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The greatest threat to rugby in the southern hemisphere is European club rugby.
The key to competing with the French and English leagues and keeping our best players in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa is to make our second tier rugby bigger and more lucrative than theirs.
The fact is the Top 14 in France is growing stronger very quickly due to its increased broadcast deal and continued private investment.
The Aviva Premiership has the same potential. If these trends continue there will be a tipping point where all the best players follow the money to Europe.
The lure of a Test jersey will not be enough to keep them.
Already we are losing experienced players who in years gone by would have stuck around and mentored younger players.
Our rugby gets a little weaker with every quality player that leaves.
While the ARU are busy sorting out the NRC, I believe SANZAR as a whole should be much more focused on strengthening the second tier. Super Rugby has to move far beyond developing Wallabies, All Blacks and Springboks.
The ambition should be to make it the best, most popular and most lucrative league in the world. To do that it needs to provide more quality content and expand its appeal.
Both Australia and South Africa have populations that could support a few more second tier teams. Player depth shouldn’t be considered an issue as rugby has a growing global player base that could and should be tapped into.
Whether that also involves adding teams in more countries I’m not sure.
But whatever the format Super Rugby should definitely involve the best non-European players.
Developing unions could even help fund additional teams based in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa in return for squad places.
If the best players from the Asia-Pacific, Americas and Africa were all playing in the same league you could also take Test rugby to the next level.
Imagine if Japan, the US, Canada, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga – to begin with, were all competitive tier one Test nations with recognisable stars.
The Rugby Championship would become a much more valuable competition for all involved.
This would happen sooner than later with their top players lining up alongside and against the best from SANZAR in Super Rugby.
People that say the pacific island nations bring nothing to the table are wrong. If they were genuinely strong and exciting, and played most of their ‘home’ matches in Australia or New Zealand, they’d create more quality content.
And quality content is the key to driving revenues in the larger markets.
But Test rugby should be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself.
The Test season should be significantly shorter than the super rugby season.
At the moment I believe the international season for top nations (as a total) is a little too long. I think an ideal breakdown would be for a top player to play a max of 20-22 Super Rugby/second tier games and 10-12 Test matches in a season.
To keep the status quo would be to concede top level rugby to Europe.
Our best players will move there earlier and earlier and professional rugby everywhere else will become second rate.
The only truly top level games played in the southern hemisphere would be a handful of home Test matches played by European based stars, and perhaps a couple of pre-season exhibition matches with teams like the NRC All Stars taking on Toulon.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.