‘Big man in America’: Bob Katter’s stunning QRL funding spray for Peter V’landys

The 2024 NRL season will open on March 3 (AEST) with a Las Vegas double-header featuring the Broncos, Sea Eagles, Rabbitohs and Roosters, one month after the game rejected a $50,000 Queensland Rugby League funding proposal to secure the survival of North Queensland’s historic Foley Shield.

It was the third strike in a miserable summer for relations between rugby league’s governing body nationally and in its Queensland heartland.

Earlier this week the NRL knocked back a request to contribute funds to a Maroons pre-season camp.

In November the ARLC snubbed a funding request for the Toowoomba Clydesdales in the Queensland Cup, writing in a leaked email that: “The ARLC, as you are aware, has not approved the participation … and does not consider that such participation is in the best interests of the game.”

Now the Foley Shield has been met with a similar answer.

QRL chief Ben Ikin slammed the rejection as a “kick in the guts” while North Queensland MP Bob Katter took aim at chairman Peter V’landys personally.

“The QRL’s 2024 funding position with the NRL still remains unresolved three months into the rugby league financial year, which is an awful way to treat the organisation that manages participation and pathways in the game’s most parochial market,” Ikin said.

“Having 50k worth of support rejected for the Foley Shield, while the NRL spends 10 times that on training fields for NRL teams in Las Vegas, is a real kick in the guts.”

Maverick MP Katter accused V’Landys of promoting himself in the United States while allowing the game in Queensland to fall into a state of disrepair.

“While the chairman of the ARLC (V’Landys) will be running around in America making a big man of himself … it’s about time he realises kids are not playing rugby league in schools,” Katter said.

“As is anything in regional Queensland, we’ve got another Sydney corporate who has very little background in rugby league taking away from a region which has given so much to the game.

“Slater, Myles, Boustead, Williams, Bowen, Hodges, Flegler, this is just a short list of the talent that’s come from North Queensland – home of the Foley Shield. And now we’ve got a commission effectively starving the potential of adding to that list.”

Katter’s son and Queensland State MP Robbie doubled down, accusing the Commission of “gambling away the future of grassroots football.”

“They rejected a funding application from the QRL to support one of the longest-running, foundational football competitions in North Queensland, but still found the millions to send teams to Las Vegas,” Katter said.

“Bleeding regional competitions dry while indulging in junkets overseas goes to the heart of a severe cultural problem at the heart of the ARL.

“We’re in a fight to keep these historic competitions alive in regional Queensland in the face of dwindling support from the guardians of the game based in Sydney.”

The Foley Shield celebrated 75 years in 2023 but its future is murky.

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In its heyday more than a dozen teams from regional centres across North Queensland vied for its prestigious trophy, including future Maroons Greg Dowling, Gene Miles, Collin Scott and Kerry Boustead.

The competition collapsed twice, in the late 1990s and mid 2010s, and since its 2017 resurrection has endured as a shadow of its former self as a three-way series between Cairns, Townsville and Mackay.

“In starving grassroots competitions of funds the ARL are tearing away at the fabric of football, and demonstrating they have lost sight of why many of us bleed for the game,” Robbie Katter said.

Originally published as ‘Big man in America’: Bob Katter’s stunning QRL funding spray for Peter V’landys