with his beloved team.

He had lived through those, at times, ordinary ’80s and ’90s, and other awful eras, too. I felt a great solidarity with him. His face expressed the truth of rugby league: fandom is all about suffering, punctuated by the briefest flashes of ecstasy. I’d have given him a hug – except for that damned jersey.

I’m not sure if I’ve made the case, and if Sunday’s grand final goes the way the odds are predicting, most fans will have switched off before full-time.

But for me, the experience was a reminder that success in rugby league is just an interruption to the permanence of suffering, and many Roosters fans, knowing they are expected to win, will just feel relief that their team hasn’t blown their bounty of good luck yet again.

The Roosters’ suffering is a first-world problem, of course. If you want suffering, what about supporting the Dragons or the Tigers?

But those are just degrees of difference, not a fundamental break.

Everyone suffers. Even followers of the Melbourne Storm, who have the least reasons for suffering, stew over their grievances.

This exquisite pain, each year, lands finally on every club, except the one that is not eliminated. But even for that one (take Penrith), the joy is to be followed by future agonies.

Why put yourself through it? I don’t know either. But every rugby league fan knows the feeling.

On the other hand, Newcastle may win. They won’t need anyone to plead the case for their humanity.

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