What makes the decision feel predetermined – despite NZR’s insistence it never was – is that its origins trace back to February last year when the Men’s Pathway and Competitions review (MPAC), somewhat surprisingly and out of scope, made this recommendation almost as a throwaway line.
It was a major piece of work, but neither the Super clubs nor provincial unions say they were asked about urban mergers; hence they were not supportive of the recommendation that read: “Amalgamate each of New Zealand’s five Super Rugby clubs with the provincial unions in which they are based, thereby removing duplication, creating simplicity and clarity of responsibility and accountability, and resolving destructive tensions that exist currently.”
Like the many other reviews commissioned by NZR, MPAC was yet another kicked to touch without any meaningful action generating from it, but clearly that one idea of amalgamation survived in the collective imagination of the new executive and governance teams that have arrived at HQ over the past 20 months.
Canterbury players celebrate after defeating Northland in the NPC final. Photo / Photosport
The question is: why? Fifteen years ago there was a painful process to break up amalgamated urban super centres which were deemed to be clustering talent in five places and creating a two-tier NPC.
The 14 major provinces have legitimate reason to feel concerned that, having seen the NPC deliver on every front this year, NZR now wants to recreate a system that proved flawed on the strength of what appeared to be the MPAC report author thinking out loud.
They have seen no detailed business cases to support the benefits of the plan and make a fair point that without having seen the numbers, the risks of creating urban behemoths – based on the historical evidence – outweigh any potential rewards.
What NZR has told stakeholders in the wake of its decision is that amalgamation is primarily a high-performance housekeeping exercise to provide greater clarity and cohesion to player pathways.
There is an underwhelming mundanity to this, until it’s realised that the battle for talent (and, by extension, the battle for hearts and minds and relevancy) is playing out in living rooms across the country where parents and their respective sporting proteges host a steady stream of representatives from the NRL and rugby.
The NRL clubs have a simple, easy-to-follow pitch about what committing to them looks like, whereas rugby, to MPAC’s point about competitive tensions, will have Super clubs and provinces seemingly bidding against one another to leave parents uncertain about what exactly they would be signing their child up for.
NZR’s new high-performance team of Don Tricker, Conrad Smith and Michael Collins believe, however, that rugby’s layered system is its greatest strength.
Conrad Smith has joined NZR’s new high-performance team. Photo / Photosport
Having NPC and Super Rugby academies enables a wider talent pool to be captured and developed along different timelines. It’s the nuance of this multi-tiered system that NZR wants to promote, but through one unified voice and point of control within the major urban centres.
It’s all very well having layers, but the one underneath needs to know what the one above is doing and vice versa, and the pathways need to feel co-ordinated rather than haphazard.
And so too, if the ultimate goal of producing a winning All Blacks team is to be achieved, does there need to be an element of consistency within development programmes – the types of skill-sets deemed foundational and non-negotiable for athletes to possess – without necessarily promoting homogenisation.
The NRL is currently recruiting about 15% of First XV talent that rugby has identified – a number NZR presumably fears could rise inexorably without cohesion in the major centres.
A secondary byproduct of this will be a reduction in costs, because the unified entities won’t need two chief executives or two boards, and presumably there will be other areas where duplication will be deemed unnecessary.
NZR hasn’t made public how much money it thinks it could save, but it likely has a fair idea, because in 2019 it paid the consultancy firm McKinsey $1m to produce a forensic report into where money was being spent across the ecosystem and on what, and where duplication could be avoided.
The report identified possible cost savings of between $20m and $30m a year, and while that figure came from proposing change more significant than amalgamation in the urban centres, NZR presumably believes there is enough financial benefit baked into its high-performance reset to constitute a win-win scenario of being frugal and effective.
Perhaps predictably, the plan has not gone down well with the provinces, primarily because some saw the invitation to discuss the future of elite men’s competitions as an opportunity to state the case for Super Rugby to be terminated and replaced with an eight- to 10-team, fully professional NPC.
This was a significant misread on two fronts. The first was that such a format fails to identify that New Zealand’s ability to compete on the international stage comes from having two distinct competitions.
This gives the almost 200 Super players something meaningful to do between July and the end of October, and an NPC overlapping with the All Blacks’ season creates an opportunity for an emerging cohort of age-grade and club players to taste a higher level of rugby, but one with a distinct vibe of being the apex of the community rather than the professional game.
Those pushing for a domestic eight- to 10-team domestic professional competition would need to explain how that would deliver the volume and diversity of games to not only develop players to the requisite level, but also offer broadcasters and fans something better than they already have.
Secondly, the unions misread the new landscape in which they now find themselves following a constitutional rewrite in late 2024 that shifted the NZR board from being mostly representative to entirely independent.
The rugby summit this month was not an opportunity for members to determine which option would progress, as would have been the case in days gone by.
It was an exercise in making them feel heard because NZR’s board is the game’s true engine now that it has a mandate to instigate change and a constitution that enables it to lead rather than pander to stakeholders.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.
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