For the first time in two decades Super League woke up on Sunday morning with a name other than Wigan Warriors, St Helens or Leeds Rhinos as its champions. Hull KR are the first new winners of the competition since 2004, and only the fifth in history to be crowned at all.
For the Robins this is a watershed moment. Without a major trophy in 40 years before this season, they have now completed a historic treble in 2025 and are arguably Super League’s premier club side. For the wider competition as a whole, though, their success could not have come at a better time.
Sport thrives on unpredictability so the fact that three teams have dominated the past 20 years of Super League has left many feeling the need for a new force to rise. With the competition expanding to 14 teams in 2026 – the new-look lineup will be announced in the coming days – there is a need for fresh stories and fresh clubs to dominate the airwaves.
Rovers have not only ended a closed shop this year, they have hammered down its doors with a Robin-shaped battering ram. That feels fitting after a season that has delivered the promise of several new clubs coming to the fore and looking as if they can now emulate the new champions and themselves smash Super League’s glass ceiling.
Castleford, Catalans Dragons, Hull FC, Warrington and Salford have reached at least one grand final, fallen short and then fallen back into the mire: all five finished in the bottom half this season. But with Hull KR now on top, there is a clear belief that a new, expanded Super League can yield more new champions.
There has been that long-craved unpredictability and feeling of freshness throughout this year that, aside from the obvious story of Hull KR’s rise to greatness, is an immense positive for Super League going into 2026. Leigh Leopards’ third-placed finish shows they are not too far behind the Robins, while Leeds rose from eighth last year to fourth this season.
Wakefield Trinity were playing in the Championship in 2024 but they made the Super League playoffs after promotion, underlining that clubs – including Toulouse and York, who are vying for promotion this time around – do not simply have to be content with scrambling to avoid finishing bottom of Super League.
But good luck wrestling the title away from a Hull KR side in no mood to be regarded as a flash in the pan. “We’ve got a saying at the club that your rent is due every day,” their captain, Elliot Minchella, said. “No matter what you’ve achieved up to that point, you’ve still got to pay your rent and work hard.
“Regardless of what you’ve done, you don’t sit back and take your foot off the gas. If anything, you’ve got to work even harder because you’re there to be chased. We’ll be chased next year but I’m looking forward to it.”
The majority of this squad is contracted long term and their biggest problem is how long they can keep their coach, Willie Peters, from the lure of the National Rugby League. Peters’s stock has risen further with this triumph but his immediate focus in 2026 will be a World Club Challenge against Brisbane Broncos. That has been pencilled in for 20 February but the venue is yet to be determined. It will be in England, with Rovers’ Craven Park home and the MKM Stadium, home of Hull FC, options at this stage.
Irrespective of that game, Rovers are now a bona fide force in British rugby league. They finished bottom of Super League as recently as 2020 but players such as Minchella and the final’s undoubted star, Mikey Lewis, have heralded a new era not only for Hull KR but for Super League as a whole. Suddenly, anyone has the right to believe it could be their year in 2026.
The action is not over this year, though; in fact, it is just beginning. Several players from the Super League champions look likely to be included in Shaun Wane’s 24-man England squad for this autumn’s Ashes. The squad will be revealed on Monday lunchtime, with the first Test at Wembley on 25 October.
Lewis is certain to be selected and based on what he has done this year – especially in the grand final – it would be a major surprise were he not in the side for the first match of the series. Should England manage to win the Ashes for the first time since 1970, it could catapult league to new heights in this country after Rovers’ domestic success.
