Rebels told they will play Super Rugby in 2024 but future on shaky ground as voluntary administration looms

What do you mean as a Rugby League fan Justin? You're a Tasmanian Rugby Union stalwart. All of a sudden your a Rugby League fan hahaha. Mate Rugby League isn't big enough to hide who you are

Andy, does on "On returning to Australia in 2012, Fardy secured a rookie contract with the ACT Brumbies". Mean he brought himself back? It may but I'm not sure that's a definitive proof. Kodela played for Argentina in 2008 but then didn't play for them again until 2020. He signed for Biarritz in 2011. You think those early matches against sides like Uruguay were why he got picked? Again, maybe it influenced but I don't have the full list and maybe those matches were against USA, Canada, etc. Players will still flow northward, and not just to MLR. Just like Meafou, Amatosero etc. that currently go from levels lower than the DC. We just don't need to put your artificial age cap on the DC and instead pick the best we can. Anyway, we are just going to have to disagree mate. As we always do when we discuss this model.

No they didn't. Fardy brought himself back, and had to accept a rookie contract when he got here. No-one had a clue he even existed in Japan. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/northern-beaches/sport/how-a-japanese-fishing-village-turned-scott-fardy-into-a-world-cup-wallaby/news-story/fa8eec567435d2343ef688b1b1ba9763 Kodela only got an offer overseas after he was capped by Argentina. Playing for an amateur club. Which Argentina was reduced to doing, despite being far further down the road of relying on overseas clubs to develop their players. So what is the lesson for Australia in that? Players do get recruited from Premier rugby, but they get recruited to MLR and the like. Given the price point and standard, it is the level where most players from an Australian DC are also likely to wind up. None will be getting picked to the Wallabies from there. Or worse, might have to be. The rest of it is a very hopeful and big if, and big ifs cut both ways. Everything will still be reliant on Wallabies revenue, and if degrading the standard of our comp means none of the next generation of players are actually good enough to attract offers from good teams after the current crop move on...? They certainly won't be Wallabies standard, which is what the top teams are mostly interested in after all. Or if every half good player is picked off by the much greater demand from second/third division teams, while still undercooked but cheap and good enough for their purposes...? Both are at least as foreseeable outcomes, and frankly would align better with the known behaviours and motivations of all parties involved. Which leads back to my very original point. In the overwhelming majority of cases the top teams take our players under one of two scenarios:- 1. They take our kids into their development programs, because they are cheap, are treated differently under the rules governing the comps, and might end up changing allegiance; or 2. They take proven players demonstrated as capable of walking in and playing at the necessary level. SR is good enough for the second, although they obviously prefer international experience and profile on top. A new Australian DC will completely unmake that, because it will be significantly lower standard than their competitions by design. So the flow of players north will dry up, and the only way Australian players are likely to end up at a top team and get quality development will be Option 1. The rest staying here won't improve standards, or make a stronger or more compelling comp; that takes money. If every one stayed here and just played Premier rugby, they would be Premier rugby standard.

You write as though the Brumbies are an also ran team. They saw Fardy in the Kamaishi shopfront. Leinster might not have recruited him from there but someone like Connacht would be on the look out. You ignore the Kodela example, there are more out there. Maybe won't be an international but Nick Champion de Crespigny, picked up by Castres at 25. Many get identified early but not all. The simple fact that players are getting recruited from Australian Premier Rugby and formerly the NRC shows that teams are scouring for talent. Even so, it's great if the overseas comps don't pick up quality players out of the DC, that will only help build our comp's quality. In time the dream has to be that we don't rely on the overseas comps to develop all the talent but also don't hold back from picking those that do make it. We should never be paying individuals 1.5m and up while out TV deal is a paltry 33m. That draw will be there from the richer comps. However if we can build a compelling competition, fix our finances, in time we'll build a strong enough competition that we'll have guys making the Wallabies from it just lke the A-League does, just like the NBL does in their codes.

My point was that Kamaishi isn't any sort of shop front. Leinster could have taken him direct from Japan, but they didn't. He had to bring himself back to Australia, get into the Brumbies, then the Wallabies, and then Leinster were interested. The clubs we would need our players playing in aren't going to go trolling the world for Australian development projects to help us out. If they aren't young players brought up through their academies, they'll need to be proven performers on the world stage to be bought in. Which is a Catch-22 situation, if you then want your Wallabies to be developed by and picked from those same teams so as to have if a competitive national side. There are a limitless supply of journeymen who might or might not be better than they look...no reason they would plumb for any of ours that might be labouring away in obscurity. That is likely to apply to the DC too. I'd agree the general standard might be higher than the old NRC, but the highs will be lower once the top half of all the SR teams go overseas for more money. It'll be NPC quality, which is about what we hoped our NRC might have become. But it won't be making Wallabies directly, as you've noted. And unless they've stood out at something near that level, which means U20, they won't be of interest to the top teams. So like I say, we are either throwing everything at the kids to get some (enough?) into teams that might give the Wallabies an outside chance of being nearly as good as the countries that will actually decide their development, or we will have a Wallabies at NRC/overseas 2nd/3rd division standard and earnings that reflect that.

