Class Act: The Working-class Game Binding London And Canberra

CANBERRA — When a new British prime minister speaks to their Australian counterpart for the first time, it’s a reset of Australia’s oldest and deepest relationship.

The agenda seems obvious: Intelligence sharing. Tariffs. Hot war and simmering conflict.

If the conversation turns to sport, cricket has often been the obvious choice.

But as Andy Burnham began his introductory calls to world leaders, he and Anthony Albanese got to rugby league.

On their July 23 leader-to-leader call, the two men talked animatedly about the sport they have each spent a lifetime inside.

Albanese told Burnham he would love to see the Kangaroos, the Australian national side, tour the United Kingdom soon.

“I used to love watching the old Kangaroo Tours to the U.K.,” Albanese told POLITICO, reminiscing about “Mal Meninga’s try at Old Trafford in the green and gold” in 1990, in Burnham’s home town of Manchester, one of “those small grounds where the fans are right there on the tiny dead ball lines.”

By the end of the call, according to Burnham's office, he agreed to support Albanese’s team, the South Sydney Rabbitohs. “I’m happy to barrack for Prime Minister Burnham’s Leopards in return,” Albanese said.

It wasn’t just small talk.

The AUKUS military alliance requires London and Canberra to operate at a level of trust that treaties and memorandums can't manufacture. Delivering nuclear-powered submarines to Australia to ward off Chinese aggression will take decades of shared industrial secrets, shipyard schedules and nuclear technology.

Personal chemistry between leaders is not a substitute for institutional machinery, but it is the lubricant.

Burnham and Albanese have a shared, unfakeable claim to a working-class sport at exactly the moment both left-wing leaders are trying to hold onto working-class voters in the face of a right-wing populist challenge.

Burnham told POLITICO that deep love of the sport is “one of the many reasons the friendship between our two countries runs as deep as it does.”

"In the North of England, rugby league is in our blood. It is played and watched week in, week out, rain or shine, and I know that is a feeling shared in communities right across Australia too,” he said.

The code of collective action

Burnham’s urgent political mission is to stem the flow of working-class voters who have switched from Labour to Nigel Farage's hard-right Reform UK, in many post-industrial Northern towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and nearby Cumbria and Cheshire, where rugby league is played.

Reconnecting with these communities is critical for Burnham’s hopes of saving Labour from defeat at the next U.K. general election, which is not due until 2029 but could potentially come sooner.

And the culture of rugby league is one that aligns closely with Labour’s left-wing history and its mission in these very same parts of the country: The sport only exists because of a fight about money and class

In 1895, clubs in the north of England broke from Rugby Union over the refusal of the sport's authorities to compensate players for wages lost to injury or time away from work.

Wealthy players didn’t need the support, while working-class players decided their only option was to quit, and set up a rival code that allowed them to receive a wage for their efforts.

Players in Australia — formed out of British colonies and still firmly in the British Empire — soon followed suit, and the split never healed. Neither did the class coding.

Union, which was devised in a historic, prestigious private school, remains a fixture of British and Australian fee-paying schools.

Australia’s opposition leader, Angus Taylor, a Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey consultant, plays Rugby Union. Albanese, who grew up with a single mother in social housing, played league.

Burnham’s Northern assets

League "has a very particular culture," said Tony Collins, emeritus professor of history at De Montfort University and the author of several books on the sport. It understands itself, he said, as working-class, democratic and inclusive — and reflexively anti-establishment.

That is a useful thing for a politician like Burnham to be fluent in. Their League connections present them, he said, as ordinary blokes voters could have a pint with. "It's the man in the pub thing," Collins said.

Burnham's northern identity is one of the few assets his party has that Farage cannot replicate.

The British leader has decades of involvement in the sport, serving as honorary chair of Leigh Centurions (Now Leigh Leopards), a team dating back to 1895. In 2018 he served as president of Rugby Football League, the sport's governing body, an appointment he described as "one of the greatest honors I've ever been given.”

