One New Zealand Warriors

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Inaugural season: 1995

Home field: Mount Smart Stadium, Auckland, New Zealand

Owner: Mark Robinson

Team colors: Blue, white, green, and red

Overview

The One New Zealand Warriors are a professional rugby team in Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL). Based in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, the Warriors were established in 1995 and are the only NRL club that plays their home games outside of Australia. The club has enjoyed periods of significant success, appearing in the NRL’s grand final on two occasions (2002, 2011) as of 2023. Under NRL sponsorship regulations, the club’s official name is technically the Vodafone Warriors.

Professional rugby has a long and storied history in New Zealand, dating back to the 1909 founding of the country’s original domestic professional organization, the New Zealand Rugby League (NZRL). As the only NRL team in New Zealand, the Warriors enjoy strong fan support, high attendance numbers, and robust jersey and merchandise sales. The club has used multiple color schemes during its history, with their original jerseys displaying a combination of blue, white, green, and red. In 2001, the club revamped their home jerseys to a mostly black design before returning to their original colors for the 2019 season.

According to the Warriors’ official website, the club is the oldest and largest pro sports franchise in New Zealand. As of 2023, the Warriors were owned by Mark Robinson, a former professional rugby footballer, who purchased the team from Autex Industries, an Auckland-based building materials company, in 2019. As of 2023, Tohu Harris served as the club’s captain, and its current head coach was Andrew Webster, who led the team to a top-four finish in 2023 and received the Dally M. Coach of the Year award.

History

Rugby first appeared as an organized sport with formal, standardized rules in the mid-nineteenth century. Sports historians note that rugby’s origins are rooted in soccer, with rugby evolving out of an informal soccer variant that permitted players to touch and advance the ball with their hands. The game largely developed in Warwickshire, England, at the Rugby School, from which it takes its name. Its first official rules were published in 1845, after which the sport spread beyond England to the overseas territories of the British Empire.

Rugby proved particularly popular in Australia and New Zealand, with early professional leagues appearing in both countries during the first decade of the twentieth century. In Australia, the New South Wales Rugby League (NSWRL) became the major pro rugby circuit, while the NZRL followed in 1909 and functioned as the top pro league in neighboring New Zealand. The NZRL still exists as of 2020, but it now acts as rugby’s official governing body in New Zealand and is responsible for operating the country’s national team, which is informally known the New Zealand Kiwis.

Auckland served as New Zealand’s primary rugby hotbed for much of the twentieth century, with the city producing the majority of the country’s national team and professional players. However, most of the top New Zealand-born rugby stars went on to play their pro careers in Australia or Great Britain during this era, as New Zealand’s domestic leagues largely functioned as second-tier circuits. In 1978, Auckland began to field a team in Australia’s Amco Cup competition, which functioned as a midweek, made-for-television single-elimination tournament involving professional players. The Auckland side participated in Amco Cup play until the 1980s, prompting speculation that a New Zealand-based club might soon be established and join the NSWRL, which was the top professional rugby league in Australia at the time. In 1992, the NSWRL officially announced the arrival of the New Zealand Warriors, and the club played its inaugural season in 1995.

During the mid-1990s, Australia’s professional rugby scene was defined by the so-called “Super League war,” in which the NSWRL battled the upstart, corporate-backed Super League for live attendance and television ratings. The two-league format quickly proved financially unfeasible, leading to a 1998 merger that formed the NRL. The New Zealand Warriors transferred to the NRL in 1998, and the club remains a fixture in the league.

The club’s early NRL results were largely underwhelming. The Warriors finished in fifteenth place in the twenty-team NRL in 1998, then followed up with an eleventh-place finish among seventeen teams in 1999, before posting a disastrous thirteenth-place finish among fourteen teams in 2000. However, the Warriors’ fortunes improved beginning in 2001, when the club made its first appearance in the eight-team finals series playoff tournament. In 2002, the Warriors reached the finals series again, progressing all the way to the grand final championship match, which they lost to the Sydney Roosters by a score of 30–8. The club posted another strong performance in 2003, making the final series again before falling back in 2004 and finishing in a last-place tie.

After a series of up-and-down seasons, the Warriors returned to the grand final in 2011, but were bested 24–10 by the Manly Warringah Sea Eagles in the championship match. Following this grand final appearance, the Warriors tumbled down the standings and battled through a string of largely unsuccessful and disappointing campaigns. The Warriors finished in the NRL’s top eight again in 2018 to reach the finals series, but slipped back to thirteenth in the sixteen-team league in 2019. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the Warriors to spend most of the season on the road due to travel restrictions affecting international transit between Australia and New Zealand.

