SANZAAR and Super Rugby need to be ripped up and pieced back together

Those matches probably tell you the level then...a Premiership team playing a state (not SS) team, a Premiership team playing a SR team, and a Heartlands Baabaa team playing a composite SS team. Pretty much exactly as I'm saying. You are wrong about the NPC though. NZR themselves describe it as "the second highest level of professional rugby in New Zealand", and while the salary cap may have decreased since the early 2000s where it was apparently a couple of million a year, the 2016-18 collective employment agreement still had a maximum Provincial Union retainer of $55,000 with two veteran players exceptions up to $85,000, aminimum retainers of $21,000 for a minimum 26 players excluding All Blacks, and a collective $15M forecast across the M10 Cup Provinces. There were calls to go amateur post-Covid (not least from Robbie Deans in Japan...recruiting strategy?), and talk of revamping the comp along geographic lines, but I've seen nothing to say any of them have actually come to anything yet.

AndyS, the NPC went semi-pro for a season then it went back to being amateur. The figure you quote could be for operating costs. NPC players are not paid in cash as far as I understand. And the reason for a third-tier competition is to develop players; a third tier will create a step up from the level of club competition and bridge the gap with Super/Test rugby, which is substantial. This concept originated and was developed during the decades of amateurism. And I did get to watch the NPC Auckland side play NSW in a pre-season game at Gosford a decade or so back not to mention that far more recent BoP pre-season game against the Force last season. I also watched a combined Heartlands team take on a combined Two Blues/Emus side at Merrylands. Fortunes went 2--1 to the Kiwis out of those games. So there's been a couple of such games already.

The much lamented gap in the Australian rugby structure is that it requires fully professional teams to select players directly from entirely amateur teams. It would be the exact equivalent of the NZ teams only having the Heartland teams available to select players from, or give them additional development, and as you noted that wouldn't really happen. The bit that is missing in Aus are the semi-pro teams that the NRC should be providing, the way the Premiership and Championship do in NZ. You may feel that the entirely amateur suburban SS teams are equivalent to your Canterburys and Waikatos, but if so you should drop NZR a line about wasting their money given the fourteen of them have wages bills of $1M+ a year each and running costs on top. Personally I think SS might be interesting against the HL, team for team/oranges and oranges. AIR the NRC as was (essentially amateur itself) and HL did have a baabaas match-up, but I would have been interested to see the NRC and NPC match up as actual teams. Not sure it would have gone well for the Aussies though, given it would still have been semi-pro/pro v amateur.

SLAR was designed to be an intermediate step between amateur competition and SR. Again, this is all pre-Pandemic planning, but the idea was to expose young players to a higher level of competition than amateur leagues, but not as high as SR. Other than that, we have a rather different reading of the facts.

If it was about quality not quantity why did NZRU/SR replace 5 teams that finished top 10 in the 2019 Super Rugby with one of them finalist and replace them with the Force, Dura and Mona. And and internal review thought it would make the competition better. TV companies want all year sport which Rugby can give with a longer Super Rugby season. Once SR was no longer teams from the Currie Cup South Africa went from 7 teams to 4 teams effectively halving the number of professional teams while at the same time giving in the Lions Share of TV revenue to fund Super Rugby. I wonder why they wanted more teams, especially as more players were leaving South Africa because they had less teams than New Zealand. In 1995 they were given $550m to set up Super Rugby and get it running. In 2006 when they moved to 14 teams the domestic leagues of each country were not the producers of internationals as they had been 10 years earlier. Something had to change to allow South Africa and Australia compete with the NH nations who in the mid 90s were actually starting to win the odd game against them. Right now SA have 4 teams in the URC and had the number of players for a squad in the Prem and T14 giving them about 6 teams to pick from. Add in that the have the Cheetahs as a second division club. They still have 7 less than England and 8 less than France even though they produce a similar playing numbers. There are over 250 South African players in the URC, Prem and T14 so it was not a quality issue that ruined Super Rugby. England have about 400 players and France 300 in the same leagues. Super Rugby was a poorly run competition that ran itself into the ground along with most of the domestic rugby in each of the participating nations thus destroying the development lines that had made those nations the best. That was where SR went wrong, not adding more teams. The latest SR format is just a continuation of making bad things worse rather than tackle the actual issues

was adjusting my name and accidently changed it by mistake changed the wrong box. Friends gave out to me my name wasn’t on the article I had written that got over 50k views so I wanted to put part of my name on for them.

You miss the point: 2019 was a WC SF, not scheduled by RFU in negotiation with NZR. How about addressing the points I'm actually making here??? When is NZ going to host England for a 3 match tour or something?

For goodness sakes mIcko, if it’s starting to not be worth your time then why not just leave and save, everyone all this drama. And gees, I thought the ABs played England in 2014 so the next time they met in 2019, was if my maths is correct, just 5yrs later and not the incorrect time frame you suggest. Cmon mate, at least try to make a decent issue rather than just b.s. your way through it.

Oh and btw….I started blogging with NH Fan who became BrenStap and who now becomes Brendan NH Fan….another stupid NH example of quantity, trying to outdo quality. I had enough of this crap so I’ll leave it all to you guys, to argue amongst yourselves.

What an absolute load of crock sh-t. SR12 lasted as long as the first Newscorp contract lasted and that was, if I recall, 5yrs. It wasn’t until the next SR contract negotiations occurred did the remaining partners decide to challenge, the 5-4-3 arrangement. From that moment onwards, we SR fans started to find out how much damage quantity, did to quality. But I guess, that’s the typical mentality of a NH Fan, isn’t it???

