1918 NSWRFL Season

The premiership ran to its full 14-round, eight-club schedule despite World War I concluding with the Armistice in November 1918 and the concurrent Spanish flu pandemic beginning to affect Australia; sources note the quality of play suffered from the loss of players on active service, but do not describe any suspension or curtailment of fixtures, and the season recorded a healthy total attendance of over 270,000. South Sydney secured the premiership by finishing outright top of the ladder on 24 competition points, two clear of runner-up Western Suburbs, with no Grand Final required under the era's automatic-premiership rule. Glebe finished a clear third on 18 points, with Balmain and Eastern Suburbs rounding out the top five. North Sydney and Newtown occupied sixth and seventh with losing records, while Annandale suffered rugby league's first winless season in the competition's history, losing all fourteen matches for the wooden spoon and finishing with a points differential of -243, the worst of any club across this entire era. Western Suburbs separately won the inaugural City Cup knockout competition. This marked South Sydney's fourth premiership since the competition's founding a decade earlier, following titles in 1908, 1909 and 1914, cementing the club's status as one of the era's most successful sides.