Next year could be as bad for rugby league as 2016 was for the wider world.
While terrorism, Brexit and Donald Trump divided a big chunk of the globe's population this year, it was neither a vintage nor disastrous year for the 13-a-side code. If you support Cronulla, it was the greatest season of your life. Leeds, not so much. If you're an expansionist, the granting of the 2025 World Cup to North America will be the most exciting news in years. Anthony Milford being barred from representing Samoa for no good reason – not so good.
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Alex McKinnon to sue NRL after tackle left him paralysed
Former Newcastle Knights player has reportedly launched legal proceedings against the NRL for the tackle that left him paralysed in 2014. Vision: Channel Seven
But the Alex McKinnon legal case has the potential to be rugby league's answer to the NFL class action. Now, in modern life if people have the opportunity to sue, particularly over a catastrophic injury suffered at work, they will. This is no criticism of McKinnon. But it must be at least a possibility that aspects of what we know rugby league to be right now will disappear as a result.
Coaches and players will be cross-examined over tackling techniques and what is said at training and during the week. It's hard to see all the evidence "playing" well. The entire ethos of a sport where hurting an opponent is a genuine objective will be in the headlines for weeks and perhaps months.
Discord has previously predicted that body contact sport probably has less than 150 years left. The writer Chuck Klosterman, in his current book What If We're Wrong?, makes similar predictions about American football because of the physical dangers it presents to its practitioners.
"No UFC fan is shocked by the sight of a man knocked unconscious," he writes. "Football, however, appeals to a swath of humanity many magnitudes larger.
"It attracts people who haven't necessarily considered the ramifications of what they're witnessing – people who think they're relaxing at home on Sunday afternoon, nonchalantly watching the same low-stakes distraction as everybody else.
"So when this type of person is suddenly confronted with the realisation that what he is watching might be killing the people who are participating, or if he was to actually see a player killed on the field – which seems increasingly inevitable – he is overcome with guilt and discomfort.
![Court case: Former Knights player Alex McKinnon plans to sue the NRL.](/web/20161224202611im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/4/7/7/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtg8r0.png/1482427451612.jpg)
"The sheer scale of football's popularity likewise presents the opportunity for media grandstanding."
Despite the pessimism, Klosterman says football will be "unkillable".
"I can imagine a world in which football continues to thrive – not despite its violence but because of it. And not in some latent, unspoken way but openly, without apology".
The question must be whether rugby league is big enough to survive in a similar way. If it is completely neutered, will someone come up with a breakaway, proudly violent version of a sport already severely regionalised and, outside the NRL, critically underfunded? Or will the defiant, anti-establishment, pro-violence audience just drift to something else?
We're talking decades into the future here. Perhaps they'll go to whatever American football becomes.
The NRL seems uninterested in justifying the "National" in its title. More clubs would mean less money for each of the existing clubs and we have seen over the past month how money-hungry they are.
In the northern hemisphere, officials in England, Scotland and Wales keep getting retrenched as funding shrinks. All eggs have been placed in the basket of England winning the 2017 World Cup. If they do, what changes in an age where St George's cross is successful across a wide range of sports? And if Wayne Bennett fails, where to for a competition that players now desert even with multiple years left on their contracts?
Things aren't all bad. Thank God for the Toronto Wolfpack, who become the first trans-Atlantic sports club in history next year.
Sure, they are playing at National League One backwaters but it seems their multimillionaire owner David Argyle has more faith in rugby league's future than I have displayed in this column.
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