New Zealand’s top netballers have used the final days of the ANZ Premiership season to warn that their home competition could vanish altogether, with no broadcast deal and no confirmed plan for 2027 even as the last games are played.
The Premiership is the only fully professional netball league left in New Zealand, and it has now taken its players into a third straight season without knowing whether the competition will exist the following year. The current television arrangement with TVNZ, which put the league back on free-to-air screens this season for the first time in years, covers 2026 only. Netball New Zealand has been funding the competition out of its own cash reserves, and players agreed to a 20 percent pay cut to help keep it running.
Silver Ferns shooter Amelia Walmsley has become the clearest voice among the players, telling RNZ that the uncertainty had reached a point where staying in New Zealand was no longer a safe bet for a young athlete. “We don’t even know if there’s a competition next year,” she said. “It shouldn’t be this bad.”
Walmsley, who has just moved from the Central Pulse to the Northern Stars, said the lack of clarity was pushing her to think about her own future ahead of schedule. “I might need to explore those opportunities earlier,” she said. “Going overseas is going to have to be something I consider.”
She was blunt about what the drift meant for the wider game. “These are people’s careers, these are people’s lives,” she said. “Players will be forced overseas, players will leave the game altogether.”
Her frustration was rooted in the gap between how the players live and how they are paid. “We train, we recover, eat, sleep, sacrifice like professional athletes because that’s what it takes to compete at an elite level but the reality is that we’re not treated like professionals and we’re definitely not paid like professionals,” she said. She was quick to add that the criticism was not an attack on the organisation. “We want to work with Netball New Zealand, we all want the same thing, and that’s a future for this sport in New Zealand,” she said. “We just need to rally together and do what we can to help make sure this sport doesn’t die in this country.”
Walmsley is not alone. She was one of four Silver Ferns, alongside Mila Reuelu-Buchanan, Martina Salmon and Maia Wilson, who publicly criticised Netball New Zealand’s silence over the league’s future in an interview with the NZ Herald. Netball New Zealand declined to be interviewed by RNZ about the situation.
The stakes are easy to see in the player market. There are now nine athletes with Silver Ferns caps playing in Australia’s Suncorp Super Netball, the richer and more stable competition across the Tasman. Several of them featured in the New Zealand league only last year before leaving, and some have had to negotiate exemptions simply to stay eligible for the national side. For a young player watching that pattern, the message is hard to miss.
The players had hoped the government might help steady the ship, but the sports minister has made it plain that will not happen. Mark Mitchell told RNZ that the future of a professional league was not his to sort out. “I don’t interfere with that,” he said. “That’s up to Netball New Zealand and the league to figure out what their future is.”
He was equally firm on the question of broadcast money. “That is commercial, that is up to Netball NZ and the Premiership league itself to be able to negotiate television rights,” Mitchell said. “Those are commercial decisions and negotiations that I wouldn’t be a part of, nor would it be appropriate for me to be a part of.” He added that “Sport NZ is not going to inject itself into a professional franchise financially.”
Mitchell has stepped into netball’s affairs before. He acknowledged wading into the saga around former Silver Ferns coach Dame Noeline Taurua last year, saying he did so “when I felt that the sport’s reputation was being damaged.” This time, he says, the problem is a commercial one for the sport to solve on its own.
That leaves Netball New Zealand facing a familiar squeeze. The Premiership is a shop window for the Silver Ferns, a pathway for the next generation and one of the few professional pathways for women in New Zealand sport. Keeping it alive costs money the governing body does not obviously have, and the players who make it worth watching are increasingly being courted by a league that can pay them properly. Every year the decision is delayed, the case for leaving gets stronger.
For now the six-team competition plays on to its finish, fast and fiercely contested, in front of a free-to-air audience that has only just found it again. Whether that audience will have anything to watch in 2027 is a question nobody running the sport has yet been willing to answer.
What do you think Netball New Zealand should do to save the ANZ Premiership? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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