David Kirk has a vision for the game. Photo / NZME
David Kirk, six months into his role as New Zealand Rugby chair, has a parallel vision to modernise, globalise and commercialise the elite game, while also wanting to turn the clock back 50 years to a time when the sport was the focal point of communities.
This dual concept is perhaps representative of Kirk himself. He was the epitome of the amateur age – working as a doctor while leading the All Blacks to their 1987 World Cup triumph, before going on to be chief executive of media giant Fairfax and then setting up his own private-equity investment house.
Rugby didn’t define him, but it definitely shaped him, and opened the door to many of the educational, business and lifestyle opportunities that have come his way.
He decided to apply for a board position at NZR late last year; partly out of gratitude to a game that has given him so much, but also because he still feels rugby can be a central pillar in instilling young Kiwis with the right attitude, level of resilience and understanding of teamwork that can be applied in everything they do.
Ask him now to sell the merits of rugby to a generation that has a proliferation of sporting choice, and his pitch is fluid and articulate.
“It is a team game, and it is a team game that has a whole load of different skill requirements according to what position you play,” he says.
“It is a team game that requires you to be a team member. Your team will not perform unless you perform, and you perform in your particular place.
“It requires you to make sacrifices for the team … to make tackles and to build confidence and courage. Because there are so many moving parts to it, you can make a genuine contribution.
“If you win a lineout or take a high ball or kick it into touch, there are moments in the game when you can make a genuine contribution to your team winning.
“The great thing about that, is that everyone gets to feel the joy of success. I would argue and there are people who know a lot more about soccer than I do, that there are people just kicking the ball around and having no part in scoring goals because it is not their job to do that.
“They don’t even get to the other end of the field because they are not supposed to be at the end of the field.
“In rugby, everyone is everywhere, and everyone is contributing to scoring tries or stopping the other team from scoring tries and that contribution that everyone makes is what binds you together as a team and that gives you the highs and lows. You feel like you have failed when the team doesn’t succeed, and you feel you succeed when the team succeeds.”
Kirk is talking about this because in his first public appearance as chair at the NZR annual general meeting, he said that the biggest challenge facing rugby is staying relevant with the youth of today.
He said that rugby’s future depends on being able to retain and grow participants and for the nation to stay in love with the sport.
Participation has grown marginally post-Covid, but in real terms, it is declining against population growth, but Kirk doesn’t believe the trend is irreversible.
“I think we are well set up through infrastructure for people to have a great experience through clubs,” he says.
“There are pathways for people to play to the best of their ability, so there is an ecosystem to remain in. It is less than it used to be, but that builds out into a social ecosystem.
“People do meet their future partners at rugby clubs. People do meet people who say, ‘what do you do?’.
“People meet people, and one thing we know about young people – and I know this better about males than females – is that they need to have role models outside of their parents. And having coaches and club people and more senior players in their club who they can look to as role models, is really important.”
There has to, however, be some scepticism about whether Kirk’s conviction that rugby clubs can once again be the social and economic hubs of provincial New Zealand is not just a wistful yearning for a period which increasingly has the feel of having been this country’s idyllic age.
Kirk is a child of the 1960s and 1970s – a time when New Zealand offered an uncomplicated, outdoorsy life with roast lamb dinners, fit-for-purpose education curriculums, health care without waitlists and a clarity about rugby’s all-prevailing role.
It was a simpler time, one with fewer choices and a smaller, less diverse population that meant rugby clubs held a gravitational social pull.
Kirk, having lived mainly in Australia for the past two decades, is perhaps nostalgic for this lost age of innocence and analogue entertainment in the way that so many overseas-based Kiwis of a similar vintage are.
It’s a raw pining for something they desperately miss and equally want to believe can be recovered. Maybe even it’s a refusal to accept the realities of modern New Zealand, that has seen a country go from selling home-grown produce through honesty boxes on the side of the road, to having a specialist Police taskforce set up to stop groceries being brazenly taken out the front door of supermarkets in packed trolleys.
Is his nostalgia clouding his judgement about rugby’s ability to fit into a modern landscape where parents are anxious about head injuries and Auckland teenagers don’t want to get off the couch?
He doesn’t think so, and he cites the increased awareness knowledge and focus on head injuries as reason for parents to embrace their children playing rugby and not fearing it.
