A trip to Papua New Guinea changed something in Connor Watson. He came back with a new perspective — and a message the NRL needs to hear.
There are trips that entertain. And then there are trips that transform.
Connor Watson went to Papua New Guinea expecting to see rugby league. What he found was something far deeper — a love for the game so raw, so unfiltered, so completely untouched by the commercial machinery that surrounds the modern NRL, that it stopped him in his tracks.
“I was genuinely stunned,” Watson said, the words still carrying the weight of what he witnessed. “You see it on television, you hear people talk about how much the game means over there. But nothing prepares you for actually being there, standing in front of those crowds, looking into those faces.”
A nation that bleeds rugby league
Papua New Guinea does not merely follow rugby league. It breathes it. In a country where the sport is woven into the very fabric of national identity, the arrival of NRL players is not a PR event — it is a pilgrimage.
Watson, who has carved out a reputation at the Roosters as one of the competition’s most versatile and committed players, has seen his share of passionate crowds. But nothing in Sydney, nothing in any NRL arena he has walked into, quite matched what greeted him on the other side of the Coral Sea.
Children who had never owned a jersey clutching hand-drawn signs. Elders who travelled hours just to be in the presence of the game they loved. Young men and women whose eyes burned with a hunger for rugby league that Watson found both humbling and electrifying.
“These people don’t have what we have,” he reflected. “They don’t have the stadiums, the facilities, the resources. But they have something a lot of us in the NRL have probably forgotten — they have pure love for the game. No agenda. No politics. Just love.”
A statement that demands to be heard
It was in those moments — surrounded by thousands of passionate faces in the PNG heat — that Watson arrived at a conclusion he felt compelled to share publicly.
Papua New Guinea belongs in the NRL.
Not as a novelty. Not as a feel-good headline. As a fully-fledged, permanent member of the competition.
“I’ll say it clearly,” Watson said. “PNG deserves a team in the NRL. What I saw over there — the passion, the numbers, the talent — it’s undeniable. If the NRL is serious about growing this game, about what rugby league can be in the next twenty years, then PNG has to be part of that conversation. Not on the edges of it. At the centre of it.”
It is a statement that will resonate beyond the Roosters’ dressing room. The question of a PNG franchise has long circled the competition’s expansion discussions, gathering momentum in recent years as the Dolphins’ successful entry into the league proved the appetite for growth is real.
Watson’s voice adds to a growing chorus — players, administrators and fans who believe the NRL’s next great frontier is not in another Australian city, but in a nation where rugby league is not just a sport but a cultural cornerstone.
More than a footballer
What strikes you about Connor Watson’s PNG experience is not simply what he said, but what it revealed about him.
It is easy, in the relentless week-to-week grind of an NRL season, to lose sight of the bigger picture. The training sessions blur into game days, the game days blur into recovery, and the cycle repeats until the season’s end. Watson’s trip broke that cycle.
He came back different — more grateful, more purposeful, more aware of the platform his career affords him. The Roosters have long prided themselves on producing players of character as much as talent. Watson, in speaking out about what he saw, reminded everyone that sometimes the most important things a footballer can do happen nowhere near a football field.
Papua New Guinea moved him. And now, he wants the NRL to be moved too.
“Go there,” he said simply. “Go there and tell me it isn’t time.”
Hard to argue with that.
