THREE KEY FACTS:
- Senior All Blacks take their skills and knowledge to foreign markets on short-term contracts, where international opponents get to know their strengths and weaknesses.
- New Zealand’s highly regarded coaches have increasingly found employment with overseas clubs or other national sides.
- New Zealand Rugby’s appointment of Scott Robertson as All Blacks coach was partly driven by fears of losing valuable rugby knowledge to rivals.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
OPINION
The rugby world once knew almost nothing about New Zealand’s rugby methods.
How the
Since the game turned professional in 1996, some of that intelligence has leaked out with New Zealand’s players and coaches having picked up contracts worldwide.
The brain drain has become part and parcel of rugby life in New Zealand, an occupational hazard that can’t be helped given supply exceeds local demand, the high regard in which the country’s best players and coaches are held and the opportunities that exist offshore.
But the value of that lost intelligence has, certainly in the first 15 years of professional rugby, been deemed relatively low.
The migration pattern was such that those players who left did so with minimal or out-of-date knowledge about the All Blacks’ systems because they mostly took off after they had been out of the team for months.
Mostly, in those first 15 years, the typical journey for New Zealand coaches was to jump from Super Rugby positions to roles in European or Japanese clubs.
The likes of Vern Cotter, Joe Schmidt (in 2006), Dave Rennie, Chris Boyd and Pat Lam left Super Rugby for, respectively, Clermont, Glasgow, Northampton and Connacht.
There was even encouragement for coaches to take up jobs in emerging rugby nations as part of a broader desire to see the game develop in untapped markets, which is why Milton Haig left an assistant role with the Chiefs to be head coach of Georgia in 2011.
Occasionally, there were instances of coaches going straight from Super Rugby to tier-one international roles – Sir Graham Henry from the Blues to Wales in 1998, Warren Gatland from Chiefs assistant to Wales in 2007 and Robbie Deans from the Crusaders to the Wallabies in 2008.
The defection of Deans, who coached an All Blacks-laden Crusaders to the Super Rugby title in 2008 and then started with the Wallabies the next day, was the most serious IP (intellectual property) breach New Zealand Rugby (NZR) suffered in the first decade and a half of professionalism, given the detailed knowledge he took to Australia of key players.
In the wake of Deans’ shift across the Tasman, NZR doubled down on its belief that its best protection against losing IP is to keep evolving and innovating the way teams train and play, so that when players and coaches do leave for offshore jobs, what they know is rendered redundant.
But in the past decade, market trends have shifted. There has been an incremental creep in the volume of intellectual property finding its way around the world and a new trend where valuable secrets and intelligence are being taken directly from the All Blacks to other tier one international set-ups, where it can be immediately utilised against the national team.
And there has been a wider leakage problem. Current and high-value players have been sanctioned to take-short term contracts in foreign markets, where international opponents get to know their strengths and weaknesses.
So too has there been a growing number of Super Rugby coaches able to simultaneously hold positions with rival international sides – enabling trade secrets to flow freely into opposition camps.
New Zealand was perhaps justified in feeling relaxed about the loss of IP in the first two decades of professionalism, but now it has become a real and present danger to the All Blacks.
Henry blazed the trail
The first signs that market trends were changing came in 2012, when former All Blacks coach Sir Graham Henry took a role helping Argentina.
Henry, who had just won the World Cup with the All Blacks in 2011, took up the job with NZR’s blessing, as there was a desire to help the Pumas find their feet quickly in their first year in the Rugby Championship.
The issue became more complex however in 2013, as Henry joined the Blues as technical director to help new coach Sir John Kirwan, while his role with the Pumas also seemingly evolved into one where he was more hands-on with the players and actively preparing the team to play.
The situation irked All Blacks coach Sir Steve Hansen, as he felt NZR was taking too big a risk letting Henry have one foot in the Blues camp and one in the Pumas’.
What particularly concerned him was that due to injuries, the All Blacks selected Blues midfielder Francis Saili to make his debut against the Pumas in Hamilton – a player whom Henry knew well through his role with the Blues and would be able to make specific strategies to exploit.
Saili had a kick charged down in the first few minutes of the test – one that led to the Pumas scoring an easy try, and although the All Blacks bounced back to win relatively comfortably, there was some resentment within the playing group that Henry had been inside Argentina’s coaching box.