“When I was playing there were kids who weren’t particularly into the confrontational side of the game – the tackling – the taking the ball up and crashing into a tackle.
“I don’t think that has changed, but what has, is the focus on injury and in particular, the focus on head injuries. Kids getting concussed and then playing the next week is just not a good idea.
“Parents strangely enough, though, should feel a lot better about their kids playing contact sports now because if there is a concussion or a head injury it will be properly treated.
“There is more protection for players than there has ever been.”
What does trouble him, both for the impact it will have on rugby’s ability to be a community focal point and for the way it will damage New Zealand economically, is that the brightest and best Kiwis don’t want to live here.
“It’s a real issue,” he says. “It is mitigated by people coming back at later stages of their lives but we don’t know if they will and so we don’t know if that mitigation is going to be relevant. “People will always travel for their life experience, but they need to come back to well-paying, interesting, satisfying jobs.
“Lifestyle – to go fishing, or go to the beach or hiking or whatever – New Zealand has got all that. But because of our scale and the industrialisation of a whole lot of industries, they are all built in the huge economies, so there are less of those world-leading, interesting jobs being created in this country.
“Financially, the guys doing well in business whether it was a car yard or manufacturing business or whatever, they were putting money into the rugby club or provincial union. If the economy generally is struggling a bit, then everything is going to have less investment.”
Kirk is trying to turn back time on the community game, but he’s only looking into the future when it comes to the elite level.
Since he was appointed chair, the chattering classes have understandably been intrigued to see what position he would take with NZR’s private equity investor Silver Lake.
The interest being driven by Kirk’s active involvement in his previous role as chair of the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association to initially block the sale of commercial assets to the US investment house.
That period between early 2021 and mid-2022 was effectively a civil war between the players and their employer, and it led to several tense public exchanges, most notably between Kirk and then NZR chair, Brent Impey.
The initial proposal – to sell 12.5% of NZR’s commercial revenue for $387m - was revised, and NZRPA signed off on a new deal in June 2022 that gave Silver Lake a 5% stake for $200m, and an option for major financial institutions to invest an additional $100m.
But NZRPA ended up taking out a High Court injunction in late 2023 when it felt NZR didn’t give the institutional option a fair go at succeeding because it wanted to take another $62m from Silver Lake which had underwritten the capital raise process.
With such a chequered history, does Kirk want to try to unwind the Silver Lake deal or has so much time and money already been invested to make it impractical and too expensive to bail out now?
“We are in, we are committed, and we are going to make it work,” he says emphatically. “I don’t think, just realistically, we have the capital to buy it back – or all of it back.
“It would potentially be possible to buy some of it back, but there is no plan to do that. We are in it for good reason and that is to have reserves that can continue to be invested and to build out a global brand and a global fan base that will make the All Blacks particularly but New Zealand Rugby more generally, a highly valuable sporting brand.
“And that highly valuable brand needs to turn into operating cash flow. It needs to deliver cash back into the business and that can be reinvested back in the community game, and also into our domestic competitions and players.”
The high-level thesis has always made sense, but in the three years since Silver Lake came on board, there has been little evidence that it has the promised capability to execute the strategy successfully.
The arrival of a supposedly globally connected and sports-media savvy investor came with the promise that it would lead to an epic lift in NZR’s income.
But that hasn’t happened, but of more concern, is that there is no apparent change on the horizon either.
Kirk all but confirmed what the Herald has been reporting since late last year, which is that it is facing a significant drop in domestic broadcast income between 2026-2030 – but that it should be able to off-set that to some extent with improved agreements with international broadcasters.
Overall, though, the total income he expects will be in line with the roughly $100m a year NZR currently earns.
There’s little wriggle room to eke more out of match day income. “There is definitely a cut off on that,” he says. “You can’t just keep squeezing the lemon on your biggest teams.
“We are increasing the number of teams – materially the All Blacks are the most important team for match day. We are not in a position to push them to play any more games than they are currently playing.”
Sponsorship is the big hope of being the category that can in the short-term, deliver the hoped for uplift in revenue.
“That [sponsorship] is probably the biggest upside opportunity over time,” he says. “But it does need a few things to fall into place. The team still needs to be a great sponsorship opportunity.
