At the heart of their suggestions came Proposal 1, which would have seen major changes in 2026 to how the New Zealand Rugby board was selected. All board members would be independent.
But at New Zealand Rugby’s special general meeting in Wellington, Proposal 2 was passed instead, mandating that three of the nine board members must have experience on provincial union boards.
Six questions spring to mind.
Is this the biggest bust-up ever in rugby here?
Definitely. In 2003, after New Zealand lost co-hosting rights to the World Cup, the provincial unions demanded the resignation of the whole board of New Zealand (NZR). (Four of the nine members survived a new vote.) But our professional players at the time weren’t warning that they would basically be involved in a new organisation.
Was the threat by the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association (NZRPA) to set up a new body to run the professional game wise?
On the one hand, it gave critics of Proposal 1 the chance to paint the Players’ Association head Rob Nichol as being on a bullying power trip. But if he’d revealed what his association had in mind after the special general meeting decision, would that be considered backstabbing? The choice for the Players’ Association was a classic rock and a hard place situation.
Has there ever been the potential for such a disconnect between the country’s best players and the NZR?
Who knows what exactly will play out now. But 1995, when Aussie media tycoon Kerry Packer was trying to buy the Southern Hemisphere’s best rugby players, was a weird time. At one point, after winning a test in Sydney 34-23, All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick actually asked the team manager, Sir Colin Meads, and coach Laurie Mains to stay on the team bus so the players could have a private meeting to talk deals at the suburban home of one of Packer’s most senior executives, Brian Powers.
Eventually, a frenetic scramble up and down the country by the then New Zealand Rugby Union’s (NZRU) Jock Hobbs saw the top players sign professional contracts with the NZRU. Hobbs had the benefit of a Rupert Murdoch-funded war chest of money, and could guarantee well-paid offers to win over players. It’s hard to know what an NZR representative in 2024 could use to smooth out the issues with the Players’ Association.
Is there a feeling at grassroots level that some change is needed, because how NZR is currently running the game at the highest level is leading to bad decisions?
NZR probably skated through on the public’s perception of whether the Silver Lake money deal was a mistake, because the details were complex and hard to unpick for a non-businessperson.
But much easier for all of us to understand was how bad the huge decision was to appoint Scott Robertson as All Blacks coach before Ian Foster had taken his squad to the 2023 World Cup.
Basically, it exposed incompetence at NZR. A showbusiness equivalent would have been Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker calling a press conference before a late-career Presley tour and saying: “Y’all should understand that Elvis is now fat, barely functioning and full of every drug from morphine to Quaaludes to Valium. So come on Elvis fans, buy up those tickets to his show.”
Proposal 1 wanted no members on the NZR board who were representing a provincial union. Are there examples of successful sports bodies where the provinces or clubs involved don’t have direct representation on the national board that runs the sport?
There are. Since 1995 New Zealand Cricket has had a nine-member board in which nobody is directly representing a provincial association. Cricket officials swear by the system.
Perhaps most germane to the NZR set-up is how the 18 professional clubs in the Australian Football League operate. The clubs as a group elect a commission of between six and nine people, none of whom are directly representing a single club.
What will change now?
Current NZR board chair Dame Patsy Reddy, overseas on holiday at the moment, has said she would resign if Proposal 1 wasn’t accepted. Given that the majority of the board supported her, it’d seem the ethical action for all nine members would be to step down, to clear the way for a new election.
