Why are the Warriors such fun?

By Benji Crossley

There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of the New Zealand Warriors and the way I experience them. They’re painful. They fail more than they succeed. They fail when they should succeed and succeed when they should fail. They lift you up and then drop you back down to earth with a shudder.  Being a Warriors fan should be water torture. So why is it not?

Why is it so much fun when the Warriors are successful? How do they capture a nation? How do Warriors slogans become such a part of our cultural lexicon that they transcend sport?

The more I think about it, the more I think the answer is that the Warriors have stopped being merely a rugby league team. They have become one of New Zealand’s most significant cultural brands.

The interesting thing isn’t simply that they win games. Plenty of teams win games. It is that the Warriors have become a way for New Zealanders to express optimism, humour, belonging and identity. They are one of the few sporting institutions capable of making large parts of the country feel as though they are participating in the same joke, the same hope and the same story at the same time.

That is why “Up the Wahs” mattered. It wasn’t really about rugby league. It was about belonging.

I think the Warriors sit in the perfect sporting and cultural sweet spot: good enough to make you believe, flawed enough to keep expectation survivable, and culturally loose enough to belong to everyone.

Firstly, it’s important to note where I sit in all of this. I am a Warriors fan and have been since 1995, but I’m not one of those diehards. I couldn’t tell you I was one of 5,000 people sitting in the south stand in the rain watching them play out a dispiriting loss to finish a season 10 and 15. But nor am I a bandwagon fan. I’m somewhere in the middle, which might actually be the best place from which to watch the bandwagon roll past.

I spent seven years overseas and, due to time zones and TV schedules, rugby league was the sport that dropped off my radar the most. I knew if the Warriors had won at the weekend and I tried to watch the Grand Final most years, but I was lucky if I watched three Warriors games a season.  When I came home, I took time reacquainting myself with the New Zealand sports scene, and just as I was ready to properly re-enter the strange experience of following the Warriors, they were whisked away to Australia for three seasons. Those COVID years were strange for fandom. They were our team, but they were somewhere else. You felt connected to them, but through sympathy, which made the frustrations of watching them lose feel different to the usual frustrations.

Then they came home for good, and something weird happened. They started winning. It was all very 2002. Andrew Webster was Daniel Anderson. Jackson Ford and Mitch Barnett were Kevin Campion. Shaun Johnson was Stacey Jones, but Stacey Jones was still there as well. Basement-level expectations made success even sweeter. The vibes were immaculate. And in true Warriors fashion, the bandwagon started moving.

The moment I felt it was ANZAC Day 2023. The Warriors had started the season 5 and 2 and headed to Melbourne for what had become their annual beat down at the hands of the Storm. This was where the wheels would fall off. We all knew it. But then something funny happened. They were winning. They jumped out to an 18–4 lead. They actually lost, but that doesn’t help my narrative, so we’ll ignore that for the moment. I vividly remember seeing the bandwagon begin to roll.

For my sins, I was still overly invested in Twitter at the time, and for all its faults it was a great way of being part of a community enjoying a sporting fixture. That night had everything: the black humour of expecting the annual trouncing, the rub-your-eyes disbelief of what was happening in front of you, the certainty with which we all proclaimed 2023 was going to be our year, and then the black humour of the inevitable and painful loss. But it was fun. It wasn’t actually painful. It arose from a sense of community built on low expectations and a willingness to relish every good moment. Quite simply, the Warriors were fun.

Stretching the metaphor, it was like you could hear every wagon in the country start moving that night. One of New Zealand’s great sporting spectacles was underway: the bandwagon. Plenty of people will remember that season. They just kept winning. Dallin Watene-Zelezniak and his mullet kept scoring spectacular tries. Shaun Johnson kicked a penalty goal with time up to cap a miraculous comeback at Shark Park. They rebounded from three losses on the bounce, the sort of run that would have ended previous Warriors teams. And while all of that was happening on the field, something bigger was building around them.

Mt Smart was full every week. You couldn’t move without an “Up the Wahs” being thrown around in conversation. Warriors merch was everywhere. In a Rugby World Cup year, the Warriors were the team we all attached ourselves to. In true Warriors fashion, they couldn’t quite finish the job. In fairness, they were probably the third-best team in the competition and that’s about where the season ended. But that was still about ten places higher than most rational people expected them to be. And not a single person could say it wasn’t fun.

The interesting thing is that 2023 wasn’t a flash in the pan. On the field, 2024 looked more like the Warriors of old: missed playoffs, frustration and a reversion to the mean. In 2025, they were back in the finals, though I liked to call them either the best bad team I had ever seen or the worst good team I’d ever seen. But culturally something had shifted. They kept selling out. They kept shifting merch. They kept creating moments. They were fun. They were everywhere.

So why has the Warriors bandwagon become such a cultural phenomenon? Why will sociologists study the origins of “Up the Wahs” in years to come? Why have the Warriors captured a cultural moment? Why should people write marketing textbooks on what they have done? It’s an entirely subjective conversation, of course, but I think four things are going on.

