AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - JUNE 18: Sam Whitelock of the Crusaders celebrates the win after the 2022 Super Rugby Pacific Final match between the Blues and the Crusaders at Eden Park on June 18, 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - JUNE 18: Sam Whitelock of the Crusaders celebrates the win after the 2022 Super Rugby Pacific Final match between the Blues and the Crusaders at Eden Park on June 18, 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
It would be all too easy to come away with the wrong impression from last week’s announcement that Australia have committed to Super Rugby Pacific until 2030.
That New Zealand Rugby and Rugby Australia have finally stopped bickering and have reached at least a temporary financial agreement about splittingbroadcast revenue that both parties can live with, could be interpreted as reason to believe Super Rugby is no longer in a fight for survival.
But rugby’s bosses will be condemning Super Rugby to the death they feel it has avoided if they think like that.
The competition has a contractual certainty about it now that Rugby Australia have dropped their frankly deluded threat to walk out and build their own competition in 2024.
Contractual certainty shouldn’t be misinterpreted as viability, however. Super Rugby Pacific will only be going in 2030 if it accepts that it is still in a fight for survival.
And to survive, rugby in New Zealand needs to make a transformational shift in thinking and lose its culture of entitlement and redefine its relationship with media.
Professional rugby has unfortunately carried a top-dog swagger in the last decade, seemingly believing that its audience is guaranteed and that bums will magically arrive on seats, leaving it with no requirement to emulate those other profile-poor but attention-hungry sports that sell their stories and promote their personalities to build a shared experience with their fans.
Rugby in New Zealand has got many things right since the game went professional, but the one thing it hasn’t been able to do is treat the media as a valued stakeholder.
Scott Barrett of the Crusaders and Beauden Barrett of the Blues pose with the Super Rugby Pacific trophy. Photo / Photosport
The sport has built an adversarial relationship with the fourth estate and never previously cared because it has never accepted or understood that it is in the entertainment business, competing for disposable income in a world of infinite choice.
Sadly, rugby has laboured under the misapprehension that it is living in 1950s New Zealand, where every village has a team, every bland and cliched utterance of anyone who has won a test cap is lapped up by an adoring public, and that every teenage boy is in the backyard after school winning an imaginary World Cup with heroic deeds involving the washing line.
Professional rugby teams in New Zealand have never really bothered with the media because they feel they haven’t had any need.
It’s the national game, everyone will gravitate towards it whether rugby sells itself to the masses or not and so when Super Rugby teams come to plan their season, everything is allocated its slot and then if there is a window left, its grudgingly given for media engagement.
That no one has been able to join the dots and work out that Super Rugby collapsed in popularity not just because of its hubristic expansion plan, but because it had no culture of story-telling and wasn’t building any connection with its fans to foster the tribal loyalties that make the best leagues so passionately consumed, is illustrative of the naivety that pervades the game when it comes to marketing itself in the cluttered world of today.
Fans want more than live content. They want to invest in the people who play and know the journeys they have been on to get there.
They want heroes and villains: a deeper sense of theatre when their team plays that only comes when there is familiarity with the athletes.
They want authenticity, too. To see and read about real people with whom they can relate – speaking honestly and openly, not with the stage-managed soundbites that come when players are taught to be wary and guarded.
Somewhat madly, though, rugby teams pay people money they can ill-afford, not to facilitate this happening as their job titles suggest, but to prevent it.
If Super Rugby goes back to offering media 10 minutes at the side of the training field to ask a few players some once over lightly questions, the interviewee casting a worried eye over his shoulder as errant teammates kick balls in his direction for a bit of a laugh, then it won’t survive.
If Super Rugby can’t reset and build a collaborative relationship with media which respects it is a conduit to the fan base and an invested partner in promoting the game, then it won’t survive.
If Super Rugby continues to see players with opinions as an existential threat to its existence, and personalities as something to be drummed out of individuals, then it won’t survive.
Super Rugby’s fight to survive didn’t end last week, it only just began.