I see it differently. Argentina has a good domestic league and top players in that league will always be picked up by European Clubs especially as many can get EU passports. Best domestic players get into the SLAR team, which would have been there regardless of SR. For years an Argentine A side played in the South American Championship for internationals. The Jags could only pick so many players. Argentina have 65 players in Europe's top 4 leagues. Jags made picking the national side harder as the national coach had to basically copy the Jags systems especially when successful which resulted in poor test results because tests must be played differently. Jags couldn't bully people at test like they did in SR.

Super Rugby struggled with expansion because the nations refused to believe that basic economics applied to them. They thought they were getting all the money because of the product but it was about matches. With the three Unions wishing to make Super Rugby the primary competition they all needed enough teams to cater for player development to get test players. As each nation did a closed shop approach Super 12s was never going to work for 2 of the nations. It was fine for NZ with 5 teams but Oz was not going to be competitive at test level with just 3 teams. Currently South Africa has 320+ players in European leagues so 4 teams wasn't enough to keep players. With Administrators unwilling to extent the season the TV companies needed more teams for more games. Making the second half of the year about internationals they have made a rod to beat themselves as they areunable to fit both a full season club game to have something worth selling and have the internationals. There are lots of weeks with no professional rugby leaving viewers with NPC or SS/HC on.

Hey NH Fan, what's the deal? :silly: :stoked:

And they're not "financially settled" at all Old Bugger! They took a one-off sugar hit large cash injection from a US investment company (Silver Lake), and then sold them a significant proportion of THEIR future revenue streams that NZR can produce! NZR STILL has the sole responsibility of having to finance ALL domestic RU activities in NZ, and ALL future revenue NZR can generate will have a significant proportion syphoned off to faceless shareholders in other countries! All the while the lame duck SR comp still bleeds viewers and public interest even in NZ, with virtually no scope to grow revenue in it's current format.

As has been pointed out previously Super Rugby and domestic Rugby are part of the package that is mainly just purchased for the international games. It is in part why NZ and Oz are the ones who are always looking to get more games outside the window. Most unions do 1 game a year or less. Do we know what percent of the 100m is for SR.

BrenStap "If Super Rugby is losing money it is costing NZRU and RA money to run it. If there was no Super Rugby they would have more money. Good so far. So NZRU and RA are actually better off to pay every player in SR the same wage and hold no competition than run it and have to pay all the travel costs, administrators support staff etc. From a sporting sense it makes no sense but from a money point of view it does." Now why didn't I think of that - get paid for doing nothing....brilliant!! Point me in the direction of the broadcaster, who will pay NZR and RA to broadcast a competition, that doesn't exist.

BrenStap Of course it's about national teams. That has been the core of NZR's being, ever since the game went professional in 1996. Back then, NZR decided that the newly formed SR12 competition, would be the stepping stone for players to gain AB selection and that, hasn't changed since then. What changed was SR12 became SR14, then SR15, then SR18. We will never know if SR 12 could've/would've kicked on, in its format because for a while, it was a premier event being broadcast globally. Unfortunately, we all know what happened when participation started to increase because it seemed that quantity, was sadly mistaken for quality and the competition, its revenue and its players, began to flag, fall and disappear overseas, respectively. NZR chose the national criteria in 1996 because at the time, the only international competition involving being played, where rankings and comparisons could be made, was the RWC. There was no comparative system in the club or provincial scene on a global scale. This may change, when and if, a global club/provincial competition is established but, let's not hold our breath, for that to happen.....it will, if it wants to.

NZR has no say when it comes to RWC events so Sky is in the same boat. However, you'd imagine that any business with some nous, would bid for the WC in NZ and utilise whomever gives the best deal, to provide ground staff, equipment and production services. If that happens to be Sky, then chalk it up. NZR always goes out and calls for bids from interested parties. When Fox had a grip on it all, it was Fox who utilised Sky to provide the ground services. Either way, unless the Govt's FTA channels can provide competitive bids, then NZR receives some revenue either as the rights holder or, as a Sky shareholder.

Your answer actually went in a different direction than my original point, but in regards the Pumas, it's very misleading to measure their results during the 2016-2019 period in the way that you do. Argentina went into SR in 2016, and in order to make the Jaguars a going concern, they had to ring fence the Pumas so that no European players would be selected (by 2018, they were summoning two or three players from Europe, to deal with areas of need). Meanwhile, the Jaguars turned out to be a very, very good system for generating new talent. The pandemic killed the Jaguars as a going concern, but the fact of the matter is that Argentina was producing bushels of young talent, to the point that after the 2019 RWC, a number of Jaguar players went to Europe. That trickle turned into a flood after the pandemic, including a number of young players that hadn't debuted with the Jags (e.g., Thomas Gallo) or had barely played with the Jags (e.g., Juan Mallía or Santiago Carreras). In a non-pandemic world, I maintain that the Jaguars would be perennial SR finalists AND Argentina would have had a ton of talent also playing in Europe. Right now, Argentina is going through a bit of a "demographic bonus" in re: its players. The real question is what will happen in 5 to 10 years time, when Argentina's pipeline talent production line is wholly contingent on European clubs.

I don't disagree that players move from level to level. I disagree that SS and HC don't have the players to take on the NPC sides. I think you were making the same point but I may have replied to the wrong comment.