When Henry came into the All Blacks changing room after the game, it is believed he was gently escorted out by Richie McCaw.
Former NZR chief executive Steve Tew told the Herald that while it had been awkward seeing Henry sitting in the Pumas coaching box, that “it is a balancing act because we do want to help some nations develop and grow”.
“But equally we live in an open, global rugby economy and our intellectual property, particularly among the coaches and players, is spread out all over the world.
“The reality is IP is going to be pretty stale, pretty quickly anyway but there are some sensitivities that we have to manage as best we can.”
In 2016, there was another coaching shift that signalled how things were changing.
Mick Byrne, who had spent 10 years as the All Blacks skills coach between 2005 and 2015, joined the Wallabies in the same role in 2016.
Byrne met with Hansen before he took the job to give him an assurance he wouldn’t be betraying All Blacks’ secrets to the enemy.
While Byrne – who will be coaching Fiji against the All Blacks this July – was undoubtedly true to his word, it was another red flag that NZR couldn’t keep saying that the IP it was losing had little value to rival nations.
In the same year that Byrne joined the Wallabies, Jamie Joseph, six months after coaching the Highlanders to their only Super Rugby title, announced that he would be joining Japan.
That move was not necessarily troubling for NZR – in fact it was supported as helping Japan improve was a strategic goal for the national body, who had commercial designs on the world’s third-largest economy – but what it triggered was an eight-year period in which his colleague Tony Brown would simultaneously hold coaching roles both with the Highlanders and the Cherry Blossoms.
The equation ended up changing as Japan became a genuine force, reaching the quarter-finals of the 2019 World Cup – where they would have played the All Blacks, had they lost their opening game to the Springboks.
The rise and rise of Japan made it questionable whether it was wise for NZR to allow Brown to hold dual roles.
Similarly, there were concerns about the wisdom of the Chiefs striking a deal with Warren Gatland in 2019 – one that would allow him to be head coach of the Chiefs in 2020, take a year off to coach the British and Irish Lions (against the Springboks) in 2021, and then return to the Chiefs in 2022.
He would be taking Chiefs IP and sharing it with the best players from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as well as his fellow Lions coaches.
While NZR was willing to let the former Waikato hooker bounce between the Chiefs and Lions, Tew said in late 2019 that it was difficult to imagine that a deal would have been sanctioned to let Gatland, had he applied for the job, simultaneously coach both the All Blacks and Lions.
“I haven’t actually contemplated this, but I think to coach the All Blacks and the Lions in a four-year period would be impossible, but that would be a call that he has made or that he will have to make,” Tew told Radio Sport.
The volume and value of coaching IP leaving the country through these simultaneous contracts has increased, but NZR has retained a degree of comfort with it, because it believes it gains as much from the arrangements as the offshore entity does.
NZR general manager of professional rugby and performance, Chris Lendrum, told the Herald: “New Zealand Rugby, like other international rugby unions, operate in a competitive global marketplace which provides considerable international opportunities for professional coaches and players.
“In both cases, there is movement between different countries and competitions at the club and international level.
“We have been fortunate in New Zealand to produce talented coaches throughout our history and many of those coaches, Graham Henry, Steve Hansen, Wayne Smith and Vern Cotter to name but a few, have spent a significant amount of time coaching in other countries before returning home.
“Our coaches have always been in demand and that shows our coach development programmes and pathways have been successful, and we strive to ensure that doesn’t change.
“However, New Zealand Rugby has equally benefitted from these exchanges of knowledge and information as the countries that have welcomed our people into their environments.”
But how relaxed NZR can continue to be about the loss of coaching IP is a question that has intensified in the last few years, because market trends are changing again to an undisputed high-danger scenario, in which key All Blacks personnel are walking straight out of the national team into senior and highly influential roles with fierce rivals.
Razor another key concern
One of the concerns held by NZR’s board back in late 2022 was that they were going to lose Scott Robertson to an international rival.
Robertson, shortly after he had steered the Crusaders to a sixth consecutive Super Rugby title in 2022, publicly stated that 2023 would be his last year with his beloved red and blacks and that he was on the hunt for an international coaching position.
“I really want to go to Rugby World Cup,” he told former Scotland lock Jim Hamilton, who hosts a podcast on RugbyPass.
