Jaguares’ re-inclusion into Super Rugby would be a decision made without fans at the centre - Gregor Paul

The Jaguares' re-inclusion to Super Rugby would come with significant difficulties. Photo / Photosport

OPINION

Sometimes it feels like rugby is the master at taking one step forward and then two back, and that it instinctively knows how to say all the right things but has no natural feel how to implement them.

At the end of last year, after a World Cup that showed the best and worst of the sport in the closing weekends, there appeared, in New Zealand at least, to be a new-found energy and desire to win back the fans.

There was an obvious shift in attitudes among the administrative class which said loud and clear that they had to put the fan at the centre of their decision-making.

From re-shaping the laws to produce a more fluid, easier to follow, quicker game, to determining kick-off times and competition formats – everything had to work for the fan first, all other stakeholders second.

New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson even told media that in the coming months, “You are going to hear a lot of the term fan-centric”.

It felt like a breakthrough moment, as if the sport was acknowledging that it had got itself into a financial mess and had lost a bit of its support-base by pandering to broadcasters, sponsors and the ego and deluded ambitions of its executives for too long.

The new message fostered hope that a new era of measured, sensible decision-making was about to begin, and that rugby had learned from the mistakes of its past.

And yet here we are in early March and some of that hope has already been killed by the murmurings that the Jaguares are being lined up to rejoin Super Rugby as a replacement for the Melbourne Rebels, who have gone bust and are almost certainly going to fold after this campaign.

How this could be justified as a fan-centric decision is genuinely intriguing as the Jaguares, despite being stacked with Pumas, were never a particularly powerful drawcard in their previous Super Rugby stint.

The Jaguares delivered on the high-performance front, but they challenged the integrity of Super Rugby as they were effectively the Pumas in disguise, and therefore an international team playing in a club competition.

It is looking increasingly unlikely the Melbourne Rebels are in Super Rugby's long-term future. Photo / Photosport

It was a hard sell to Kiwi and Aussie fans, and now that nearly all their leading players have left Argentina for club contracts in Europe and Japan, it’s even harder to believe that a Jaguares team drawn from no-name, inexperienced locals will fulfil the wants and desires of Australasian supporters and set pulses racing.

Nor will Super Rugby Pacific followers celebrate the return of games being played in Buenos Aires at difficult-to-access times.

That’s a lose-lose for fans, and while it’s possible that Argentina’s best players could drift back home over time and join the Jaguares, supporters in this part of the world shouldn’t be asked to take part in this development journey and accept that they have a short-term dud but maybe a long-term winner.

That promise has been made too many times before and surely everyone feels like Super Rugby has been there and done that with the Jaguares, and that it didn’t work out plonking a solitary team in a far-off continent.

The additional danger of bringing back the Pumas is that the cost and difficulty of getting to Argentina from New Zealand has escalated post-Covid.

There are no direct flights and with the Rebels having collapsed, and other clubs believed to be in dangerous financial territory, Super Rugby can’t be daft enough to add to its expenses with virtually no prospect of the Jaguares delivering any uplift in revenue.

Fans are already wondering about Super Rugby’s viability and credibility in the wake of the Rebels going into administration, and more teams toppling over in the next few years will destroy the competition entirely.

This talk of bringing back the Jaguares is likely being driven by New Zealand Rugby which perhaps feels an element of guilt for bringing the Pumas into the Rugby Championship, encouraging them to create a Super Rugby team and pull their players to Argentina, only to axe them without consultation when the borders shut during the pandemic.

Rebuilding the Jaguares may well strengthen the Pumas, but it’s not Super Rugby’s responsibility to be Argentina’s development vehicle and certainly not right to ask Kiwi and Aussie fans to accept a compromised club competition for the supposed greater good of the international game.

A fan-centric solution to the Rebels’ demise would be to run next year’s Super Rugby with 11 teams – an imperfect but workable proposition, and then begin 2026 under the terms of a new broadcast deal as a 10-team competition.

Fans have made it clear they want a more competitive Super Rugby – more contests that carry genuine uncertainty and unpredictability, with a higher quality of players, all in a manageable time zone.

Getting to 10 teams will require a painful decision to terminate a current club, but it is also possible that another one is going to financially collapse in the next 12 months and fans will get what they want by attrition.

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.