New surf league offers 48 athletes A$89,000 each, equal pay
Chris Mater left the top job at Surfing Australia to build a four-team surf contest engineered for a 4pm television slot. The first season is January 2028, and almost everything else still has to be sold.
Start with the slot. Four o'clock, Saturday and Sunday, across eight summer weekends on Australia's East Coast.
Everything else about the Surfing Super League has been designed backwards from that appointment. Chris Mater, who ran Surfing Australia for seven years until he stepped down on 31 October 2025 and spent 19 years before that at Red Bull in Australia and the United States, launched the eight-team franchise competition publicly on 19 August 2026.
Surfing has stayed off live television for decades because contests run on a waiting period: organisers hold a window of days and call the event on when the swell arrives. A broadcaster cannot sell that.
So the league has abolished it. Four teams compete in each game, not two, each fielding four surfers — three men and one woman — who relay in and out of the water across two 40-minute halves with a 10-minute interval. Each half closes with a designated "Power Surfer" so the finish is guaranteed, and the highest team score wins.
Fifteen games at a fixed 90 minutes gives roughly 30 hours of summer content that starts and ends when the listings say it will. Seven regular rounds lead to a Grand Final for the top four. When the surf is poor, the league adjusts course length, wave targets and scoring, on the reasoning that the object is winning the match rather than earning a perfect 10.
The sharper break is with how surfers get paid. Prize money is replaced by 48 fixed contracts — eight squads of six — each worth A$89,000 for the eight-week season, about US$58,000 or £44,000, equal regardless of gender or tier. That is roughly A$4.3m of player payroll a year. Squads are drafted from four tiers, from retired greats to unranked free surfers, and every tier earns the same.
By the league's own count, only around a dozen Australians hold a spot on the World Surf League tour, the global professional circuit, and there has never been a way to be paid full-time to surf at home. Tokyo Olympic medallist Owen Wright is coming out of competitive retirement to play. Athletes keep their personal sponsors and stay eligible for WSL and ISA events outside the SSL window, so the league is pitched as an addition to the world tour rather than a rival to it.
The audience numbers Mater is selling come from two different places. Peer-reviewed research from the Australian National University values recreational surfing's direct contribution to the economy at A$2.71bn a year, built on Australian Sports Commission data showing more than 720,000 active adult surfers. Surfing Australia, on a much broader definition, counts 6.3 million participants and 7.3 million fans.
Investors are offered two doors: the league itself, or one of the eight regional franchises running from the Sunshine Coast and two Gold Coast clubs at Burleigh and Snapper down through the Northern Rivers, Newcastle, Sydney's Northern Beaches, Sydney South and Melbourne. Sponsorship is stacked the way rugby league and Australian rules football stack it — a founding principal partner plus five majors at league level, and the same again at each team — with banking, airlines and insurance the named targets, according to B&T.
The timing is not accidental. On the day SSL launched, the private equity firm EQT agreed to take a majority stake in Melbourne Storm of the National Rugby League, Australia's professional rugby league competition, subject to approval. The World Surf League is itself evaluating new investment or a sale after what it describes as substantial inbound interest.
The starting line is A$483,000 of seed capital from David Elsworth, former senior vice-president of creative strategy, content, marketing and new business at Coca-Cola Japan, per ASIC filings — about US$315,000 or £240,000. The next 18 months have to deliver franchise sales, a founding principal partner and the broadcast deal Mater says is in final negotiations. For scale: the Big Bash League, Australia's Twenty20 cricket franchise competition, took 15 years to reach its present size and is only now, contentiously, opening itself to private money.
What a founder can take from this is a sequence. Mater found an audience nobody had commercialised, then built the product around the distribution channel — a television slot — instead of hoping the channel would bend to the sport. He locked in supply first, offering surfers guaranteed money the incumbent tour does not pay to anyone outside its top dozen, and he put the investable structure in place before a single wave has been ridden.
More: the Surfing Super League