Netball's Path to Professionalisation
How netball moved from an amateur sport to a professional one: 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
Professionalisation first took hold in New Zealand in the late 1990s, ahead of other major netball nations. This gave New Zealand an early structural advantage in developing full-time playing pathways, even as most other countries' domestic competitions remained amateur or semi-professional for years afterward.
Building toward a trans-Tasman league
In England, the Netball Superleague was founded in 2005, succeeding an earlier competition called the Super Cup that had started in 2001 — an early step toward a more competitive, structured domestic league, though full professionalisation in England took much longer to arrive.
Across Australia and New Zealand, the ANZ Championship launched in 2008 as a trans-Tasman semi-professional league, combining clubs from both countries, with rising player salaries and growing media coverage. It ran until 2016, by which point average attendances had grown substantially from its early seasons.
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, with genuine minimum player salaries that grew significantly over its opening seasons, and the ANZ Premiership in New Zealand. 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. A genuine "professional era" for the Netball Superleague is generally dated to around 2016, and the competition underwent a further 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 — New Zealand first, then a shared Australia/New Zealand competition, 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.