A Whirlwind Visit to the Papua New Guinea Chiefs
After Jarome Luai and Alex Johnston were sold the dream and signed on the dotted line with the Papua New Guinea Chiefs, I flew over on a whirlwind 48-hour trip this week to see what all the fuss was about. Any club that has the heavy backing of a charismatic Prime Minister and tax-free dollars to splash is going to have no problem making headlines, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and see what it was really like over there.
Yes, they’ve got a couple of big-name players and Michael Chammas is a fantastic operator who is doing an outstanding job putting the jigsaw together, but what I saw in the two days I spent over there convinced me that there are still plenty of major issues to overcome.
The first thing that hits you when you get off the plane in Port Moresby is the heat and humidity. Within five minutes I was sweating through my shirt. The Chiefs are going to find out that those conditions aren’t for everyone. Visiting sides are going to find it even harder to adjust, so it may end up being the home side’s super power on game day.
After landing, I was given a tour of the resort that the players will be living in. I saw the stadium and the vacant lot of land next door that has been acquired for a Centre of Excellence. There’s a huge amount of construction work to do in a short amount of time to bring the Chiefs to life by the time their players start to arrive on November 1 next year.
Players, staff, and their families will live at the Airways Hotel, which has been around since the 1980s but got a major renovation in 2016. The part of the resort that the Chiefs will be living in still hasn’t been built yet—it’s literally still a hole in the ground. Their plan is to build a tower of one, two, and three-bedroom apartments. In other words, teammates, coaches, and staff will literally live on top of each other. Think of the COVID bubble the NRL operated within on the Gold Coast during the lockdown period and extend the timeline, and that is effectively what the players are going to be signing up for.
The resort is nice, but it’s not luxury in terms of “wow, this place is amazing.” That alone won’t convince too many players and their partners to take the plunge. The other thing about it is that everyone is at really close quarters, and for an NRL team environment to be like that, there will inevitably be problems that crop up. If there are tensions between players, and you’re kidding yourself if you don’t think those exist within any NRL team, they’ll be exacerbated by proximity.
Within the resort, there is only one main pool area. On days off, there’ll be players and staff on day beds within metres of each other. Any type of conflict will be magnified, and it’s not just the players, it’s their partners and kids. Again, not everyone is going to be friends, but they’ll always be forced to play happy families.
Sure, you can leave the compound; it’s not a prison. In saying that, it’s not like Australia. You can’t just close the door behind you and head out for a spontaneous outing. Safety concerns are real and they’re not just magically going to go away. Every time you leave the resort, you’re going to have to be with a driver and a security guard because the players will be treated like heroes. Like gods. They’ll be mobbed wherever they go. I’m just a reporter, and everywhere I went over there it was like being a celebrity—so many people wanted to be around you. At times when we got out of our van to film, one of the security guards told me to hand him my phone and watch. Our other security guard followed my cameraman and I closely, telling us where we could and shouldn’t go.
There is a significant divide between rich and poor over there. Crime is a reality that you have to deal with sensibly, and that will be the case for the players too.
Chiefs CEO Lorna McPherson—a white Scottish woman—told me she’s never feared for her safety during her 17 years living in PNG. She drives herself everywhere without a security guard and insists talk about safety issues in Port Moresby—one of the world’s most dangerous cities—have been blown out of proportion.
Still, the life of any player who signs up with the Chiefs will change drastically. You’re eliminating a lot of players from your roster if they don’t want to live on top of each other, they don’t like the heat, and if their wives and families don’t want to go. So the Luai signing isn’t going to be a silver bullet. Nor is the inflated salaries.
There are also some massive infrastructure challenges ahead. They want to add 9,000 seats more to the stadium in the next 18 months. Even if they are able to achieve that, there is currently no public transport to get fans to and from games played at night, which is the most sensible time to play in Port Moresby.
They’ve acquired the land next to the stadium for the Centre of Excellence. They’re now out to tender—they want that to be ready by November 2027, so they’re going to have to move fast.
One thing that is going to make those challenges easier to get past is the unequivocal support of Prime Minister James Marape. I had a 45-minute sit-down with him; he’s a fascinating fella and he loves his footy. He’s very clever and he’s clearly got a lot of passion and charisma. Nine paid for my flights, accommodation, and expenses to go over to Papua New Guinea, but on the same trip were a bunch of rugby league influencers with popular podcasts who were paid for by the Chiefs. The likes of Willy Mason and James Graham were there to gather content for their podcasts, and the PM had them eating out of the palm of his hand.
He can capture a room; he sold the dream to Luai and AJ, and there’s no doubt people will buy in. It is definitely more than footy over there.
During my trip, I caught up with Joey Grima, who is heading up pathways for the Chiefs and has been over there for a few years already. He walked me through the program they’re delivering, and they are putting 960 kids a year through their academy. That will have a big impact on making positive social change, which is probably the biggest positive that bringing an NRL club to Papua New Guinea will have.
To be part of the academy, you have to go to school—that’s a compulsory condition the Papua New Guinea Rugby Football League are putting on it. They go through two sessions a week for 22 weeks of the year, so it’s a significant program, but there are also significant hurdles in talent identification because of how difficult it is to navigate the remote and mountainous areas outside the city.
From the perspective of living in Sydney, we drive to the Central Coast, and it takes us an hour from the CBD. Everything over there is a flight because of the highlands and the terrain.
The Prime Minister’s mission is to bring in 1 million members. That’s a crazy figure, but the truth is that there’s 10–12 million people who live over there, and it could be a lot more because it’s so difficult for them to track the population given how tribal it is.
It’s a very different ball game to anything we’ve got in Australia. It’s an exciting project, but it’s not going to be all smooth sailing, and there’ll be a lot of players who don’t have their heads turned by the pay packets.
The Luai and Johnston signings were a positive step in the right direction. There’s so much more still to do to make it a success.
True to their name—the Chiefs are going to need strong leaders to ensure they set solid foundations for the NRL’s most fascinating franchise. With successful businesswoman McPherson and tenacious GM of football Chammas in charge—PNG is in good hands. Throw in the unwavering support from the Prime Minister who used his own private jet to fly Luai and his family back to Australia—anything is possible.
It’s rugby league’s boldest experiment, and I’m as intrigued as any other footy fan to see how the next 22 months play out.