Despite mixed results on the field, the New Zealand Warriors rank among the most financially successful and stable franchises in the NRL. Sports commentators note that the Warriors enjoy very high levels of support in New Zealand, with an active and devoted fan base buoying strong merchandise sales. The Warriors play their home games at Mount Smart Stadium, a unique sports venue with a seating capacity of 47,000 built into the volcanic cone of Auckland’s iconic Mount Smart. Nathan Brown signed a three-year deal to become the Warriors’ head coach in August 2020, positioning him as the club’s bench boss through the end of the 2023 season when Andrew Webster became head coach.

In 2022, the team's principal sponsor Vodafone New Zealand changed its name to One New Zealand and the Warriors changed their name to One New Zealand Warriors. In 2023, the Warriors returned to New Zealand full-time.

Notable players

In 2019, the New Zealand-based news media company Stuff published its picks of the twenty-five greatest Warriors of all time to coincide with the team’s twenty-fifth anniversary season, naming the “Little General” Stacey Jones as the top player in club history. Among many other career highlights, Jones is best-remembered by Warriors fans for scoring a remarkable solo try in the 2002 NRL grand final.

Defender Simon Mannering finished in second place on the list, honoring a Warriors career that spanned from 2005 until his 2018 retirement. Stuff named polarizing halfback Shaun Johnson the third-greatest Warrior of all time, noting his immense natural talent and tendency to draw fan criticism for his perceived tendency to back away from play during the most intense moments of competition. Former captain Steve Price appeared in fourth place on the list, while current captain Roger Tuivasa-Sheck rounded out the top five. In 2018, Tuivasa-Sheck became the first member of the New Zealand Warriors to earn the NRL’s top individual honor, the Dally M Medal for regular season player of the year.

Other noteworthy names from the Stuff review include forward Ruben Wiki, forward Kevin Campion, and Manu “The Beast” Vatuvei, who distinguished himself as a prolific scorer during his time with the club. Over the course of his career, Vatuvei became the first player in NRL history to score at least ten tries in consecutive seasons. In 2014, Vatuvei also reached the top of the leaderboard as the New Zealand national team’s top try scorer of all time. As of 2023, Dallin Watene-Zelezniack held the club record for tries in a single season with twenty-three.

Former Warriors forward Stephen Kearney also merits mention as a noteworthy player from the team’s history. Kearney was in the Warriors lineup in 1995 when the club played the first match in its history. He remained with the Warriors for three seasons before moving to Australia, but after the end of his playing career, the native New Zealander served a highly successful stint as the head coach of New Zealand’s national team. Known as “King Kearney” during this phase of his coaching career, Kearney led New Zealand to twenty-three test wins and five victories over archrival Australia, both of which set records for Kiwis coaches. Kearney returned to the professional ranks as coach of the Warriors in 2016, but posted underwhelming results before being replaced by Todd Payten on an interim basis in 2020. The following year, the team signed the former Newcastle Knight coach Nathan Brown as head coach. However, once again the team did not make the finals and also had a seven-game losing streak between Rounds 12 and 19. In 2022, Brown was replaced as head coach by Andrew Webster.

Bibliography

Hart, Chloe. “‘This Is the Hardest It’s Going to Get’: NZ Warriors Open Up about Relocating to Australia for NRL.” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 7 Aug. 2020, www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/nz-warriors-open-up-about-relocation-to-australia-for-nrl/12531074. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Hornell, Scott. “Nathan Brown Signed as NZ Warriors 2021 Head Coach.” Last Word on Sports,8 Aug. 2020, lastwordonsports.com/rugby/2020/08/08/nathan-brown-nz-warriors-2021-head-coach/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Kearney Signs On with Warriors for Three More Years.” RNZ, 26 Feb. 2019, www.rnz.co.nz/news/sport/383384/kearney-signs-on-with-warriors-for-three-more-years. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“League: King Kearney Looks to Build Lasting Kiwis Empire.” New Zealand Herald,21 Nov. 2015, www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/league-king-kearney-looks-to-build-lasting-kiwis-empire/MWPJECHZA4W2BAESR3BYT2TWCY/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Official Website of the Vodafone Warriors.” Vodafone Warriors, 2024, www.warriors.kiwi/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Origins of Rugby.” Rugby Football History, 2007, www.rugbyfootballhistory.com/originsofrugby.htm. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

Smith, Mike. “Everything You Need to Know about New Zealand Warriors.” Best in Australia, 2019, bestinau.com.au/new-zealand-warriors-nrl/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

Thomas, Jackson. “Counting Down the Warriors’ Greatest 25 Players in 25 Years of NRL.” Stuff, 19 Mar. 2019, www.stuff.co.nz/sport/league/110537506/counting-down-the-warriors-greatest-25-players-in-25-years-of-nrl. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.