1. The Warriors let us enjoy sport again

First, the Warriors aren’t the All Blacks. The All Blacks are New Zealand’s team and, rightly or wrongly, a lot of our national psyche has been built around and off the back of their success. In the same way Nelson told his sailors at Trafalgar that “England expects”, New Zealand expects of the men who wear the black jersey.

Win, and they’re the All Blacks, so of course they should. Lose, and it simply isn’t good enough. The Warriors don’t suffer from those expectations in the same way. Win, great, happy days. Lose, well, of course they should, they’re the Warriors.

That freedom matters. The Warriors allow New Zealanders to enjoy sport without carrying the full burden of national expectation. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a team for enjoyment rather than worrying how a result will play around the world. It’s nice to remember that sport is supposed to be fun.

2. The Warriors belong to a generation

Second, Winfield Cup kids are now market drivers and decision makers. I’m 40. I remember having a Penrith Panthers lunchbox in the early 90s. Graeme Hughes and Graham Lowe on TV2 were an early iconic commentary duo for me. I remember joining the Warriors kids club in 1995. I remember the thrill of getting to stay up and watch Origin.

I was that impressionable 6–12-year-old through the early and mid-90s as rugby league massively grew in this country. Just as importantly, I was a teenager during the first years of Warriors success:16 when they first made the finals, 17 when they made the Grand Final. Those games were social occasions. A group of mates and I gave each other rugby league balls for our 18th birthdays where we forged team signatures on the ball. I don’t know why we did it. But we did. We were league fans and we watched a lot of NRL.

That generation, shaped by the glory days of the Winfield Cup, the Warriors’ arrival and their early success, are now making household decisions, or at least pretending to, because my wife won’t read this, and have disposable income to spend. More importantly, we are passing those memories and loyalties on. The Warriors are benefiting from the first generation that built part of its sporting identity around rugby league and is now creating family traditions of its own.

3. The Warriors became a language

Third, the Warriors were ready for the merch-and-meme economy. It’s a little bit chicken and egg, but the Warriors have either leaned into or helped create a cultural moment. For years, their never-ending kaleidoscope of jerseys for different occasions was a punch line. Forget changing your bloody jersey, just learn how to tackle.

But then vintage sports jerseys became fashionable. Sports merch became cool. And the Warriors were ready for it. They leaned in. Constant merch releases. Limited editions. Warm-up tees. The Warriors capitalised on trends and drove new ones. They made sure their product was visible.

But the bigger achievement is that the Warriors became a language. “Up the Wahs” became cultural shorthand. Saying it to someone was a way of recognising the same hope, the same joke and the same willingness to climb onto the bandwagon. Saying it while wearing the limited-edition Christchurch pre-season game warm-up tee was something else entirely. Throw in the proliferationof content creators and influencers who capitalised on the moment and you have a uniquely 2020s cultural world that just fits.

4. Rugby left the space open

Fourth, rugby union left space open. There will be plenty of leaguies, and union types, who will scream that you can’t ignore the on-field product or the comparison with rugby as part of the Warriors’ success. They’re right, up to a point. But I’m trying to avoid talking only about success. I’m trying to talk about why they are fun. Why is being a Warriors fan a special kind of fun?

For years New Zealand rugby occupied the emotional centre of our sporting identity. But expectation, professionalism and a more controlled public image created room for something looser and more enjoyable. The Warriors stepped into that space. They offered humour, unpredictability and an open invitation to join in. By the time union tried to compete in that cultural space, the Warriors had won the battle without having to fight.

The New Zealand sporting bandwagon isn’t unique to the Warriors. The Breakers, the Phoenix, Auckland FC, Liam Lawson and plenty of others have all got it rolling. But the Warriors bandwagon is without doubt our biggest and best.

That leaves the tension. Maybe one of the reasons the loss to the Dolphins felt so painful, it certainly wasn’t fun, was because we had started to believe. I had reached the point where I’d convinced myself that if it wasn’t going to happen this year, it would never happen. Maybe once expectation rises, once New Zealand expects, the fun changes.

But even if we lose this weekend, or next weekend, or in the Grand Final, we’ll still remember the fun. We’ll remember the endless rotation of halfbacks, the youngsters making their mark, the fans singing the team song, and the absurd collective hope that this time, finally, it might be different.

What do we remember about 2002 and 2003? The Grand Final? Or Ali Lauitiiti? Campion and Webcke? Mark Tookey off the back fence? For some reason, come what may with the Warriors, it’s the fun that stays with us.

Maybe that is the real answer. The Warriors are fun because they have become ours. Not just league fans’. Not even Auckland’s. Ours.

Unlike most sporting bandwagons, nobody really minds who climbs aboard. The Warriors have become one of the few institutions capable of cutting across geography, age and sporting tribes.  That is why “Up the Wahs” resonated. That is why sold-out crowds survived seasons that should have killed the vibe. And that is why the losses do not seem to matter quite as much as they should.

Once a team becomes part of a culture, the results stop being the whole story.

The Warriors are no longer just a rugby league club. They are part of the way New Zealand talks about itself. Whether they ever win a premiership or not, they have already achieved something far more difficult: they have become part of New Zealand culture.

But you know what would be the ultimate kind of fun? Winning a Grand Final.