Sanzaar announced a five-year international plan after difficult negotiations among member nations.
Rassie Erasmus proposed aligning the Rugby Championship with the Six Nations to unify seasons.
New Zealand rejected the proposal, citing concerns about restructuring Super Rugby Pacific and player welfare.
Sanzaar, after months of fraught negotiations between the member nations, last week finally unveiled its international plans for the next five years.
It wasn’t an easy agreement to reach, primarily because New Zealand and South Africa have opted to do their own thing in 2026 and 2030 (hostingreciprocal tours in those two respective years).
There had also been discussions about binning the Rugby Championship in 2028 in favour of Argentina and Australia, respectively, playing three-test series against New Zealand and South Africa.
That concept never got over the line, partly because the financials were going to be hard to stack up and partly because there has been a realisation, albeit late in the piece, that the Rugby Championship is not the basket case New Zealand and South Africa have tried to say it is.
In typical Sanzaar fashion, an acceptable compromise agreement was reached after prolonged bickering and all four countries seemingly endorsed the five-year plan.
Seemingly, because the ink was barely dry on the triumphant press release announcing it when Springboks coach Rassie Erasmus reiterated his desire to see a radical restructuring of the Southern Hemisphere season and to shift the Rugby Championship to February/March to align with the Six Nations.
Billy Proctor leads the All Blacks' haka against South Africa in Wellington. Photo / Photosport
“I don’t want this to be a headline, this is my opinion. But I think it would be fantastic if we could [start] the Rugby Championship in February, when the Six Nations is on,” Erasmus said.
“It would be so much easier if all the teams were aligned, not having some countries flat in [July] and others are peaking in November and we are flat.
“I hope this doesn’t go against SA Rugby’s wishes or the way they’re thinking.”
Erasmus presumably knows full well that his views do not clash with those of his employer as this issue of shifting the Rugby Championship was put on the Sanzaar table throughout 2023 and 2024 and came under serious consideration, only to be rejected by New Zealand.
South Africa and Argentina were the drivers of this proposal as they have both found themselves in the curious position of having their clubs (and in Argentina’s case, elite players) locked into Northern Hemisphere competitions and their international team committed to the Southern Hemisphere schedule.
It has become an unsustainable long-term proposition for both nations as it effectively commits their players to being available for 12 months of the year with no clear off-season.
And while Erasmus is earning global praise for the way he is building depth in his Springboks’ squad, his heavy rotation of players is driven as much by necessity as it is innovation, and he knows that there is a risk some of his best talent will self-destruct without careful management of game time.
Shifting the Rugby Championship to align with the Six Nations would be the perfect solution for both South Africa and Argentina.
It would immediately alleviate all their pressure points – lock them into a season structure that comes with a ready-made off-season.
But for New Zealand and Australia, such a shift would require a total overhaul of the current set-up: a radical rethink on when Super Rugby Pacific would start and end as the elite players would need to be match-conditioned and battle-ready for test matches in February-March.
Fundamentally, rugby would have to transition from being a winter sport to a summer sport as under this model, the off-season would have to shift to begin after the July tests and run through August to early September.
When this was a live option last year, Australia was supposedly comfortable with the proposed shift, but New Zealand rejected it on the grounds that such a major restructuring would potentially cast the future of the NPC into doubt and carried too large a risk when weighed against the likely rewards.
It would be unfair to label New Zealand’s resistance as short-sighted, but the long-term risks of restructuring the season to play tests in late summer were perhaps inflated.
Super Rugby Pacific is predominantly a summer competition as it is and fans are more resilient and flexible than administrators may believe and will adjust to the new reality of watching the Blues play the Crusaders on Boxing Day.
Besides, given the country’s creaking stadium infrastructure, people may be more inclined to attend Super games at the height of summer rather than the depths of winter.
Player welfare has been aired as another concern, but teams already play warm-up fixtures in late January and it seems selective to argue that the risks of dehydration or heat stroke would be so much higher in mid-December to early January as to rule out playing then.
This argument is weakened further because New Zealand Rugby was quite happy to send Super teams to 40C-plus temperatures in Japan when the Sunwolves were part of the competition and, even now, the conditions encountered in Fiji when the Drua play at home are extreme.
The real kicker and strongest argument for making the change is that it would create one unified season structure, which, to Erasmus’s point, would remove the fatigue imbalance that currently taints the July and November test windows.
Ardie Savea and Juan Martin Gonzalez after a clash between the All Blacks and Argentina. Photo / Photosport
One of New Zealand’s great bugbears is that the Northern Hemisphere sides have often come down here with many of their top players resting at home – as France did this year – devaluing the commercial potential and fan interest in the July tests.
Some of this is driven by international coaches in the north rationalising that they don’t want players who are at the end of a long season to encounter an All Blacks team starting their international campaign.
Unify the seasons and potentially every problem the game currently has will be fixed. Clearly, judging by the fact Erasmus has refloated the idea, South Africa remain determined to lobby for change and pressure New Zealand to reconsider.
