Edited for Accuracy

There seems to be. Even the Australian captain-elect got drunk and lost his position! But the reason for this is a mystery to me.

I’m not sure SL players are less likely to get ‘’drunk and nasty’’. Lower profile so less likely to get caught maybe.

This is the answer to yet another question that didn't require asking imo.

Virtually every SL player could wake up face down in the gutter in the middle of Leeds any number of times yet 99% of the time nobody would know or care who they were. Local news at best unless there was some especially henious element to it.

The drinking culture in the Aussie game maybe different in some ways but IMO it's no greater than in SL just better reported.

Bringing the divide of SL and NRL into is silly, each player are there own man (or woman).

Good point, also, the weather is hotter in Aus, maybe it's all that thirst quenching. I know I drink more in hot weather.
Tis no excuse for bad behavior from the NRL players though.

Drinking is also on the decrease among young people in the UK. This could also be a factor.

It's the level of celebrity involved that is the key factor. League players in Australia are at the top of the food chain sports-wise. they have more money, more media attention and more fans. This means that their behaviour is under the microscope to an extent that far exceeds what our players have to live with. It also means that there is the potential for more of an entitled "don't you know who I am attitude" that can lead to young men making fools of themselves. There is an extent to which young sportsmen believe they get a free pass on bad behaviour because their talent allows them to do so. It probably protected them a lot through school and early adult life and by the time they are highly-paid professionals they believe that this is the natural order of things.
The comparison really should be with NFL players in the States and footballers over here. These people live similar lives, in which they are told time and again throughout their early lives that their talent entitles them to anything they want. They are then put in an environment where they are constantly scrutinised by journalists who know that some of them will slip up and create a headline story.
None of which is to excuse the players involved for their poor choices and bad behaviour.

And there was me thinking that Cricket was the national sport of Australia and Australian Rules was the biggest footie code......34,818 was the average attendance at the AFL in 2018, some 19,558 more fans per game than the NRL, with AFL side the Sydney Swans being the best supported team in NSW a state that delivers 12 of the 16 NRL sides and is supposedly a RL state?

You are correct about celebrity being a factor though. Zak Hardaker is the bad boy of English RL, with Homophobic slurs, drunken brawls, assaults, drugs and now drink driving on his CV, yet maybe 20,000 people in the UK could pick him out in a line up.

Catalans bound Sam Tomkins, along with his lesser known brother were caught up in a drunken tirade against innocent bar staff to the point the bar staff were offered bribes to not report it. It’s bad enough that bar staff are made to feel scared by Catalans bound Sam Tomkins and his brother but to try and bribe her is utterly disgusting.

Also, a few years ago, half the Catalans first team were arrested for assault in Leeds.

I don’t think SL is too far behind the NRL

Less likely to get caught, I think, as no bugger knows who they are. Plus the NRL players have a lot more cash, which may make them more likely to go out and do daft things with it.

Is alcohol still the drug of choice in the English game?

Jesus how many offences had he committed!!!

Yet the NRL has the biggest TV audience. I don't underestimate the popularity of aerial ping pong in Australia and acknowledge its wider spread but in NSW and Queensland the NRL is king and players face a much higher level of scrutiny, more at a level football players get here.

One other important point about the original article cited, the "prominent columnist" is an unapologetic Yawnion troll who will never miss an opportunity to have a dig at a code that is far more popular and successful than the dying game he favours. There have been more than enough incidents of yawnion players misbehaving on the grog but these receive less attention because, the (a) their chums in the press are better at cover ups and (b) nobody gives a rat's cock about them.

NRL bad boy incidents compared to SL are more numerous than SL simply because of the greater number of players there and the interest in them. If we were going on percentages of bad apples in the sport it is probably higher in SL, in addition to our home grown idiots we import those deemed too badly behaved for the NRL.

What is your basis for saying that there are a higher percentage of bad apples in SL? Apart from Zachary Hardaker, who have been the really bad apples in SL, behaving on a similar level of nastiness to the NRL perpetrators described in the article?