Mark Robinson resigned as chief executive of New Zealand Rugby after six-and-a-half years.
Robinson’s tenure included a $175 million reserve, record revenue, and a new digital channel.
His era saw significant changes, but also strained relationships and debates over strategic management.
The headlines followed a predictable pattern, claiming that Mark Robinson’s resignation as chief executive of New Zealand Rugby after six-and-a-half years in the role was a shock departure.
But it really wasn’t, not in an age when corporate heavyweights are surrounded by a small army of advisers whopreach about the importance of a clean and well-timed exit.
No one wants to walk out of a job with the dreaded question of whether they jumped before they were pushed hanging over them. No one wants to call time with a definitive sense the organisation they are leaving behind is failing.
The timing isn’t surprising, it’s perfect because, when carefully and selectively presented, the narrative of leaving the game in better shape than he found it just about holds up.
There is $175m in reserves, record revenue of $285m and a new digital channel in NZR+ up and running. Were it not for one missed penalty goal, the All Blacks would have joined the Black Ferns as World Cup winners on Robinson’s watch.
So too has Super Rugby been revamped as a Pacific tournament with a smaller geographic footprint that has slashed costs and made the competition more accessible to viewers.
He says that he’s also worked tirelessly to enable rugby to become a fan-friendlier sport – having been instrumental in lobbying his international peers to embrace a game where the ball is in play for longer and the referee intrudes less.
“The way we came out of Covid, I am really proud,” he says. “If you look at the revenue growth from that time, it is well over 60%.
“We have been able to invest in a range of different areas in the game to be able to consolidate some levels of the game the way some people don’t give us credit for.
“We have genuinely tried to positively change the game because we recognised that we needed to address ways in which fans were catered to and the way they connected with the product.
“The participants also needed to be thought about differently and put right at the centre of the game.
“I think fans are starting to connect more with our athletes through greater mediums. There is greater insight into our athletes.
“We have a wider international fan base, more people connecting to our game and rugby in general in this part of the world and that is borne out with our recent [sponsorship] announcements with Toyota and Gallagher.
“We are more focused on fans in Japan and the USA and educating the fan base in that part of the world. If you look at the product now compared with six years ago, I think you have to say there have been significant changes.”
In the three days since Robinson made his departure public, he’s done a masterful job at reflecting on his tenure as one that has repositioned rugby as a much-improved consumer sport, NZR as a modern, digitally focused organisation and the All Blacks as a globalised and better monetised brand.
He says he doesn’t want to be seen to be disparaging or critical about the organisation he inherited or the stakeholders that support it. But he feels he came into office at a time when rugby in New Zealand faced a non-negotiable decision about modernising its approach to generating revenue and building a new, sustainable financial model.
Having been a board director since 2013, and a World Rugby council member, he’d been on the frontlines of the sport for six years before his predecessor, Steve Tew, announced in March 2019 that he would be moving on after the World Cup that year.
Robinson says he can’t recall having a lightbulb moment when he knew he wanted to apply for the role, but after his playing career had finished in the mid-2000s, he could feel himself being pulled towards sports administration.
He had a stint as chief executive of the Taranaki Rugby Union between 2007 and 2012, before becoming general manager of energy and transport firm Symons Group, and then consulting roles from 2018.
He seemed to me a little defensive and prickly about the question of his career trajectory, perhaps because he knows several leading figures in the game privately questioned whether he had the experience and credentials to lead a large and complex organisation such as NZR.
Mark Robinson: 'There will definitely be differing views depending on where you sit.' Photo / Photosprort
But he believes that some of the doubts held about him relate to him being an agent of change – that not all stakeholders held the same international perspective he did. Nor did they fully understand the global trends driving professional sport, he says.
His belief is that his tenure came with an inevitable element of turbulence and criticism because ultimately it was transformational and progressive.
“There will definitely be differing views depending on where you sit in the system or even if you are just an observer, and I became comfortable with that a long time ago,” he says.
“I think I have always understood what it means to be a leader.”
Analysing the narrative
There is no doubt that rugby in New Zealand has changed in the past six years – stylistically, culturally, and economically - but to my mind what’s perhaps misleading is the extent to which Robinson is trying to portray himself as the architect of the new landscape in which the game now operates.
