Sitting in the office he is just days away from vacating, on the second floor of Rugby League Central, NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo leans forward.

“I’ll share this story with you really briefly,” he says.

It’s the tale of an “outlier”; an olive-skinned Lebanese boy going to a “white” primary school in a segregated South Africa, dealing with the tragic death of his older brother, Antony, in a motorbike accident.

In an attempt to make sense of it all, a teenage Abdo would head to a dusty community field alone, with a tennis racquet in one hand and a football in the other. Imaginary goals would be kicked over the nets on the hockey field, before pummelling backhands and forehands into a cement wall.

Each shot would be aimed at a large crack down its centre, causing a deviation that would be difficult to predict.

“Ironically, when I was a young kid, I always wanted to be a professional sportsperson, like many of us do,” Abdo says.

“It was evident that I wasn’t going to make it that way, so the ability to be a sports administrator kind of goes back to kicking goals in rugby and being the NRL CEO, and then hitting against the wall in tennis and having the opportunity to lead tennis. It’s just weird how life works like that.”

Administrators often talk about sport having the power to transform lives. For Abdo, it’s not a platitude. The awkward schoolboy with the football in one hand and a tennis racquet in the other has ascended to the top of both those sports, as the departing NRL chief executive, who will soon take over from Craig Tiley as the boss of Tennis Australia.

“He is the best CEO the NRL has ever had,” says Australian Rugby League Commission chairman Peter V’landys.

The results suggest as much. Today, the NRL has 9.6 million social media followers across its platforms, an increase of two million on the 7.5 million followers in 2014. In 2019, the year before Abdo stepped up from chief operating officer to the chief executive job, the television audience was 137 million. By 2025, that figure had risen to 224 million.

The women’s game has also flourished; the Redcliffe-based Dolphins are the first of a wave of new teams introduced and the NRL has just brokered a $5.3 billion broadcasting deal, the largest in Australian sporting history.

Abdo and V’landys couldn’t be more different in their personalities, which is perhaps why they work so well together. Whenever V’landys would come up with what sounded like a half-baked idea – “Let’s take the game to Las Vegas!” – it would be Abdo’s job to make it a reality.

“His greatest asset is his calmness. It made up for my madness,” V’landys says. “I was a kamikaze pilot, he’s steady as you go. That was the difference. We got the right balance. Someone had to implement all the ideas and he was the implementer.”

V’landys, who is also the chief executive of Racing NSW, had big plans for Abdo well before he succeeded predecessor Todd Greenberg.

“His greatest asset is his calmness. It made up for my madness.”

Peter V’landys

At a racing function at the Royal Randwick’s chairman’s room, situated above the winning post in the Queen Elizabeth II Grandstand, this reporter was assigned a spot next to Abdo.

“I’ve done you a favour seating you together,” V’landys told me at the time. “Not many people know him now, but you watch, he’ll go far.”

Reminded of that comment this week, V’landys grins. “You should put that in your story.”

One of Abdo’s first big tests came shortly afterwards. Sponsors were turning away from the game in droves in 2019, a year before Abdo’s ascension to the top job, due to off-field player misbehaviour.

A mechanism introduced to protect the image of the game, the NRL’s no-fault stand-down rule, was being legally challenged by the first player suspended under it, Jack de Belin.

In courtroom 18C of the Supreme Court, Abdo and Greenberg were grilled in the witness box by one of Sydney’s most eminent silks. It wasn’t lost on those witnessing the proceedings that Abdo handled the pressure every bit as well as Greenberg.

“That was a tough situation,” says Abdo, who will turn 50 in December. “It was the first time I’d ever been in a courtroom, and it was the first time I’d ever given evidence like that. It certainly was a unique experience and probably a good training ground.”

Yet the biggest challenge was to come. Just after taking over from Greenberg, Abdo and wife Anna – his high school sweetheart – were standing at the front door of their Roseville home. They were about to take their dog for a walk when the phone rang.

It was news that the Queensland chief medical officer had shut down the state’s borders, just as a charter plane was carrying the South Sydney Rabbitohs to a game in Rockhampton.

“I handed the leash to Anna and said, ‘I don’t think I can go on this walk,’” Abdo recalls. “I don’t think I saw her again for days.”

It was the moment the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. The NRL 2020 premiership was paused after two rounds, and with no savings to fall back on, the game needed the competition to restart to avoid going broke.

“It’s probably the biggest financial challenge the game will ever face in its history,” V’landys said in March 2020. So V’landys set the audacious target of restarting the competition on May 28 of that year.

Most people thought it was madness and couldn’t be done. But on deadline day, the Broncos hosted the Eels at Suncorp Stadium and the game was back in business.

“That’s the kind of leadership that people want,” Abdo says. “You’re not going to get everything perfect all the time, but you’re going to make the bold decisions. In order to implement and execute that, you’ve got to care, and you’ve got to be in the details. You’ve got to be hungry, you’ve got to have a level of humility, and you also have to have a sense of humour.”

All of those traits have served Abdo well. After seven years as NRL boss, the closet Sea Eagles fan will leave on his terms, for one of the most prized posts in sports administration.

“My dad, when I was growing up, always used to say to me, ’When you’re speaking, be as short as possible – leave people wanting more,” he says.

“I always try to live up to that, but I don’t always get it right. However, in terms of … timing, making a contribution, and wanting to leave ensuring that people wanted more—not wanting you to go—that was probably in the background of my mind as well. I think my dad would be proud that when I speak these days, I always try to leave people wanting more and not speak for too long.”

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