Burnham’s advocacy for greater investment in community-driven sport mirrors Albanese’s passion.

“Rugby league is about community. It’s about local identity,” Albanese said, and those who see the sport, its teams and its players as commodities to be traded or cut “don’t understand the sense of belonging it fosters.”

The pair talk about rugby league in the way Labor leaders were once able to talk about their own parties: mass movements marked by their sense of tightly-knit community.

Albanese's 118-year grudge

Named for hawkers who walked Sydney's streets selling wild rabbits to those too poor to afford other meat, Albanese’s Rabbitohs were founded in 1908 by working men from the city's factory belt.

The club went on to win 20 premierships between 1908 and 1971 — still a record — the year Albanese’s mother took her starry-eyed 8-year-old son to watch the sport’s Grand Final.

Albanese played the sport for practical reasons: he could reach the training ground at inner Sydney’s Redfern Oval by bus — his family could not afford a car.

His days ended after school as he climbed the Labor ranks, becoming one of its youngest officials and an MP from his early 30s. Then came Rupert Murdoch.

In 1996, the newly-elected Albanese rose in the House to condemn a Federal Court decision clearing the establishment of Super League, a breakaway Murdoch-funded competition.

Calling it a battle between the community history of the game and the “private domination of this game by an individual,” Albanese risked his political career in labeling Murdoch’s venture “un-Australian”.

Famous for brow-beating Labor politicians, Murdoch's newspapers controlled more than 70 percent of Australian news print circulation and set the daily agenda.

While Super League eventually collapsed back into the non-profit National Rugby League, the Rabbitohs did not survive the wreckage. Administrators cut the club in 1999, seeking a leaner competition and clubs with bigger fan bases and deeper pockets.

Albanese used his office to cultivate a backlash that became the largest sustained sports protest in Australian history.

As a Rabbitohs board member, Albanese tabled motions in Parliament, helped organize rallies and joined nearly 100,000 people marching through Sydney demanding their team back.

"This debate goes to the very heart of the alienation which people are feeling about our society," he told the House in Nov. 1999. He was in the Federal Court in 2001 when it ordered the Rabbitohs readmitted to the competition, finding their exclusion breached the Trade Practices Act.

Authenticity dividend

While many would find it hard to outdo life membership of their favorite team — an honor Albanese received in 2013 — he took his fandom a step further: marrying a Rabbitohs fan who shouted the club’s battle cry from the audience during a speech by Albanese.

A first date with pension fund executive Jodie Haydon followed just before Covid lockdowns, and the pair married in 2025.

Businessperson Peter Holmes à Court in 2006 bought a 75 percent stake in the Rabbitohs with actor Russell Crowe, with Albanese’s blessing. He argues the prime minister’s obsession is the rare kind voters detect as genuine.

"His love for the Rabbitohs is absolutely authentic," Holmes à Court told POLITICO. Instead of seeing a politician looking for photo opportunities, with Albanese his team pride is "like an organ, another arm."

Albanese’s fandom occasionally overwhelms his official role.

In March 2026 he joined an on-field invasion draped in club colors after the Rabbitohs’ Alex Johnston broke the NRL’s all-time try record, telling Nine Television "it was worth it to be part of history." In July he told comedian podcaster Nikki Osborne that a Souths win is "always a good aphrodisiac."

“Anti-snobbery is the new movement, right? You can't be too woke, but you also can't be too elite in a populist revolutionary world,” Holmes à Court said.

Albanese rallies to the defense of his sport at the dispatch box on the floor of Parliament, and promises to use his relationship with Burnham to “discuss getting more kids off screens and onto sporting fields in our two great countries.”

Burnham keeps it similarly practical: "Together we are delivering good jobs through our AUKUS programme, ensuring young people get a good start in life, and driving down the cost of living. I know as two progressive Labour leaders we have a close friendship ahead of us."

Albanese won’t be getting his desired Kangaroos tour of the U.K. this year.

England’s team is headed Down Under instead, for the Rugby League World Cup, beginning Oct. 15.