“I genuinely want to go to a couple. It’s one job [All Blacks coach] and when someone doesn’t give it to you, you have to think differently about what opportunities are out there.”
And there were opportunities out there – England were openly looking for a new coach to take over in 2024, while both Wales and Australia hinted that they would be, too, and Robertson’s name was constantly floated in global media outlets as being the preferred candidate for multiple nations.
In July 2022, it felt inevitable the man universally known as Razor was going to land an international coaching role after the 2023 World Cup.
The international market was awash with opportunities and having seen Robertson deliver so much success at the Crusaders, there was an understandable reluctance within NZR to see him head offshore with such in-depth knowledge of players that he could use against the All Blacks.
Fear and protectionism weren’t the key motivations in NZR appointing Robertson All Blacks coach in March 2023, but they were part of the consideration.
This was the man who had rebuilt the Crusaders’ legacy. He had invigorated the careers of a handful of established All Blacks, developed a few new ones and had shown an uncanny ability to unpick the strategic thinking of his rival coaches.
But by installing Robertson as coach, partly to stop him from taking his rugby intellect offshore, it triggered an unforeseen chain reaction which has led to various members of the jettisoned All Blacks coaching team ending up with New Zealand’s fiercest rugby enemies.
Joe Schmidt, who was the All Blacks assistant coach in 2022 and 2023, is now at the helm of the Wallabies.
A year ago, he was inside the All Blacks tent plotting how to retain the Bledisloe Cup, now he’s at the helm of the Wallabies, working out how to win it back.
Shortly after taking the job, Schmidt addressed the issue of IP transfer, underplaying the value of the intelligence he would be taking from New Zealand to Australia.
“I think IP is only ever relevant in the geographical and player group that you’ve got. I don’t think I’ve got any IP left that the All Blacks haven’t seen either, so I think that’s a reciprocated situation,” he said.
But the value of what Schmidt is taking is not the tactical and strategic knowledge he accumulated by spending two years with the All Blacks.
That will change under Robertson and so Schmidt will inevitable only have minimal insight into how the All Blacks will play.
What he will have, though, is invaluable and durable intelligence about many of the players Robertson will pick.
Schmidt will know micro details about which shoulder players prefer to tackle with, defensive reads some are slow to make and what technical defaults show up in players when they are under pressure.
In a sport where the margins are tiny, this sort of detailed knowledge can be critical as Ireland will testify, as perhaps they misread what dangers are presented by having a former coach in the enemy ranks when they met the All Blacks in last year’s World Cup semifinal.
Schmidt had been Ireland’s head coach between 2013 and 2019, but given he’d been out of their system for four years, the Irish players didn’t think he’d have access to any destructive intelligence in 2023.
“I don’t think Joe would know anything about this squad,” the veteran outside back Keith Earls said before the quarter-final. “We’re a completely different squad. He probably knows things about individuals, but I think we’ve all changed our habits under this coaching staff.”
Earls, it seemed, got it wrong as the All Blacks were well beaten by Ireland in July 2022 when Schmidt was in a peripheral role with the team, but 18 months later, New Zealand won, greatly helped by their ability to pick the Irish attack patterns by looking for individual skill cues in their opponents.
Schmidt’s knowledge of how various Irish players would react under pressure was invaluable in helping the All Blacks win that critical test and now he’s with the Wallabies, armed with a dossier of inside knowledge about New Zealand’s best players and a strong understanding of how All Blacks assistant coach Jason Ryan likes to organise and drill his forwards.
Schmidt has also recruited former All Blacks forwards coach Mike Cron – a man who was with the national team between 2004 and 2019 – and who is equally well versed in the strengths and weaknesses of New Zealand’s key talent.
But before the All Blacks meet the Wallabies in September, they must first face an England team who have been greatly helped by Andrew Strawbridge, who was the All Blacks skills coach in 2022 and 2023.
He is now doing the same job for England – New Zealand’s first opponents this July – and as much as he’ll be able to help them sharpen their pass and catch, he’ll also be able to give England’s players specific cues to look for from their opposition, while also being able to divulge a few other helpful titbits to his fellow coaching staff.
Having Kiwis embedded within opposition coaching teams is nothing new, but Schmidt and Strawbridge are illustrative of what has become an underappreciated problem in New Zealand – of high-value rugby intelligence and trade secrets seeping out of the country, directly into the hands of competitors.
