Fans call rugby league tough, others might describe it as brutish. But tune in on Sunday evening for the NRL grand final between Melbourne and Penrith and the television will skew more Barbie pink than black and blue. The normally coal-coloured Panthers will be looking to win their fourth-straight premiership in their alternative strip – the first time a pink jersey will feature in a grand final.
The appearance of the Panthers’ pink strip this weekend is partly by chance. The Storm finished as minor premiers, and will therefore wear their blue and purple home jerseys in the highly-anticipated decider. Penrith’s normal black jersey is tonally too similar, so they will adopt their secondary strip.
In previous years the Panthers might have worn a mostly white strip – a traditional approach for uniform clashes and also part of the Penrith palette – but the club first adopted pink as its secondary colour in 2014, and reinstated it in 2021.
Ryan Ellul spent six years in marketing at the NRL and now runs Sport Design Australia. With the Storm’s brand having grown to be as much purple as it is Victorian navy, he says these two clubs have been pioneers in adapting to the breadth of the rugby league community.
“It comes back to everything in marketing, what does your audience want?,” he says. “The beauty about the pink jersey with the Panthers, was they realised their audience really loved it, and so instead of being like, ‘oh, pink is considerably off our brand’, they listened to their audience and doubled down on it.”
Pink has permeated rugby league in recent decades thanks to the Women in League Round which, since its inception in 2006, has prompted clubs to adopt the colour into one-off strips for that weekend. None went as hard as Penrith.
For round 14 in 2009 in a clash against Manly, Penrith wore pink shirts, shorts and socks to raise awareness of the Panthers Women In League group, which was fundraising for cancer research, Penrith Women’s Refuge and Nepean Hospital.
Shaun Mielekamp, the sports administrator who recently left his post as chief executive of A-Leagues club Central Coast to return to rugby league as Wests Tigers’ general manager of community, had been recruited by then-chief executive Glenn Matthews from Souths to become Penrith’s marketing manager.
“I did the black rabbit, white rabbit [logos] and the Armani suits and all that with with Russell Crowe, so marketing and merch and brand was really my lane,” Mielekamp says. “They brought me in to help the Panthers rediscover their brand and identity.”
The Panthers have, at different times, worn just about every colour in the rainbow. There was the blue and white of their second division days, to brown on entry into the NSWRL competition, the black, green, red and yellow of the 1990s “liquorice allsorts” and a phase of teal and something called “rust”. “They were probably a little bit lost at the time,” Mielekamp says.
The executive worked with then-Panther Frank Puletua, who is also an artist, on a board proposal to support Women in League, focused on an all-pink playing strip. The club backed the idea, but the uniform’s debut in 2009 did not go to plan – they fell to a heavy defeat.
“[Coach] Matty Elliott came to me, because he was really supportive of it and he said, ‘mate, I don’t know if we can ever do this again’. It was a tough loss in the context of the season,” Mielekamp says.
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Elliott himself can’t remember that exact conversation, but recalls the players supported the concept. “It was really an important strategy by the NRL to acknowledge the contribution of women in league,” he says. “Not having resistance to ideas like that, where some other organisations may do, I think that’s probably a sign of where the club started to change,” he says.
Ellul believes attitudes to uniforms even now can be conservative, and highlights the resistance to Manly’s rainbow jersey two years ago. “A lot of a lot of players might not say it publicly, but [back then] they probably would have not felt overly excited about pink jerseys, or even having pink on their jerseys.”
But Mielekamp says the players supported the concept because of the cause. “It was about the club meaning something,” he says. “The players did buy in, but at the end of the day, they were the ones that had to wear it and, yeah, it was hard. A few players after the loss were like, ‘man, come on, we’re a tough footy team, we we need to look a little tougher than this’.”
Despite the 20-6 home defeat, the club sold seven times as much merchandise that weekend. The following year, the Pink Panthers – either famous or infamous, depending on your perspective – were a key part of the NRL’s Women in League promotion, and the side stuffed the Sea Eagles, 40-22.
While the NRL made purple the colour of Women in League in 2014 to differentiate it from breast cancer awareness, the Panthers – rather than abandon it – adopted pink for their away jersey for that season, a significant escalation. They also refined it with black shorts and black socks.
The response was largely positive. “Once we put on the black shorts, and the black and pink combination kind of fit really nicely, it just became part of the DNA, and everybody got behind it.” Mielekamp says. “I think the players felt better that this is a good balance. No one was fearful of it anymore, because you’ve gone and done it already, it’s now something that you’re the only club that’s brave enough to do this.”
