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Opinion
Before throwing himself into this year’s appendage-swinging contest with Australian Rugby League Commission Chair, Peter V’Landys, Rugby Australia Chair Hamish McLennan threw himself into last year’s appendage-swinging contest with New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson.
Last year, it was supposedly about equality. This year… I’m still not really sure what it’s about.
Interestingly, McLennan insisted throughout last year’s shenanigans that his NZR counterpart, Chair Stewart Mitchell “is a really good guy”. And equally, he’s left NRL CEO Andrew Abdo alone this year.
He obviously knows his targets, and he certainly knows how to get a reaction. But it’s a hell of a way to do business, and I can’t help but wonder what suddenly-former RA CEO Andy Marinos made of it all. That he is suddenly the former CEO probably tells you all you need to know. Pictures and a thousand words, and that sort of thing.
But regardless of what you make of the methods, McLennan certainly got what he was after – a bigger share of the broadcasting revenue that RA foolishly gave up a few years ago, and with the flow-on being an extension of the Super Rugby Pacific joint venture through to the end of the 2030 season.
And after all of that was threatened last year, it seemed an extraordinary outcome. One minute, one half wants to walk away, and the next minute a new seven-year partnership!
The announcement in early December was collectively described by those making it as “a significant moment for professional club rugby in the Pacific region”, a “unified commitment to the Super Rugby Pacific format”, and with the partnership to “provide stability and continuity that the competition and Super Rugby clubs need to enable Rugby to grow in stature and importance across the region.”
The extended joint venture arrangement from 2024, the announcement said, was going to push the tournament back to the bleeding edge in terms of innovation as was the case in the early days of the old Super 12 competition, through trialling and implementing new rules and Law variations (which we’ve seen already this season), and a desire to develop “the most exciting form of Rugby in the world.”
We were told to expect an integrated women’s competition structure built on the success of the Super W and Super Rugby Aupiki on either side of the Tasman, and importantly, new ways of engaging fans and broadcast innovations, something that’s been long overdue.
(Photo by Oisin Keniry – World Rugby/World Rugby via Getty Images)
And on that last point, though they couldn’t make the set piece shot clocks visible for fans at the stadium and watching at home on TV for this season, there is a much more consistent look and feel across the game broadcasts no matter where they’re being played.
If you look carefully, there’s not a lot of difference between how Sky Sport presents a game from New Zealand and how Stan Sport and the Nine Network do it from Australia. Ditto the Fijian Broadcasting Corporation as well.
They’re all using the same set of graphics generated and distributed by SANZAAR at the start of the year, and it’s all done very deliberately so that there’s a unified presentation for the rugby fan watching four or five games at home, as was the case on Saturday. From Lautoka to Auckland to Hamilton to Brisbane, the ‘product’ essentially looked the same from one game to the next.
But the big ticket item in last year’s announcement was, in my humble opinion, somewhat buried and hasn’t been elaborated on at all since:
“The new agreement will usher in a new governance model for Super Rugby Pacific with the establishment of a nine-person board, which will include an independent Chair, four independent Directors, and one representative each from NZR, RA, the New Zealand Rugby Players Association (NZRPA), Rugby Union Players’ Association (RUPA).
“The Board will oversee the competition with the purpose of a clear, unbiased focus on governance, and the creation of a consistent look and feel across the competition.”
The 2023 Super Rugby Pacific season has five rounds to run, followed by three weeks of finals concluding on Saturday 24th June. That’s eight more weekends before all attention moves onto international rugby. Being a Rugby World Cup year, it’s already getting more than its fair share now.
And it’s really curious to me that we still don’t know any more about how these independent directors and the Chair will be selected, never mind actually appointed, nor do we know how this new model of governance will function, where it will be located, what (if any) linkage it will have to SANZAAR, who still perform a logistics and management support role to SRP now, or what powers it will have.
The curiosity around this inaction and confused existence became a shared one over the weekend.
“We need to be fan-centric, and at the moment we’re high-performance-centric and the balance isn’t quite right. It’s about what the fan wants, what they need to see, and that can sometimes go against high performance,” Blues and former NSW Waratahs CEO Andrew Hore told stuff.co.nz Senior Sportswriter Marc Hinton over the weekend.
(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
“At the moment we’re still hitched to the national bodies, and they’re not necessarily motivated to make franchises better. That’s the issue. The national bodies need to decide: do we want to build a product that everyone’s going to cherish and reinvest in; or do we want to run it, and own everything?”
Challenging NZR to show they’re not “only interested in the black jersey”, Hore made a pretty clear call to the powers that be around the mooted governance changes for Super Rugby: get on with it.
“We need people who are thinking Super Rugby every day. And at the moment it’s half the year. But we need to be thinking how can we make this a nine-month proposition? That could be global club competitions, and the women’s game.”
“At the moment, the Supers generate around $28 Million that goes back into high performance. I want that to be $70 Million. The more we grow Super Rugby, the more we grow the ability to reinvest.
“That’s being compromised because we’re not allowing ourselves to build a competition that can generate more money.”
Andrew Hore is not above speaking his mind on matters like this, but in this particular instance, I can imagine there is a very quick and definite consensus around the other CEOs. The franchises have similar questions to those I’ve posed above, and now it feels like they’re ready to start asking them out loud.
And if it’s clearly not the franchises holding things up – because why would they? – it’s not hard to see the delays in this process as the start of yet another looming power struggle.
And even with absolutely nothing to base this on, it’s probably not even that difficult to guess which joint venture partner suddenly has an issue with what was previously agreed upon and announced. Hint: I’ll wager it’s not the one who just announced a significant financial loss for the financial year, with prioritised Super Rugby investment as one of the explanations offered.
Why this would be the case and what could be gained by sudden backtracking, I cannot even begin to guess. But if we think about who we’re dealing with here, it could be for literally anything. You’d really hope it’s nothing to do with a desire to water down independence.
Ultimately, the franchise CEOs just want the competition to be run well and be the best it can be, and not have to operate with one hand tied behind their back. Funnily enough, their business solely depends on it. Remember, they just need “stability and continuity … to enable Rugby to grow in stature and importance across the region.”
Hopefully, sometime soon ideally, some light might be shed on what is actually a pretty important piece of structural work for Super Rugby Pacific.
But I can’t help but be worried, the longer the silence and inaction continue.