RugbyAustralia has appointed Les Kiss as Wallabies coach, starting in 2026, challenging traditional coaching cycles.
Kiss will work alongside Joe Schmidt this year, allowing continuity and strategic development.
This approach may influence New Zealand Rugby to reconsider its coaching appointment cycle for the All Blacks.
Some will say it is bold but risky, others will reckon it’s ill-advised and destined to fail, but Rugby Australia’s decision to put Les Kiss at the helm of the Wallabies just 14 months before the next World Cup could prove to beinspired. It could be the move that debunks the myth about how long a head coach needs to be in the job to have real influence.
The decision to let Kiss see out his contract with the Queensland Reds through next year’s Super Rugby Pacific competition and delay starting with the Wallabies until the start of the 2026 Rugby Championship has the potential to force a global rethink on how and when international coaches are appointed.
What the Wallabies are instigating is a continuity policy of sorts – one that has come about after a robust process that gave every leading Australian coach the opportunity to put their name forward, and one that didn’t unsettle the incumbent.
Critically, what Rugby Australia has done is give the Wallabies the opportunity to keep building under Joe Schmidt this year with Kiss across – but not embedded – in the team’s strategic and cultural direction.
This will leave Kiss well-placed when he takes over for the Rugby Championship next year to preserve and retain key elements of the team’s strategic blueprint and core values, while also injecting his own style and tactical twists to potentially give the team a jolt and an element of unpredictability leading into the World Cup.
It’s a plan that confronts head-on the long-held belief in most leading rugby unions that a head coach should be appointed at the beginning of a World Cup cycle and retained – subject to performance – until the end of it.
To change mid-cycle has historically been deemed a high-risk strategy that will be disruptive and regressive, as the argument has always been strong that a new head coach needs years, not months, to make an impact.
New Zealand has been the nation most fiercely wedded to the notion that an international coach has to have their contract aligned with the World Cup.
But perhaps Australia’s decision will be the one that leads to New Zealand being open to change and potentially, in future, shifting to a new practice of running the appointment process for the All Blacks coach in the middle of a World Cup cycle.
It’s a move that certainly seems to make more sense than the current thinking of locking the All Blacks coach into a four-year deal that runs through the World Cup cycle.
The incumbent, Scott Robertson, is contracted to the end of 2027, but it is not clear – possibly not even inside New Zealand Rugby (NZR) – what he will need to achieve to have his contract extended or when an extension discussion or contestable process would likely happen.
Previous appointments have taken place immediately after a World Cup and that has been equally difficult as many potential head-coach candidates have committed their future to other teams long before the process has begun and left New Zealand picking from a compromised talent pool.
The answer as to what best practice looks like may, then, lie in Australia, and New Zealand should seriously consider following suit and shifting its contracting cycle for the All Blacks head coach so it is no longer aligned with World Cups.
All Blacks coach Scott Robertson (right) and NZR CEO Mark Robinson. Photo / Michael Craig
If Robertson delivers this year, would NZR be willing to extend his contract by two years and then make his job contestable immediately after the British and Irish series in 2029?
If it did that, NZR could publicly declare as early as this year just when and how it will run the process in 2029, giving aspiring candidates a long timeline to prepare and structure their existing contracts so they can apply for the role when it is made contestable.
It would remove the imbalance of overweighting the significance of what happens at the World Cup in determining whether a coaching team should be retained or not, and align with the more relevant and important metric of the All Blacks consistently producing a 75% win record.
And, potentially, it will recalibrate the current high-performance thinking with the growing evidence around coaching impact and how quickly it can be made.
Robertson, Dave Rennie and Vern Cotter all coached their teams to Super Rugby titles in their rookie campaigns, while former Wallabies coach Michael Cheika took his team to the World Cup final not even 10 months after starting in the job.
There is proof all over the world that the right coaching team can have an immediate and enduring impact and Australia, maybe not by design and more by circumstance, is perhaps showing New Zealand that it’s time to adapt.
