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Earlier this month we heard the announcement the Super Rugby competition will expand to 17 teams from 2016 onwards, with the inclusion of an Argentinian team and a sixth South African team.
This is undoubtedly good news for South Africa, who have campaigned hard for the reinstatement of the Southern Kings and even threatened to join the European Rugby Competitions if their demands for a sixth team were ignored.
With 17 teams, it is evident the existing conference system will need to be tweaked in order to provide a draw that is fair to all teams.
A conference system based on geographic lines provides many benefits, the most obvious being the reduction of international travel costs and the opportunity to create a draw where clubs play each other twice – once home and once away.
In essence, a tournament structured with a conference system satisfies the requirements of a domestic competition, leading into a Champions League at the end of the regular season.
One proposal that has been mentioned many times on this site is to expand the competition to 18, then arrange the teams into three separate conferences, each comprising six teams.
Within each conference, each team would play each other twice, which is a total of 10 matches per season.
The top two teams from each conference would then participate in a play-off series and the winner would be crowned Super Rugby Champions.
But while this model provides more domestic matches, it could spell the end of Super Rugby as a truly international tournament and the emergence of three separate regional competitions.
Reports suggest South Africa will definitely play in a conference isolated from Australia and New Zealand, and may look to expand their conference in future with other African teams, thus creating their own African Super Rugby conference with a regular season that may extend beyond 10 rounds.
The next likely division would be the New Zealand Teams plus one or more teams from the Pacific Nations forming an Oceania Super Rugby conference, providing more local derbies in New Zealand.
So where does the devolution of Super Rugby leave the remaining five Australian clubs and the newly admitted Argentinian club.
In order to provide a fair and entertaining finals series/Champions League, all three conferences must be of a similar strength and should ideally have the same number of teams.
But there is a clear lack of depth in Australian Rugby simply due to the popularity of other football codes like the NRL and AFL, so an Australian rugby conference would be considerably weaker than the African and Oceania rugby conferences.
This basically means the third Super Rugby conference will need to contain a significant number of non-Australian players in order to raise the standard to the level of the African and Oceania conferences.
Another suggestion is new international clubs from Japan, Argentina and Asia be included in this third conference, enabling the number of Australian teams to be reduced to three teams corresponding to the true rugby union heartlands.
This would strengthen the Australian teams and render them worthy competitors in a Super Rugby finals series against the New Zealand and South African teams.
Of course the Australian clubs would need to undertake significantly more international travel compared to the African and New Zealand clubs.
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.