When Brad Moaar was fired by the All Blacks in August 2022, he ended up with Scotland a few months later.
Highlanders assistant coach Kenny Lynn has just taken a job with the Pumas – and Brown was unveiled earlier this year as part of the Springboks coaching group.
Brown hasn’t come out of the All Blacks directly into the Boks, but he will be arriving in South Africa with detailed and relevant, first-hand knowledge of specific players, particularly as he spent the early part of the Super Rugby Pacific season helping the Blues on a part-time basis to cover for the incapacitated Jason O’Halloran.
What all these defections mean is that each of New Zealand’s Rugby Championship opponents will this year have some Kiwi presence and influence in their respective coaching teams.
There is no strong legal ground to impose restraint of trade clauses in coaching contracts to block these sorts of moves so NZR, it seems, is going to continue to rely on its ability to evolve and innovate as its means to protect itself from IP loss.
Lendrum says: “Ultimately, IP in rugby is being shared constantly across the eco-system as the game evolves and individuals share information and concepts about the game.
“But when you consider the amount of video analysis and data available and the need for teams to constantly adapt and change with game trends, that sort of information doesn’t have a long shelf life.”
Sabbaticals another weak spot for NZR
To a certain extent, Lendrum’s point carries weight. Rugby’s free market has led to players and coaches from every country scattering all over the world. Teams show their full hand every time they play, and it is match day that will provide opposition with the best source of intelligence from which to make their assessments.
But no country – maybe South Africa – experiences the same volume of player and coaching departures and there are now former All Blacks players and coaches throughout the Japanese top league, in Europe’s biggest clubs and, of course, in various international sides.
Not only that, but no other country is facilitating a sabbatical programme in the same way as New Zealand – one which gives international opponents a close look at leading All Blacks and an opportunity to learn the fine detail about their respective games.
Because of South Africa’s open eligibility rules, there are Springboks flooding into Japanese clubs and so this year, their talismanic flanker Pieter-Steph du Toit was in the same team as Beauden Barrett.
Not only that, but Hansen did some hands-on coaching in his director role at the Toyota Verblitz club, and the balance of that set-up feels like it will have been in favour of the big South African flanker learning more about the All Blacks than the other way around.
And this is the under-appreciated concern with sabbaticals: that New Zealand’s IP is being shared in a way that it can prove useful to their most fearsome opponents, and these sanctioned breaks for top All Blacks are perhaps proving more valuable to other nations than they are New Zealand.
In 2020, when Barrett was on a previous sabbatical contract with the Suntory club, he was exposed to then England coach Eddie Jones, who was working there on a consultancy basis.
When the English media found out that Jones was spending time mentoring Barrett – a player who would be instrumental to the All Blacks – the arrangement was lampooned, with commentators calling for the Rugby Football Union to stop their national coach working in Japan.
But, again, there was perhaps a misread of the dynamic, as the arrangement potentially was of greater benefit to Jones than it was Barrett and the All Blacks.
In Jones’ book Leadership: Lessons from my life in rugby, he wrote: “In England, there has been much criticism of me coaching Suntory, and working with Beauden.
“But for me the best thing is that Beauden, one of the world’s great rugby players, is comfortable enough in himself, as I am in myself, to talk about the game so openly.
“When working with Beauden, I have learnt more about his humility and the way he keeps working at his game.
“He has twice been the World Rugby’s player of the year [sic] but, with Suntory, which is supposedly meant to be an easy gig for him, he comes out every morning for training with the vim and enthusiasm of an 18-year-old.”
Still, despite the potential for IP to end up in the wrong places, Lendrum says that the positives of offering sabbaticals outweigh the negatives.
“Sabbaticals are an effective mechanism for extending our long-serving All Blacks’ time in New Zealand, while also giving them an opportunity to experience a different culture and a different brand of rugby and earn additional income.
“As a rule, our players want to play while they are fit and able, and realistically can make more money on the field, than from the sidelines, and the same would apply to coaches.
“Hence, non-playing sabbaticals are less frequently requested but have occurred with Codie Taylor, Richie McCaw and Dan Carter notable examples.
“In the end, it is about what is right for individuals and their circumstances.”
At the start of professionalism, New Zealand had its secrets closely guarded. But not now, not after a decade of IP leakage that is gathering pace and is seemingly unstoppable.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.