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USA Rugby boss Nigel Melville will come to Wellington this week and tell Sanzar executives his nation is ready to be part of Super Rugby.
The former England halfback and coach of Wasps and Gloucester says the USA is flexible enough to base a franchise on either the East or West coasts and that there are investors and broadcasters ready to fund an American Super Rugby team.
Rugby in the US has enjoyed a mini-boom in popularity in recent years and Melville says interest could potentially explode if agreement is reached with Sanzar to base a franchise in the States.
"The game is perfect for the US and people will love it," says Melville. "There is an opportunity here and the timing is right to have regular quality rugby in the US. In many ways, we will be saying to Sanzar it is a case of 'do you want us?'. I know we have the commercial support because I know what investors are around and what the broadcast interest is.
"We are entirely flexible. If Sanzar wants us to play against South Africans then we can go East and have a team based there or if they want us to play Kiwis and Australians then we can go West Coast."
Sanzar bosses have invited Melville and executives from Argentina, Canada, Japan and the Pacific Islands to hold talks about being part of a revamped Super 14. Aware that TV viewing figures in New Zealand are down about 20 per cent this year, that senior players are leaving in their droves and that the competition has started to feel stale, Sanzar executives have agreed to look at ways to dramatically revamp Super Rugby, probably to start in 2010.
With 300 million people and one of the biggest economies in the world, America has the potential to become a rugby heavyweight. Earlier this year, the New Zealand Rugby Union struck an alliance with their USA counterparts in a deal that will see the former provide coaching resources to the latter.
The deal was struck not with the exclusive altruistic goal of seeing rugby in the US develop - the NZRU is aware of the commercial power of the US and the opportunities that exist there to make money through the All Blacks.
Having a Super Rugby team in the US would help create more commercial opportunities as it would drive up spectator interest in the sport. Melville says that is key to developing the sport in the States and that it would also be important to ensure that, if the US is granted a Super Rugby franchise, it is competitive.
"It would need to be a hybrid team," says Melville. "The players involved would have to be at the required level. I would like to think that there are three or four American players who could play at that level right now. And when our academies start pushing greater numbers of players through, we could start providing more players and get to the stage where we have an entirely home-grown team.
"We do not lack athletes, but we lack rugby players," he says.
The preferred model for Melville would be for the franchise to be privately owned so it could be well-funded through corporate investment. He says he has no idea how that will sit with Sanzar as, other than an invitation to this week's talks, there has been no dialogue on the future shape of Super Rugby.
With the new competition likely to be locked in for at least five years through broadcast rights, it is really a case of now or never for the US. If they are shunned by Sanzar, it will become tough in the extreme to fulfil the sport's potential without access to a global competition.
But Melville is not viewing the Sanzar opportunity is such stark terms. "We just need to know where we are heading over the next two years. We have a really good relationship developing with New Zealand.
"But if the Sanzar opportunity doesn't work out we will head East and look to Europe."
That philosophical approach is not shared by the Pacific Islands who have virtually no commercial support and no other options to grow the game if Sanzar can't find a place for them in Super Rugby. Samoan Rugby chief executive Peter Schuster says that the preference for inclusion in Super Rugby would be as individual nations rather than as a collective entity.
It is doubtful whether Sanzar would agree to accommodating Samoa, Fiji and Tonga and it is also unlikely they would agree to having a franchise based in any of the islands due to the logistic difficulties, lack of infrastructure and reduced sponsorship, commercial and broadcast potential.
Schuster accepts that being based in Samoa is probably not going to happen, but doesn't see that as a major issue.
"We will look at the commercial side and if we need to be based in Newcastle, in Melbourne or in New Zealand then we are supportive of that," he says.
The major attraction of gaining inclusion into Super Rugby for Samoa is the ability it would give them to lure back many top players based in Europe. If they could gain access to those players, then they would be able to compete more effectively at test level and that would open the possibility of being invited into an extended Tri Nations.
To strengthen their case for inclusion, Schuster would also like to see the eligibility laws revisited to allow players who represent a Tier One nation and then stand down for one year to be eligible again for Tier Two nations.
In effect that would see capped All Blacks such as Brad Mika, Jerry Collins and Chris Masoe become eligible to play for Samoa.
