The Warriors are chasing their first NRL premiership with a Penrith-influenced coach, five senior players with Panthers connections and a development system remarkably similar to the one Gould once prescribed.
In 1994, North Sydney Bears fullback Ivan Cleary received a phone call from Phil Gould. Affectionately known as Gus, Gould had already become a legendary rugby league coach by his early 30s. He asked Cleary to join him at the Sydney Roosters, where he had just accepted a role as head coach. While the duo had no idea then, that phone call would be the beginning of a chain of events eventually leading to the Warriors – the then-new club from across the Tasman – becoming one of the competition’s strongest clubs over three decades later.
The Warriors have just finished the National Rugby League (NRL) regular season second on the premiership ladder. With the finals series beckoning, the club is among the experts’ favourites to take out the title for the first time in its 30-year history. But it hasn’t always been like this for the Warriors.
In May 2011, Gould joined the Penrith Panthers – a club desperate to turn its fortunes around – as their general manager of football. He would spend the next five years working on rebuilding the club’s development pathways. That same year, Cleary – who spent four years at the Roosters under Gould, before joining the Warriors in 2000 – was now head coach at the Warriors, leading the club to its first grand final in nine years. Following the grand final, Cleary announced he was heading to Penrith as the head coach, where Gould’s rebuild of the club was just beginning.
The duo would spend the next four years working together closely, before Cleary left in 2015, eventually returning to Penrith in 2019. Gould left the club that same year, claiming his job was done. The Panthers would go on to win four premierships in a row from 2021-2024, becoming the greatest club in the game’s modern era. In the lead up to their first premiership of the four-peat, current Warriors head coach Andrew Webster was hired as an assistant coach to Ivan Cleary.
Webster had been an assistant coach with the Warriors from 2015-2017, before joining the Wests Tigers, where Cleary was subsequently named as head coach a month after Webster signed with the club. The duo would spend two years together at the Tigers, before Webster eventually followed Cleary to Penrith in 2020, the year before the club’s historic run began.
That same year, Gould was signed by the Warriors as a consultant. He spoke about the club’s potential to replicate the development systems he had implemented in Penrith, or “farming the farm”, as he called it. Gould said New Zealand should be to the Warriors what Western Sydney is to the Panthers – a breeding ground for local talent that would rise together in the ranks, eventually playing in the top side. The vision was clear: the Warriors needed to set the foundations for the club’s redevelopment of its pathways programme, similar to what Gould had implemented at Penrith.
“I think New Zealand and Western Sydney are pretty similar, especially with the multicultural influences. There are lots of Māori and [Pacific] Islanders there too. West Sydney is sort of like South Auckland,” says James Fisher-Harris, current co-captain of the Warriors.
Born and raised in Northland, Fisher-Harris was invited to Penrith as a 17-year-old by Gould. He would go on to become one of the club’s greatest forwards of all time, winning multiple premierships with the Panthers and captaining the New Zealand international side, before signing with the Warriors in 2025.
“I had never had a preseason before [arriving at Penrith],” Fisher-Harris says, laughing.
In 2022, a year after Gould’s departure from the Warriors, the club announced it had signed Webster on a three-year contract as the team’s head coach. It had also committed fully to the philosophy of nurturing and retaining local talent, announcing the return of its SG Ball Cup (under-19) side and fielding their own reserve grade side in the New South Wales Cup.
The club signed former head coach Andrew McFadden as its general manager of recruitment, pathways, and development in 2022. The development network would expand further under McFadden’s leadership, with the Warriors adding teams in the Harold Matthews Cup (under-17) and Jersey Flegg Cup (under-21), effectively giving the club a complete pathway from the early teenage years through to the NRL. Additionally, in October 2025, the Warriors partnered with the Auckland Rugby League and New Zealand Rugby League to launch a refreshed representative pathways framework to boost the domestic pathway to the NRL and NRLW.
In his first year in charge of the Warriors, Webster won the Dally M coach of the year award, with the side finishing fourth and hosting its first home semi-final since 2007. Key players in that campaign included former Penrith players Wayde Egan, Dallin Watene-Zelezniak, and Te Maire Martin – with the first two having spent significant time in the Gould-led Penrith junior development system and Martin making his NRL debut at the Panthers.
Five senior players in the Warriors squad have either directly or indirectly benefitted from Phil Gould’s rebuild of Penrith, alongside the team’s current head coach. There is an exciting group of young local players in the top side who have had the fortune of coming through the ranks together at the Warriors, something Gould said the club needed six years ago.
“We’ve developed our young guys from the start of the 2023 preseason. You wouldn’t have been able to tell me all these young guys were definitely going to be as dominant as they have, but if you believe in them and put time into them, they grow and they become those types of players,” Webster says.
The Warriors are now reaping the benefits of the “farming the farm” approach. The club sold out every one of their home matches in New Zealand for the 2026 regular season after becoming first NRL club to do so in 2024. There is a strong stream of local talent from around the country in the Warriors development system. They are heading into the finals as one of the favourites to take it all. The only thing left for them to do now, is win the club’s first title.
