Which NRL Teams Make Money? Betting Returns by Club

Every NRL punter has a club they swear the market underrates. I wanted to test that properly: across 1,235 premiership matches, which clubs actually returned a profit at kick-off prices, and did they do it as favourite or as underdog? If you came here from my this weekend's rugby tips page, think of this as the background reading behind how I price club reputations.

The headline answer is that 7 of 17 clubs made money for flat-stake backers. Canberra Raiders led at +16.7% and Gold Coast Titans propped up the table at −22.7%. The catch is that a club's return in one season had a correlation of just −0.02 with its return the next. That is effectively no relationship, so this is a map of where value sat, not a promise of where it will sit.

1Canberra top the club table, Gold Coast sit bottom

This chart shows what you would have made backing one club in every match at the kick-off price, after 5% commission. The baseline matters first. Backing every team in every match returned −1.9% across 2,444 team-bets, which is roughly the cost of doing business against a fairly efficient market.

Above that line, Canberra Raiders at +16.7% stand well clear, with Brisbane Broncos on +8.1% and Dolphins on +7.2% behind them. Below it, Gold Coast Titans at −22.7% are the clear outlier, with St George Illawarra Dragons on −12.6% and Canterbury Bulldogs on −10.3% also costing backers plenty.

What I take from this is that the spread between clubs is far wider than the market margin. Loyalty to the wrong club over several seasons hurts much more than the commission does. The Dolphins figure also comes from a shorter run, because they only joined in 2023.

2Profitable clubs won more often than their prices implied

Here each club's average implied chance at kick-off sits beside how often it actually won. Canberra Raiders won 53.7% of matches against 49.1% implied, and that gap is the whole source of their profit. Penrith Panthers did something similar from a much higher base: priced as heavy favourites and still winning a little more often than the price suggested.

At the other end, Gold Coast Titans won 31.2% of matches against 38.2% implied. Wests Tigers fell short by a similar margin. The market kept giving these clubs more credit than their results justified.

This is the forward-pack lesson I keep relearning. Prices lean on reputation and recent headlines, while win rates come from the dull work in the middle of the field that holds up over eighty minutes. Small gaps of a couple of points, like the Warriors or Broncos show here, are well within what chance can produce.

3Almost all the club profit came at underdog prices

Splitting each club's matches at a kick-off price of 2.00 changes the story completely. As a sub-2.00 favourite, Canberra Raiders returned −12.2% over 73 matches. As a 2.00+ underdog they returned +45.1% over 74. Brisbane Broncos and Parramatta Eels show the same shape: losses as favourite, healthy profit when the market wrote them off.

Penrith Panthers broke exactly even at 0.0% across 140 matches as favourite, which says the market priced their dominance almost perfectly. Their +65.7% as underdog comes from only 15 matches, so I treat it as a curiosity rather than a pattern.

The losing clubs mirror this. Gold Coast Titans lost at both ends, −29.8% as favourite and −20.3% as underdog, while South Sydney Rabbitohs scraped +0.7% as favourite but bled −20.8% when the price drifted. For me the useful signal is less about the club and more about the price band: the market has tended to be harsher on capable underdogs than it should be.

About the writerCharlotte Hayes

I'm Charlotte Hayes, based in Sydney, and I write the rugby match tips at bettips.vip — where the set piece and the bench decide what the scoreboard only hints at.

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