Blues winger Caleb Clarke scores a try during the Super Rugby Aotearoa match, between the Blues and Highlanders held at Eden Park. Photo / Photosport
Blues winger Caleb Clarke scores a try during the Super Rugby Aotearoa match, between the Blues and Highlanders held at Eden Park. Photo / Photosport
COMMENT:
It has taken 25 years, but finally a Pacific Island team will win a place in Super Rugby.
The sceptics and cynics – of which there are rightly many given the false hope the Pacific dream has been peddled over the years – will say it's another lie.
NewZealand Rugby's insistence that a Pacific Island team is a near non-negotiable priority for Super Rugby Aotearoa in 2021 sounds like yet another public relations exercise to win the popular vote at a time when the national body's unilateral decision to disband Sanzaar has set it at war with its alliance partners Australia and South Africa.
But for all that this could yet be another giant hoax where the Islands are moved like the pawn they have always been, it's almost certainly not.
And what makes this time different is that NZR is ready to take the unprecedented step of sharing its broadcast income with the new Pacific team.
That's the game-changer right there – the Pacific side will have the financial means to build a competitive squad, hire quality coaches and not be disadvantaged by an anemic bank account.
Broadcast revenue is the golden ticket. It pays for virtually everything in Super Rugby and it's the uncertainty about Australia's future television rights which has led to them being kicked out of New Zealand's plans for next year.
TV cash is the only currency that matters. Stick a wad of it on the table and you will have everyone's attention.
There are two things that talk in this business: money and Australian executives. The thing about money, though, is that it is worth listening to and as entertaining as some of the top brass across the Tasman have been in the last week in expressing their outrage as New Zealand's Super Rugby walkout, the more they shout the less everyone will listen.
Blues players form a huddle during the round 6 Super Rugby Aotearoa match between the Hurricanes and the Blues. Photo / Photosport.co.nz
The chutzpah is admirable, but all the bravado in the world can't hide the fact that Australia is travelling towards a financial black hole at hyper speed without a TV deal in place for next year.
It does seem contradictory, then, that NZR is ditching Australia on the basis they can't show them the money and yet inviting the Islands to come on board when they have long been rejected from inclusion precisely because they also haven't been able to and still can't prove their financial worth.
But we now appear to be in the post-Covid age of enlightenment which has cast the Pacific Islands in a new light.
With a phenomenal talent base but relatively tiny populations and economies, the Pacific Islands have long been viewed as asset rich, cash poor and until now, Super Rugby has madly chased after the cash rich, but asset poor, Western Force, Rebels and Sunwolves.
Covid-19 didn't make NZR realise the folly of backing weak teams to generate strong balance sheets. They had already worked out that was flawed.
What the arrival of the global pandemic has done is provide the reset mechanism to escape from its frankly daft past and create a new world where they trust that a compelling competition will generate fan interest and that, ultimately, financial sustainability is driven by capturing the hearts, minds and emotional investment of the consumer.
This is why the Islands now have the red carpet being rolled out in front of them and why New Zealand will share its TV riches.
This wasn't the case with the last attempt to bring a Pacific side into Super Rugby.
Blues winger Caleb Clarke scores a try during the Super Rugby Aotearoa match, between the Blues and Highlanders held at Eden Park. Photo / Photosport
The New Zealand Government commissioned a feasibility study in 2018 to ascertain the viability of a Fijian team being involved in Super Rugby in 2021.
But the provisional team was subjected to a financial stress test that no existing team in Super Rugby would have passed.
Sanzaar wasn't willing to share its broadcast revenue with the Fijian team. If they came in, it would be under similar terms to the conditions imposed on the Jaguares and Sunwolves where they would operate autonomously – not sharing in the pooled wealth of New Zealand, South Africa and Australia.
The Fijians were asked to prove that they could generate $12m of income on their own – something not even the financial heavyweight Blues could do – and hence they were deemed a financial liability and not invited to take part.
While there is indeed many a slip twixt the cup and the lip, events will have to take a catastrophic turn for a Pacific Island team not to be involved in Super Rugby next year.