“Ideally as you build your international fan base, more people love the All Blacks, think that they are cool. And if they are in a country where there is not a lot of rugby being played - their team is not great, and they are just looking for someone to latch on to - the All Blacks will be their top team.
“In other parts of the world where rugby is well established and they support their home team, then the All Blacks is their second team, or at least their marker of excellence so they love that.
“When you have got actual consumers thinking that, then you get sponsorship from major consumer goods companies because all of the people they are selling to love the All Blacks or [feel the team can] embody a whole range of virtues and capabilities that are admirable and which they want their own brand association with. Then the All Blacks will be their choice of rugby or sports brand generally to have on the kit or front of jersey.
“You see how quickly and with high quality of sponsors we filled the gap Ineos left us with. Toyota and Gallagher two great sponsors. Global sponsors, international sponsors… big balance sheets and the ability to write big cheques and the ability to grow with us over time.
“The brand is there we just need to keep building it.”
But when Kirk was on the other side of the table opposing the deal with Silver Lake, one of the core arguments against selling an equity stake was the inherent power of the All Blacks brand and its long-established ability to attract global sponsors.
It’s probable that Toyota and Gallagher would have invested in buying naming rights to the All Blacks’ kit regardless of whether Silver Lake was a partner or not, just as AIG, Ineos, Altrad and Adidas all bought in long before the US firm was involved.
This begs the question of what value does Silver Lake bring to NZR? “Don’t underestimate how important it has been in helping us believe in the opportunity,” Kirk says.
“Then structurally, in terms of our thinking, the way we go about accessing that opportunity.”
Selling 7.5% of future revenue for a motivational pep talk seems like an extraordinary price to have paid, but Kirk believes that it’s the fact that Silver Lake has so much resting on this deal now which has empowered the partnership.
“You could argue that you could have got some consultants in to give you a plan,” he says. “But unless you have got people with skin in the game, people driving this, you would have to bring a whole management team in that understood the growth of international brands and the ability to monetise international brands, what to invest in and how much to invest and where.
“Those skills are not that common, and people are not going to give them to you for nothing.
“Having an investor who has skin in the game, it matters to their reputation, and it matters to their return on investments. Don’t underestimate having that drive there.
“That above all is what Silver Lake have brought us, is they have brought their aspiration and the understanding of what opportunity is out there for a global brand such as the All Blacks.
“They have led our approach, our planning and thinking about what we have to do to access that.
“I don’t think we would have been able to do that without them. The question is how much did you have to sell to access that?
“That’s what I think in the end, a lot of debate and disagreement, we got there. We sold a relatively small amount to get a lot of access to a lot of support and advice and drive to deliver the outcome. I think we are in a good place.”
Comparatively, NZR is in a good place. Most other major national rugby unions have suffered major losses since Covid, but don’t have the same depth of cash reserves.
But Kirk is conscious that NZR can’t feel smug while it sits on a cash pile of $175m. The building of reserves is not, of itself, a sign of success or indicative of the union being on track to a brighter financial future.
“We have probably got more reserves than we need,” Kirk says. “It has never been the intention to build reserves and just sit there - lazy capital as it is called – on our balance sheet.
“We are investing that – and this is what we have not quite arrived at yet, is how long and how much we are going to be investing?
“Are we going to be having a negative end of year cash flow on the basis we have invested new money on growing future revenue? There are some moving parts that we are working on.
“The investment is still in building a global fan base and the brands, and the investment is in our performance in order to deliver on the brand promise.”
The inference is clear. Kirk believes NZR has the investment capital available, the relevant experience and expertise within its governance and the relationship with Silver Lake embedded to the point where the organisation has been set up to succeed.
The stage is set, then, for a new chief executive to take over from Mark Robinson, who will be leaving at the end of this year, and bring to life Kirk’s vision of modernising and globalising the All Blacks, while rejuvenating the community game.
Kirk says the process to find a new CEO will likely begin in a few weeks, but that potential applicants should be aware of what the job entails.
“There will be a lot of people who would love to run a global sporting brand. But they are not coming just to do that.
“They are coming to run the NZ community rugby. People with only a professional sporting background coming thinking they are running a professional sport will not be appropriate.”
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.