Robinson’s self-assessment is also perhaps guilty of over crediting his and New Zealand’s role in global initiatives such as the formation of the Nations Cup and then selling them as domestic wins, of presenting recent successes such as winning international All Blacks’ sponsors as evidence of newly developed brand strength rather than signifying business as usual, and of trying to park too many broken or strained relationships under the umbrella of Covid.
And there has been relationship carnage throughout Robinson’s era – with South Africa for the way the Super Rugby split was handled; with Australia for the initial way New Zealand tried to glue together Super Rugby as a wholly-owned private enterprise that only offered three licences to teams across the Tasman; with the professional players for the way the initial proposal to do a deal with Silver Lake was handled and with All Blacks coach Ian Foster.
Effectively understanding and contextualising the past six years requires a drill-deep analysis to question how much of the friction and confrontation can be attributed to the uniquely difficult circumstances produced by the Covid-19 pandemic, and how much was symptomatic of poor strategic management of relationships.
And while Robinson says he was working towards a clear and considered strategy, I believe there is a long body of evidence – the way the Silver Lake deal had to be rescoped, the collapse of the Super Rugby eight-team proposal, and the prolonged Foster-Scott Robertson coaching saga – to say that he appeared to be operating to an ad hoc, haphazard plan that was defined by public and media reaction.
The whole story of how Super Rugby Pacific came to be in its current format and finally rejuvenated itself as the world’s premier club competition, is one of circumstance and happenstance. It perhaps illustrates that the success stories of the Robinson era owe more to good luck than good management.
It was the Government in 2020 that brought the curtain down on the old Super Rugby format by closing the border for two years. It was more down to Rugby Australia and New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association that the tournament was relaunched as a jointly owned 12-team Pacific-region competition, rather than as an eight-team NZR-owned venture that was being viewed as a sellable entity to private-equity investors.
There is no doubt that the geo-politics of the Sanzaar alliance have shifted on Robinson’s watch, but not seemingly to any grand design.
Having parted Super Rugby company with South Africa – abruptly and without the necessary consultation according to administrators from the Republic – it would seem that NZR has spent recent years regretting that decision. They have spent the past five years trying to rebuild high-performance exposure to the old foe.
That will see the All Blacks tour South Africa next year for six weeks (a likely three-test plus five-games itinerary), with the Boks reciprocating in 2030.
Reciprocal tours with South Africa are set to return. Photo / Photosport
They will be marketed as the Greatest Rivalry and while they will be welcomed by fans, sponsors and broadcasters alike, it has left significant doubts about what the long-term future of international rugby in the Southern Hemisphere looks like as these two tours will all but kill the Rugby Championship as a meaningful tournament.
This is why the Greatest Rivalry feels to some observers like a short-term money grab, an ad hoc venture that doesn’t fit into any long-term vision for growing the value of international rugby in this part of the world.
And ad-hoc financial moves seem to me to have been a prevalent theme in the Robinson tenure, most notably with sponsorship deals with Mo Altrad and Ineos in 2021, who significantly outbid the competition.
There was widespread consternation about NZR signing a partnership with two billionaires, especially as Altrad had already been arrested and charged with bribery and corruption (for which he was later found guilty), and Ratcliffe’s petrochemical company Ineos had been labelled by Greenpeace as Scotland’s worst polluters.
Four years on, and Ineos have walked out and NZR is now pursuing a different sponsorship strategy of aligning more with consumer brands and not necessarily taking the highest offer.
With six months left in the job and goals still to achieve, Robinson says he’s not ready or willing yet to talk about what he learned in trying to manage such extensive change, or what he may have done differently.
What he does say is: “We had a model for the game and still do, that within the financial framework, we didn’t have an allocation of resources that goes towards growing the game for fans.
“We had the cost base we had and in our sport. Other codes, over the course of professionalism, have been able to create a model where they dedicate resources out of their P&L into fandom. Or they have taken an investment partner to be able to grow that.
“The thesis behind taking an investment partner to invest in fandom, growth of revenues and reach, building a digital presence and content is stock and standard in the sporting world and is absolutely the path for us to be on.
“Were there issues with parts of the process and executions that could have been different? Yes. Of course there were. Whatever happened in the process, we got to the state where the game felt comfortable. People will point to that time as any number of things that they may believe could have been different.”
