NZ’s professional landscape could soon undergo a massive makeover. Photo / Photosport
New Zealand’s professional landscape could soon undergo a massive makeover which will see the Rugby Championship played in late summer and Super Rugby finish in early spring. Gregor Paul explains why such a radical proposal is being considered.
The decision by New Zealand Rugby to unilaterally break up Super Rugby in June 2020 has had obvious high-performance and commercial consequences.
The absence of South African teams has left New Zealand’s best players underexposed to big, physical men and a brand of rugby built on power and set-piece dominance.
Commercially, the break-up has cost NZR about $11m a year – with $4 million per annum being returned to Sky to reflect the reduced Super Rugby content and $7m going to Rugby Australia this year as part of a retrospectively agreed revenue share of broadcast income.
But what’s only just coming to light are the unintended consequences of that decision, the most significant of which has left the Sanzaar alliance – between New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and Argentina – seriously considering the most radical change in living memory by shifting the Rugby Championship to March-April and playing Super Rugby between May and September.
For the past few months, all four nations have been weighing the pros and cons of turning the Southern Hemisphere season upside down by playing the showpiece international tournament at the end of summer.
For New Zealanders, it may seem a semi-ridiculous idea to just about reposition the national game as a summer sport and pit test rugby against test cricket, but it is being driven by the valid fear that South Africa and Argentina are facing an existential player safety and welfare crisis if the Rugby Championship remains in its August-September window.
When NZR blew up Super Rugby in June 2020, it perhaps didn’t think through all the ramifications and the specific, wider impact it would have on South Africa and Argentina.
That decision led to South Africa placing its clubs into the United Rugby Championship (URC) – a cross-border competition featuring Irish, Welsh, Scottish and Italian teams.
A significant number of its leading players were already contracted to European clubs.
NZR’s decision in June 2020 also saw the collapse of the Jaguares and with no domestic professional team, Argentina’s best players are all now playing for European clubs.
The break-up of Super Rugby has effectively meant South Africa and Argentina have become Northern Hemisphere teams – their players locked into European club schedules which run from September to early June.
When Covid hit three years ago, NZR saw a chance to rebuild Super Rugby as a transtasman/Pacific competition, but the unintended consequence has been to create an untenable new world where the South Africans and Argentinians have one foot in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere.
And this is where the looming player safety crisis lies, as the best players in South Africa and Argentina are barely afforded a six-week break in any given year.
The URC kicked off in mid-September last year and finished on May 28, with Munster beating the Stormers.
Any Springboks players involved with the Stormers will have just a few weeks off before assembling to play the Wallabies in Australia on July 7 and likewise, some of Argentina’s best players will be in club action in France until June 17, before they assemble to play the All Blacks on July 7 in Mendoza.
They will go through a truncated Rugby Championship, play a few other warm-up tests before they go to the World Cup and then straight into club rugby once they finish with their international commitments.
The best medical and high-performance advice is that players should have at least 12 weeks off between seasons, ideally 16.
South Africa and Argentina’s elite playing group aren’t afforded even half the rest they need – a scenario that exposes them excessively to injury and mental burnout.
The picture will be much the same in a non-World Cup year, with South African and Argentina playing three tests in July, with the Rugby Championship kicking off in early August and running through to late September – with players then returning straight to their clubs who will already have begun their campaigns.
The impact of Covid, which disrupted the 2020 and 2021 seasons, partly prevented this problem of year-round rugby impacting the Springboks and Pumas, but now that the world has returned to normal, it’s a priority issue for the two affected countries to fix.
In contrast, the arrival of Super Rugby Pacific has given New Zealand’s and Australia’s players longer breaks between major competitions and a minimum of 10 weeks off between seasons.
The Rugby Championship no longer affords all four participating nations equitable means to prepare and is making dangerously high demands of the South Africans and Argentineans.
The only way to fix it is for New Zealand and Australia to agree to a radical reorganisation of their seasons and so the Sanzaar partners are effectively locked in a battle of wills.
Either South Africa and Argentina continue to push their players beyond the brink, or New Zealand and Australia endure the short-term upheaval of a season restructure, but one that would at least unify the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and deliver equitable and sustainable rest periods for all players.
After several months of discussion, it is no clearer as to which side will prevail.
