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It took the Dolphins just four seasons to go from a blank NRL team sheet to September. What began with Wayne Bennett, a collection of hardened veterans and a handful of calculated gambles has evolved into the club’s first finals team — and one that looks very different from the side that started it all.
When the Dolphins were awarded the NRL’s 17th licence in October 2021, the new franchise carried the history of a Redcliffe club founded in 1947 but deliberately entered the competition without the suburb in its name.
The ambition extended well beyond the peninsula. NRL chief executive Andrew Abdo said the Dolphins could reach from Brisbane’s northern corridor through Moreton Bay and towards the Sunshine Coast, giving the club a much broader footprint from which to build its support.
Wayne Bennett was appointed foundation coach eight days later and faced the considerable task of assembling an NRL roster from scratch. The recruitment strategy that followed leaned heavily on experience: Felise Kaufusi became the inaugural signing before Jesse and Kenny Bromwich and Mark Nicholls joined a forward pack carrying premiership success, representative experience and hundreds of first-grade games.
Alongside them were two younger recruits whose importance would become clearer with time. Isaiya Katoa was only 18 when the Dolphins signed him from Penrith, while Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow arrived from North Queensland with an opportunity to establish himself at fullback. Four seasons later, both are central figures in the first Dolphins side bound for September.
An Opening That Changed Expectations
Few expansion teams get an introduction quite like the Dolphins did.
More than 32,000 people were at Suncorp Stadium on 5 March 2023 when they faced the Sydney Roosters, with the occasion carrying an added connection through Arthur Beetson, the rugby league Immortal who had represented both Redcliffe and the Roosters.
The Dolphins won 28–18 and quickly showed it was more than an opening-day flourish, winning seven of their first 12 matches and sitting sixth after Round 13. The demands of a full NRL season eventually exposed the limitations of a new roster, however, and they finished 13th with nine wins and 15 losses, scoring 520 points while conceding 631.
Thirteenth place hardly suggested an immediate finals contender, but the first season had answered the more fundamental question confronting any expansion club. The Dolphins had demonstrated quickly that they could compete at NRL level, and expectations began moving accordingly.
One Game Short — and the End of the Foundation Era
By the end of 2024, credibility was no longer the benchmark.
The Dolphins entered Round 27 knowing victory over Newcastle would put them into the finals in only their second season. Instead, the Knights won 14–6 and claimed eighth place, leaving the Dolphins 10th with an 11–13 record.
The defeat also drew a line under the club’s foundation era. Bennett departed after two seasons, Kristian Woolf moved from assistant to head coach and inaugural captain Jesse Bromwich retired.
Bennett later credited Bromwich, his brother Kenny, Kaufusi and Nicholls with helping establish the standards required inside a new NRL club. Their recruitment had given the Dolphins something an expansion side could not develop overnight: players who already knew what successful NRL environments looked like.
Woolf inherited those foundations, but the next stage required the Dolphins to become less dependent on the generation recruited to establish them.
The 721-Point Season That Still Wasn’t Enough
The answer in 2025 was spectacular in attack and costly at the other end of the field.
In Woolf’s first season as head coach, the Dolphins scored 721 points, the best attacking return in the NRL, while Jamayne Isaako led the competition with 278 points. For all that attacking production, they conceded 596 and finished ninth with a 12–12 record.
According to rugby league historian David Middleton, they became the first team since Western Suburbs in 1924 to lead the competition in points scored and still miss the post-season.
The problem became particularly stark late in the season. Across successive matches against the Roosters, Broncos and Sea Eagles, the Dolphins conceded 36, 38 and 58 points. A side capable of scoring at a premiership-threatening rate had been left outside the eight because it could not consistently contain opponents.
That contradiction became one of the defining lessons carried into 2026. The Dolphins did not need to reinvent an attack that had already led the competition; they needed to become considerably harder to beat.
Woolf Builds a More Complete Dolphins Side
Defence, fitness and physical resilience were consequently prominent themes heading into Woolf’s second season, but the change since 2023 has involved considerably more than tightening the numbers without the ball.
Katoa has developed from an 18-year-old investment into the halfback entrusted with directing the team. Tabuai-Fidow has become one of the club’s defining players, while Max Plath went from joining the Dolphins in 2023 and making his NRL debut that season to winning the 2024 Arthur Beetson Medal and making his Queensland debut in 2026.
Isaako’s career revival has added another strand to that development, while the roster has been strengthened progressively rather than rebuilt in one hit. Daniel Saifiti and Kulikefu Finefeuiaki arrived for 2025, with Morgan Knowles, Selwyn Cobbo and Brad Schneider among the additions for 2026.
It is a significantly different model from the one Bennett needed in 2023. The inaugural Dolphins relied on established players to import experience and standards; the current side increasingly combines that foundation with players whose best football has been developed or produced during the club’s own short NRL life.
The Comeback That Finally Took Them to September
The breakthrough arrived in a Battle of Brisbane that initially looked like becoming one of the Dolphins’ worst nights of the season.
Brisbane raced to a 24–0 lead at Suncorp Stadium on 8 August before the Dolphins overturned the deficit to win 40–32, securing the first finals appearance in the club’s NRL history.
There was another indication of their progress three weeks later at Allianz Stadium. Forced to defend periods with 12 men and then 11 against the Roosters, the Dolphins conceded only 12 points and won 26–12. It was their 16th victory of the season and moved them to third on the ladder with one regular-season match remaining.
Through Round 26, the Dolphins have scored 612 points and conceded 474. The attack remains among the club’s great strengths, but the broader change is reflected in the outcome: 16 wins already, compared with 12 across the entire 2025 regular season.
Four Seasons, a Different Measure of Success
Four years ago, the Dolphins were an expansion gamble — a new NRL side built around hardened veterans and young talent that might or might not deliver.
Now the gamble is paying off.
The Dolphins are heading to September for the first time, and the players once recruited on potential are increasingly the ones driving them there. Katoa, Tabuai-Fidow and Plath are no longer prospects around an experienced foundation; they are part of the core of a finals team.
That is how far this club has moved in four seasons. The question is no longer whether the Dolphins belong in the NRL. It is how far they can go.
Published 30-August-2026
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