Coaching conundrum
Where there is most contention about Robinson is in the hiring and firing of high-performance coaches of national teams.
Last week, head coach of the New Zealand Under-20 team Milton Haig, suddenly quit his role, citing irreconcilable differences with his assistants.
Haig’s departure means that for the third successive World Cup – the U-20s head to Italy next week for the Junior World Championship – a New Zealand team will be operating with an interim head coach.
In 2022, the Black Ferns parachuted Wayne Smith into the head coach role four months before the tournament after a review led to the removal of Glenn Moore. In 2023, Foster and most of his assistant coaches and management team went to the World Cup in France knowing they would be out of a job after the tournament as Scott Robertson had already been appointed that March to take over.
Most seasoned observers have argued that to head into pinnacle events on the back of major coaching upheavals does not align with best practice high-performance management, but Robinson argues they do.
He says that these decisions were not borne of distress and panic, but driven by an evidential need to make changes that were designed to give the teams the best chance of winning.
“The expectations of any of our national teams is that we go to these pinnacle events and we win,” he says. “Our role is to ensure that we do everything possible to put the team first in performance and give them the best chance of winning.
“And when you look at all three of those examples there are times when the organisation [NZR] by virtue of the information that is being shared within reviews and its internal working in understanding what the team environments are, make changes.
“As it relates to the Black Ferns, people can read into the speculation about why we made those changes. We made the changes, and we got as much support around that environment as we possibly could and we got success out of that.
Mark Robinson: 'The expectations of any of our national teams is that we go to these pinnacle events and we win.' Photo / Michael Craig
“As it relates to the All Blacks, we took the same view. We had the information at hand, and we were tasked with short-term, giving the team the best possible opportunity to win and perform and we led the changes to make that happen.
“We also had the obligation of thinking about the next cycle, and we made the calls that we did which were a departure from the past because we believed it was the best thing for the future of the team.
“I stand behind those decisions. I understand that certain individuals found those difficult, but we were team first.”
The Black Ferns won, and the All Blacks came within a whisker of winning – and Robinson cites this as proof that the decisions made were entirely justified and aligned with a clear goal of succeeding on the international stage.
Floating on Silver Lake
Robinson has six months left to serve so he says he doesn’t want to be talking about legacy, but he seems to accept that the decision to bring in Silver Lake will be viewed as the defining element of his tenure.
That, and his ability to reshape the business model of NZR which he’s hoping to do before he signs off, with a major project on financial sustainability now in its closing stages.
He came into the job convinced that NZR was being held back by the fixed-cost agreements it had to share 36.5% of its revenue with the professional players, and 17% with the provincial unions.
Tied into that, was his belief that not only did those costs need to be either lowered or decoupled as revenue-share agreements, but that NZR needed an injection of capital to start building stronger traditional revenue streams and investing in alternative ventures.
His thesis largely stands up to scrutiny, but the execution across these past six years has seen costs climb to a record $305m, and to date there has been, in my opinion, no discernible evidence Silver Lake has advanced the capability of NZR to maximise traditional revenue streams or build new ones.
It’s big chance to prove itself was in improving the existing broadcast deal which expires this year, but NZR is understood to be facing a significant reduction – between $15m-$25m – in the value of its domestic rights, and it’s hoping that it can plug the shortfall with improved deals with offshore broadcasters.
Best case scenario is that it retains the $111m-a-year it currently earns, which NZR will try to promote as a victory given the economic climate, but it will be a hard sell as break-even is not the home run that was being promised when Silver Lake came to the mound to have a swing.
In my opinion, Robinson, perhaps not cognitively, now gives the impression that he is no longer quite as gung-ho and certain about Silver Lake delivering on the sales pitch as he was four years ago.
Back in 2021 and for the three years that followed, he seemed to me to be incapable of having a rational conversation about whether history will see rugby’s rush to private-equity investors – the Six Nations and European club competitions have done similar deals to NZR’s with Silver Lake – as the right call.
Now that the evidence to say it was a bad idea is accumulating in Europe and NZR has lost almost $75m in the last three years, he’s more sanguine in his approach to the debate, but stands firm that it was the right thing to do.