NZR is believed to be open-minded about the proposal to shift the Rugby Championship and has canvassed high-performance feedback to determine how the All Blacks could safely prepare and be at their best if they had to play test matches in March.
It’s even believed that discussions got to the stage of considering the feasibility of building a high-performance training centre which would enable the country’s leading players to collectively train and condition over the summer months.
New Zealand’s Super Rugby clubs have also been kept in the loop and one source has told the Herald that they mostly like the idea of shifting their competition to later in the year.
But as always when it comes to negotiations between Sanzaar partners, there may be an element of subterfuge on NZR’s part – a sense it is projecting a willingness to consider the plan while remaining confident it is never likely to succeed due to the probability it would provoke an unwinnable legal battle with the major European club competitions.
Several people with knowledge of the situation have told the Herald that what may ultimately scupper any plan to shift the Rugby Championship is fear of prompting major European clubs into legal action.
It is understood that World Rugby has offered Sanzaar legal opinion which has highlighted the probability of wealthy investors fighting the move in court.
The big European clubs must release Six Nations players during February and March and if the Rugby Championship dates changed, they would be obliged under World Rugby regulations to then release South African and Argentinian players throughout March and April.
One source said: “If you changed things so you had the Six Nations starting in February and Rugby Championship in March, you could have 10-12 weeks in a row where clubs don’t have access to those players leading into the playoffs of major competitions in the Northern Hemisphere, there would clearly be issues with those wealthy owners.”
The Herald has also been told NZR continues to refute any notion that it unilaterally blew up Super Rugby and was unwilling to maintain club links with South Africa.
In July 2020, NZR privately suggested to the South Africans that they create their own domestic competition with the top sides then engaging with Super Rugby Pacific in some kind of champions’ playoff.
The offer was rejected, leading NZR to believe that the South Africans made the decision to quit on their own because they wanted to transition all their clubs to the URC – the Cheetahs and Kings joined in 2017 – and then try to persuade the Six Nations to let the Springboks join after the Sanzaar broadcast deal expires in 2025.
Sanzaar chief executive Brendan Morris told media in February last year that: “They [South Africa] did put us on notice they were exploring their options, that was well before Christmas.”
But Six Nations chief executive Ben Morel said in January this year: “There is no conversation about expanding the Six Nations right now, the entire focus is on finding the right solution and improvements to the July and November windows and finding a more competitive narrative for those fixtures.
“Our whole energy of the Six Nations is focused on that. So there’s no conversation regarding anything else. There never has been.”
New Zealand appears to believe that South Africa gambled on being able to force the Springboks into the Six Nations, and now that they have been rebuffed, they are scrambling to find a long-term solution to a Rugby Championship problem they never thought they would have.
South Africa, however, disagree about the nature of events in 2020. They insist they aligned their clubs with the URC not as a deliberate strategy to pave the way for the Boks to enter the Six Nations, but because it was the only realistic option available to them.
They saw a domestic competition with a champions’ playoff with Super Rugby Pacific as commercially unrealistic and not a viable means to ready their players for test football.
That’s why, as recently as last September, South African Rugby president Mark Alexander, said: “They [NZR] threw us under the bus. That had the potential to cripple South African rugby forever, so it [Europe] works for us, in how we prepare teams, we have a lot of players in Europe, so using this as a base is ideal.”
The Argentinians are understood to feel an equal sense of betrayal, as the Pumas were invited into the Rugby Championship in 2012 with the support of a long-term vision to integrate their whole professional rugby ecosystem into the Southern Hemisphere network.
This plan saw the Jaguares join Super Rugby in 2016 and they gradually lured the country’s best players out of European club contracts back to Argentina.
The Jaguares made the Super Rugby final in 2019 and such was their success in attracting the best players back to Argentina that they supplied about 80 per cent of the Pumas World Cup squad that year.
There were even tentative plans to award Argentina a second Super Rugby license, but now the Pumas have been forced into mostly picking tired and overworked players in the Rugby Championship.
Rugby geopolitics tends to be headline-grabbing one minute and forgotten about the next, as for all that the sport in the professional age has considered radical restructuring proposals and specifically how to align the Northern and Southern Hemisphere seasons, the landscape today looks exactly like it did in 1996.
But there is an overwhelming belief that this is an issue that won’t go away because something has to give in the Southern Hemisphere and that the best solution may be to flip the New Zealand and Australian seasons upside down.
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