The All Blacks perform the haka ahead of the their end-of-season tour match against Italy last year. Photo / SmartFrame
The All Blacks perform the haka ahead of the their end-of-season tour match against Italy last year. Photo / SmartFrame
The All Blacks have signed a multimillion-dollar deal with a new sponsor for training kit naming rights.
A major car brand replaces Ineos, which ended its sponsorship early, with New Zealand Rugby (NZR) securing more sponsorship money.
The deal aligns with NZR’s strategy to partner with consumer brands, boosting local marketing efforts.
The All Blacks have flexed their brand power by signing what is likely to be a multimillion-dollar agreement with Toyota to enable the Japanese vehicle manufacturer to put its name on the national team’s training kit.
The naming rights to the All Blacks’ training kit wereunexpectedly left vacant earlier this year, when British petrochemical company Ineos quit its six-year sponsorship halfway through the deal.
Ineos had been paying about US$12 million ($20m) a year to have its name on both the All Blacks training kit and on the back of their playing shorts, but Toyota is understood to have only bought rights to the former, with New Zealand Rugby (NZR) still in negotiations to sell the latter to a different buyer.
The agreement – which is thought to also include the provision of vehicles to players and management who don’t have existing contracts with previous vehicle partner, Ford – is a giant win for NZR as it achieves two of its key goals of finding a replacement sponsor for Ineos ahead of expectation, and for the deal to be with a consumer brand.
Last month, NZR was able to reach an out-of-court settlement with Ineos, which is believed to have resulted in the British firm paying what it would have – $21m – for its sponsorship in 2025, with a small additional compensation payment on top.
And now that NZR has struck a deal with Toyota, it is likely to end this year with significantly more sponsorship money than it would have had Ineos remained on board.
There is a third benefit in that while Toyota is a worldwide brand with presence across the globe, it also has a strong local presence and a desire to sell more vehicles in New Zealand.
The benefits of this to NZR are significant as one of the weaknesses of being in partnership with Ineos was that it had no presence or business in New Zealand, and as a business-to-business organisation, it did no above the line advertising to help with the heavy lifting of promoting and marketing the All Blacks.
The Ineos sponsorship also came with significant opposition from environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, and the Herald understands that had the sponsorship not been unilaterally terminated by the company’s billionaire owner, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, NZR was unlikely to renew it when it expired at the end of 2027.
Will Jordan (right) celebrates with Damian McKenzie after scoring against Ireland last year. Photo / Photosport
NZR’s private equity partner, Silver Lake, wanted the All Blacks to have more consumer brands in its sponsorship portfolio. The agreement with Toyota is the beginning of that shift to align more with companies that have greater brand awareness with the public, and who have a greater desire to advertise and promote the relationship instead of leveraging the association around match day entertainment, as Ineos did.
When Ineos terminated its agreement in January, NZR had hoped it would have a replacement for at least one of the assets, if not both, by early next year. The fact it has achieved part of that goal within four months will partly be attributed to its digital strategy.
At the core of Silver Lake’s investment thesis is a plan to grow the All Blacks’ fanbase through the production of content and for that audience to be used to drive greater sponsorship values.
The strategy is widely considered to make sense, but it remains contentious as to whether the execution is delivering.
NZR is thought to have spent close to $18m on content creation and platform upkeep over the past two years. The results have been, at best, modest, with only around a combined 1.5 million people thought to have registered to the All Blacks’ YouTube channel and the national body’s own platform, NZR+.
But while some analysts remain unconvinced the plan is delivering, New Zealand Rugby commercial’s general manager, Yarnie Guthrie, recently told the Herald that NZR+ had been a game-changer.
“Walking into meetings and presenting NZR and the wider team and being able to share information on this incredible content platform is powerful,” Guthrie said.
“We are not benchmarking ourselves against other rugby teams at all. We are looking for the spend of people that are investing in a top-tier football team or an NFL team, or a Formula One team.
“People on the other side of the table are buoyed by what we are doing and achieving. It’s a game-changing asset being able to build into the overall proposition.”
