Netball's Path to Professionalisation
How netball went from amateur to professional: New Zealand's early lead, the trans-Tasman ANZ Championship and the domestic leagues that followed.
For most of its history, netball was played entirely on an amateur basis — professional leagues, salaries and full-time contracts are a relatively recent development, arriving decades after equivalent structures existed in many men's sports.
New Zealand's early lead
New Zealand set up its first franchise-based elite competition in 1998: the Coca-Cola Cup, with ten teams, later succeeded by the National Bank Cup. The ANZ Premiership's own history describes that period as bridging the amateur and semi-professional eras.
Building toward a trans-Tasman league
In England, the All England Netball Association's Super Cup ran from 2001, and was replaced by the Netball Superleague from the 2005–06 season — a step toward a more competitive, structured domestic league, though professionalisation in England took much longer to arrive.
Across Australia and New Zealand, the ANZ Championship launched in 2008 as a trans-Tasman league with five teams from each country — in the ANZ Premiership's words, the "dawning of the semi-professional era for netball". It ran until 2016.
The 2017 split
When the ANZ Championship ended, Australia and New Zealand each launched their own fully domestic professional competitions in 2017: Suncorp Super Netball in Australia and the ANZ Premiership in New Zealand, which describes itself today as a professional competition. Both remain among the strongest professional leagues in the sport today.
England's later push
England's domestic professionalisation lagged behind Australia and New Zealand for years, and the competition underwent a significant relaunch in 2025 — see Netball Super League — explicitly framed as a renewed push toward a fully competitive, commercially sustainable professional league.
Why professionalisation took this path
Netball's professionalisation is closely tied to its history as a sport built for women — women's sport more broadly has generally professionalised later and more slowly than equivalent men's competitions, with sponsorship, broadcast deals and sustainable salaries all arriving later than they did in longer-established men's leagues. Netball's specific timeline — franchise competition in New Zealand from 1998, then a shared Australia/New Zealand league from 2008, then a 2017 split into two strong domestic leagues, with England catching up afterward — reflects where domestic investment and broadcast interest built up fastest.
Where to go next
See Suncorp Super Netball, ANZ Premiership and Netball Super League for the current durable detail on each competition's format, and history of netball for the sport's broader international development.
Sources
All information on this page is given to the best of our knowledge at the time of writing (October 2026), after referring to the sources below. Where sources disagree, we say so on the page.