They'll be able to because any other 9 in Perth making more than IFL won't have been offered as much because he's no longer so important. All this would be less of a problem if a good chunk of the fifth team's budget was split between the remaining four.

They're already covering most of it and there will be savings from not having to fund the Rebels.

That's exactly why you need fewer teams. 20% fewer slots to fill but a much smaller reduction in income because SR is such a loss maker. You can afford to fill all the slots you need with the best 80% of your players and don't need to pay the worst players.

But can RA afford to cover his entire wage bill if the Rebels go belly up. Is he free to walk away from the contract if no Oz team can match what the Rebels are paying him.

In AFL one team does really well and gets 60k on average. While 21k is small for AFL it is still a big enough fan base to get run a professional team off. If any SRP side had that average attendance they would be between 5-10k better off than any other team. Attendances aren't just an Oz issue but when all the SRP sides in Oz are running off half the attendances of 10 years ago that is still alot of money to lose.

Brett if this is the case then Rugby is unlikely to every make it as a professional support in Australia. Even if they do a domestic league only about 25-33% of the teams would be supported. Unless NZR remove their OS rule for test players the average SRP player in an NZ teams is always going to be better than an OZ team average player. Yes a team like the Brumbies might win it but that still leaves the Rebels unable to win. Over the next two weeks we will see the Saders take on Munster (Ranked 14th in the Champions Cup) and Bristol (Ranked 21st in the Champions Cup), All the teams will be without their internationals. Even if Saders win its only Europe lower ranked sides so why would any person support an Oz team knowing they aren't the best in SRP or the World. At international level we are unlikely to see Oz ever get back to the 1991-2003 era as they are now up against teams who now have the same foundations as them and playing numbers. It seems more and more that the focus of the Lions in 2025 is now just to make sure RA don't go bankrupt.

Not really. Its cheaper to have 3 non test players for RA and the SRP teams than have 2 test players. Those 3 players also have no rest periods or managed work load. If you have a test player you need a backup as the test player is limited by what he can do. RA have no money, better to spend $25m on the best non test players they can get for the 5 teams then spend $10-15m on the test players and have little left for the other 75% of the players.

Let's call the proposed comp the DC (Domestic Competition) it will be a fully pro/full season comp so more professional than NRC was. I would expect Fardy in the proposed environment to play in the DC, a fully professional comp rather than head to a Japan Div 2 side. However, even if the Japan Div 2 does pay more and a player like him still went down that route. He'd still be in the shop front. Instead of the Brumbies Super side identifying him, a different higher tier club side would pick him up and the Wallabies could pick him from that other club.

Well I know for a fact that the Storm pay 140k per game for AAMI Park, so you’d figure the Rebels have a similar deal.

I'm not following...are you saying instead of going to Kamaishi, he would stay playing NRC? Doing that didn't attract him anything better than an offer from very second division Japan...why would he get a better offer had he kept on doing it for another couple of years? I thought the whole point was that the moment anyone could attract anything remotely close to serious money (>c.a. $90k assuming we still want to blow just as much cash as now) then we'd be waving them goodbye and bon chance? Or are you saying he could still return and progress? Beacause he didn't get picked up from Kamaishi, he came back and managed to get another chance at SR. Going forward, if he returned he would be landing at the Sydney Rays again for less money. So why would he come back at all?

Except now instead of being picked up from Kamaishi, he'd had very likely have the contract here in the national comp. So instead of the Brumbies picking him up from Kamaishi. He'd play for an Oz team and then (at least until we can make our own comp more profitable/higher standard) progress to a higher league from there. Same as Kodela from Belgrano to Biarritz.

But he still had to crack SR at the Brumbies, and took a year in their systems to show he was actually far better than anyone knew and all the evidence to that point (as genuinely nice a bloke as he was). Fardy is an excellent example. He played for Kamaishi, because as an NRC level player that was the best offer he could hope for. Which would be exactly the case for any players left labouring away in the post-SR NRC. He wasn't head-hunted into the Wallabies or even back to the Brumbies from there...he was proper invisible in a team so second division, they couldn’t manage to qualify for the Challenge series that would even allow them to compete for promotion to the Top League, in any year he was there. Had he stayed there, as he would have no alternative to do once there was even less left here, no-one would even know who he was.

There are some guys for Argentina that get picked up at 19/20, there are others like Francisco Kodela that went from Argentine club rugby to Biarritz at age 27. Your suggested age cap is arbitrary - Scott Fardy the classic Oz example, had to go offshore after not cutting it at the Force and only properly cracked Super Rugby at 28. The old adage of if, you are good enough - you are old enough, applies the other way as well.

What is it they are using the 120mil they have borrowed on? Long business lunches?

LOL they have the lunch planned already to discuss those very beans..... Could take a few lunches to work thru it tho obviously.