A Super title and 25,000 crowds: How Reds plan to make Queensland a powerhouse

September 5, 2026 — 9:15am

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Queensland Reds chief executive David Hanham and general manager of high-performance Sam Cordingley are basking in the warmer relationship between Rugby Australia and New Zealand Rugby.

Talking to the Herald from their offices in Brisbane, they expressed confidence that RA heavies Phil Waugh and Dan Herbert, and New Zealand counterparts Steve Lancaster and David Kirk have provided the stable platform that rugby needs at Test and Super Rugby level.

There is a Bledisloe Cup Test coming to Brisbane on Anzac Day, a conviction among Super Rugby executives that 10 teams is the right number and confidence that the competition’s best team, the Hurricanes, would stack up well against any club side in the world.

“Some of the best players in the world are playing in Super Rugby,” said Cordingley, who played a key role in the recruitment of new Reds coach Vern Cotter.

“If you put the Hurricanes up against any teams in the north, that would most likely be a really good result … I don’t think it’s a question of talent [in Super Rugby], it’s a question of consistency.”

But those more favourable bigger-picture conditions are only one reason why the Reds are, in cricketing parlance, determined to play on the front foot.

Unlike their Super Rugby peers in Australia and New Zealand, the Reds have recorded a series of operating profits, participation numbers in the state are strong and 12 Reds were named in the Wallabies squad to face Argentina this weekend.

As a result, Queensland have unambiguously set their sights high.

“We’ve set a five-year vision for the QRU [Queensland Rugby Union] to build ourselves and build Queensland back to being one of the best rugby provinces in the world,” Hanham said.

“And part of that is making sure that we’ve got a winning team and a successful football program. Obviously, you can’t be a strong rugby province without winning on the field.

“Keeping in mind when we talk about a rugby province, that’s the community game and the professional game that we’re responsible for.

“In five years, we want to grow the game. We’re about 90,000 players [in Queensland]; we want to get to 100,000.

“We want the Reds to be a consistent top-three team, and in that period of time to be winning a title. We want our crowds at Suncorp to get from averaging 15,000 back up to 25,000.

“A big part of that is maintaining financial sustainability as a business, and getting the Ballymore development under way. If someone said, ‘What does the best rugby province look like?’ That’s how we define success.”

There are many layers to a project of such ambition, especially in a complex sporting landscape such as Australian rugby.

While the New Zealanders are well into the National Provincial Championship, their domestic rugby competition that runs for 10 rounds before three weeks of play-offs, Australian clubs are about to embark on the four-week Super Rugby AUS.

Cordingley, who played for the Ballymore Tornadoes in the short-lived, eight-team Australian Rugby Championship in 2007, acknowledges that lack of exposure for the next tier of players remains a challenge.

“I can only speculate on where we [Australian rugby] may have been if we’d retained that competition [ARC] relative to the New Zealand NPC … or what the Currie Cup has delivered in South Africa,” he said.

“Credit to Rugby Australia in terms of being able to invest in that product [Super Rugby AUS] … but I still think we’re short of where we need to be.”

That has forced the Reds to be creative, in high performance and commercially.

After Super Rugby AUS, they will embark on a four-game tour of Japan and Italy, courtesy of their partnerships with Saitama Panasonic Wild Knights and Benetton Rugby in Treviso.

Hanham says the Reds have found a way to make these tours “cost neutral”, and Cordingley has been the driving force behind them as a way to accelerate the development of the Reds’ non-Wallabies.

In echoes of former Wallaby Ben Darwin’s theories on cohesion, Cordingley says the tour games are not solely about accumulating playing minutes, but increasing what the Reds call “shared experience matches”.

“It’s not just playing games of rugby,” Cordingley said. “We have created these partnership opportunities with Benetton and Panasonic to be able to provide experiences for our players and staff collectively to get to what we target – around 30 shared experiences matches a year to be competing with the French Top 14 clubs and the English Premiership.”

The Reds are confident Cotter’s arrival will also be step towards their title ambitions, but they also hold firm views about Super Rugby’s structure.

There is near-constant chatter about change or expansion, with Japan often mentioned as a possible entrant.

Hanham, however, urged caution.

“There is a very strong view – I believe shared by the clubs and unions – that we’ve got the right number of teams,” he said. “How do we improve the quality of the competition, in the sense of not only the onfield product, but how we market and promote it?

“We’ve now got an Anzac Bledisloe, which I think is a great tent-pole event, like State of Origin is to NRL. We’ve got Super Round, which was a great success in Christchurch … I feel like we’ve created a product that’s going to be successful.

“My personal view is we don’t want to be messing with the integrity of that. However, there is an avenue to enable other competitions to join the Super Rugby Pacific competition at the appropriate times, where you’re not changing the number of teams every year.

“That’s probably been one of Super Rugby’s challenges – it’s constantly changed, too often, over a long period of time.

“So, maintain integrity, keep the competition strong and then an opportunity to bring the Japanese competition in at the appropriate time – that will be down the track at some point, I assume, if all the stars align.”

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Paul Cully is a rugby columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.AdvertisementAdvertisement