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From the concourse above Go Media Stadium’s northern bank, in the hour before kick-off, the New Zealand Warriors final game of the regular season seems almost incidental. The late-afternoon, early-spring sunshine paints the deep shadow of the Colin Kay Stand over the turf far below, where the NRLW fixture splutters to its conclusion, and the talk of fans leapfrogsbeyond the upcoming men’s game against Manly.
Paul Miller, a Warriors fan since the team’s inaugural 1995 season, leans against a metal railing, a grin playing on his lips. He won’t quite claim it to be “our year” just yet, but his wallet has already spoken for him. He will be in the stands of Sydney’s Accor Stadium come 4 October – and he anticipates that his team will be with him. “We’ve already got grand final tickets, so we’re pretty hopeful.”
For almost all of the Warriors’ previous three decades of existence, that kind of optimism might have been the definition of insanity. The team has made the NRL grand final twice before – losing in both 2002 and 2011 – but for much of the club’s history between those two peaks the team has functioned almost as a by-word for inconsistency and unfulfilled potential.
Yet since the post-Covid arrival of Australian coach Andrew Webster, the team has qualified for the post-season three times in four attempts. That consistent success has pulled fans and energy into the team’s slipstream, and it would now be difficult – if not impossible – to make the case that there is a better-loved oval-ball team in Auckland.
In 2025, an average of nearly 24,000 fans turned out to watch the Warriors’ home games. Across town rugby union team the Blues, with the advantage of playing a code that has long dominated the national discourse, managed an average of 15,000 at Eden Park as they competed for the Super Rugby Pacific crown; that same season, their competitors, the now-defunct Moana Pasifika – having failed to mount a serious challenge for the loyalty of the Warriors’ South Auckland heartland – attracted just shy of a combined 50,000 spectators across their seven home games. This season, every one of the Warriors’ nine home games was sold out – eclipsing Moana Pasifika’s season figures in any two of their fixtures.
Millers cast an eye over the parade of fans ambling past, most of them kitted out in Warriors colours – with almost as many young kids being carted on hips or shoulders as there were trays of drinks being gingerly carried in two hands. “The crowds, the Warriors crowds, are probably the best in the whole league, to be honest,” Miller says. “It’s pretty awesome the amount of people supporting them and selling out the grandstand every week.”
Deb Lovelock, her manicured fingers laced around a beverage, remembers her first Warriors game in 2005 when – freshly arrived from England and with a background in rugby union – she found herself in the stands in the company of “hardly anybody”. But she remembers feeling an energy, even in the sparse crowd of a Warriors off-year, that was “next level, incredible”. She returned to the stadium with ever-increasing frequency, drawn by “the atmosphere, the fans, the whole culture”. “Everybody’s here for a good time,” she says. “There’s never any maliciousness, never any fighting. I just think it’s a really nice culture as well for the kids.”
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And even an underwhelming performance on Saturday – a 31-30 victory against ninth-placed Manly thanks to a 78th-minute drop goal by Chanel Harris-Tavita – did little to stem the optimism of the Warriors faithful. In the game’s aftermath, Brendan Walsh, a season ticket holder since 2013, believes the “bloody awesome” season the team has put together is destined to end with the Provan-Summons Trophy leaving Australian shores for the first time in its history. “Just looking at the Warriors, they believe they can do this, and they’ve proven it week by week,” he says.
The Warriors may have been shaded on points differential by Penrith Panthers in the race for the minor premiership, but Walsh senses a growing fear emanating from rugby league circles across the Tasman that Australian dominance of the NRL is under challenge. He says that proves it is a realistic prospect – although he shows no restraint in going much further than that. “The fact is, yes, we are going to take the NRL this year. This year’s our year. For us hardcore Warriors fans, we’ve seen it building – and this year, this team, honestly, I believe.”
