RGR didn’t just bring rivers of gold. It ignited the public imagination in New Zealand, South Africa and across the rugby landscape – with the Times of London sending a sportswriter to cover the tour and his match report from the first test being the best-read sports piece on the day the English Premiership kicked off.
There were 380,000 match tickets sold in South Africa and a further 68,000 in Baltimore and 2.1 million Kiwis watched the series across Sky’s channels and Three.
This was rugby, in a format, that the world wanted to see and while the four club games didn’t provide the nostalgic road trip down memory lane that the organisers hoped for, the tests were so epic and compelling as to leave a strong sense of anticipation about the reciprocal tour by the Springboks to New Zealand in 2030.
And it’s likely now, that for three key reasons, RGR will become a permanent fixture, with another tour to South Africa in 2034 almost certainly going to be agreed as part of the 2031-2035 broadcast cycle.
RGR has enormous commercial horsepower and is a hit with fans
Now that RGR has been a success, it seems everyone loosely involved in its inception wants to claim they were the architect.
But the idea didn’t have an obvious genesis or single champion. Its origins can be traced back to the break-up of Super Rugby in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic shut borders.
Having unilaterally turfed the South Africans out of Super Rugby, NZR then began talking about other ways to retain rugby contact between the two nations.
By mid-2022, the concept of building an old-school multigame touring format took hold, under the brand name Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry.
There were initial plans for SARU’s broadcast partner, Super Sport, to take a minority equity share in RGR, but NZR never opened talks with its broadcast partner Sky to do the same.
It is thought that NZR felt an equity partnership with Sky would tie its hands to some extent in future media rights negotiations – and in the end agreement was reached for RGR to be a 50:50 joint venture between the two national bodies.
By April 2023, it was far enough developed to present to fellow Sanzar partners Australia and Argentina.
Sean Fitzpatrick joins Ardie Savea, Codie Taylor and Jordie Barrett during the NZ national anthem at Ellis Park. Photo / Photosport
The plan would be highly disruptive to the future of the Rugby Championship as it simply wouldn’t be played in either 2026 nor 2030, hence it would have material impact on Australia and Argentina’s media rights negotiations for the 2026-2030 cycle.
Rugby Australia, as NZR’s joint venture partner in Super Rugby, is understood to have felt blindsided and excluded by the creation of RGR and sought some kind of financial recompense in lieu of losing lucrative Rugby Championship fixtures in 2026 and 2030.
No agreement on compensation was reached, but earlier this year NZR rescinded on its previous stance of rejecting RA’s request to play an Anzac Bledisloe test, and has signed up for three fixtures in 2027, 2029 and 2031 respectively that will likely see the two bodies split $12m-$14m.
South Africa also agreed to play one-off tests this year against the Wallabies and Pumas – all of which is critical as each of the Sanzaar nations now have schedules that are tailored to their markets and content slates that are as lucrative if not more than the pre-existing agreement to play the Rugby Championship every year.
For New Zealand, what the redrawn calendar has done is materially shift its matchday income.
In the document entitled Rugby System Programme, NZR forecasts that it will – conservatively make total revenue of about $250m next year, about $270m in 2028, about $330m in 2029 and about $300m in 2030.
The revamped format of having long tours is forecast to make NZR about $100m more than had it stayed with the traditional set-up.
The significant jumps in 2029 and 2030 are from respectively hosting the British and Irish Lions and Springboks.
The former is likely to be a seven-game tour with three tests (possibly two at Eden Park and one in Christchurch), a game against the Māori All Blacks and three games against Super Rugby clubs.
Playing a fourth test as part of the seven-game itinerary was considered but the Herald understands that is now unlikely.
The following year the Springboks will play three tests in New Zealand and one offshore (West Coast of the USA, Japan and Australia are all options), probably a game against the Māori All Blacks and at least two games against the Super Rugby clubs who didn’t play the Lions and one to be determined.
The rivalry has been legitimised
The other great achievement of RGR 2026 was to legitimise the rivalry by starting to write a new chapter on top of a chequered history.
To some, RGR could be seen as an attempt to rewrite history – to glorify and launder the relationship and interactions between the two nations during the apartheid era.
New Zealand’s rugby rivalry with South Africa may well be the greatest in the global context, but it was also the only rivalry that the Springboks developed between the 1960s and early 1990s, because no other country went to the Republic.
Even now, large factions of New Zealand’s rugby public seem either wilfully or genuinely ignorant of the troubled nature of the history and the division and enduring hurt that reciprocal tours caused before South Africa abolished apartheid and had global sanctions lifted in the early 1990s.
All Blacks haka during All Blacks v South Africa, Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry Tour, Baltimore. Photo / SmartFrame
Too many New Zealanders have never been able to see the relationship through anything other than a rugby lens and there was, at times, an element of discomfort seeing RGR being marketed and commercialised in areas such as Soweto where police violence was once endemic against the local population under a previous regime that the All Blacks effectively enabled.
But South Africa is certainly not the country now that it was 30 years ago, and nor, to a lesser extent, is New Zealand.
The former has seen free and open elections introduced, a burgeoning black middle class emerge, and the Springboks reinvent themselves as the team of the people rather than the team of the Dutch ruling classes.
New Zealand has seen a material shift in its sociodemographics, most notably growth of its Pasifika, Asian and Māori populations.
And the ethnic diversity of both teams, their inclusive and celebrated cultures and real sense of transformation that both the Springboks and All Blacks portrayed went a long way to generating a sense of the rivalry being genuinely reflective of modern South Africa and New Zealand.
All Blacks coach Dave Rennie, whose mother came to New Zealand from the Cook Islands in her late teens, certainly felt there was an authenticity to the rivalry now that didn’t necessarily rub out what had gone before, but did give it a sustainability through legitimacy.
“New Zealand looks a lot different now to how it would have 50 years ago,” Rennie said. “My mum would have come about 65 years ago to New Zealand. “There was massive migration to New Zealand but the All Blacks teams of that era would have had very few, but Pasifika especially. They obviously had Māori.
“The whole game’s changed. If you look at every team across the country, there’s a massive influence around Pasifika and that’s reflected in the national team. And likewise, here, [SA]. “The change from apartheid has opened massive doors for a lot of these unbelievably talented calibre black players.”
Former All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick who led the All Blacks in the first game in the Republic after sanctions were lifted in 1992 and then again for the 1995 World Cup and three-test tour of 1996, noted that legitimisation had come through fan endorsement.
“I said when the game went professional in 1996 that we can’t play South Africa four times a year, that it’s going to lose that edge. But I think it’s as big as ever.
“It has been commercialised, but this is fantastic. It’s commercialised because there’s an appetite for it, clearly. I think we need something like this as a fan.
“This has got meaningful games which is what we want. This is big time. It’s quite nostalgic as well, What people don’t realise totally is that we – South Africans and Kiwis – are very similar in terms of our attitude, embracing the hostility. We love that.
“That’s where the respect lies. The similarities rather than the differences.”
RGR toughens the All Blacks’ high-performance programme
The All Blacks didn’t win a World Cup for 24 years after they won the inaugural tournament in 1987.
There was a view – albeit big picture and simplistic – that there was too much Wallaby and not enough Springbok in the All Blacks diet during that period.
In the period 2004-2010, 24% of the All Blacks tests were against the Wallabies, with the Bledisloe operating as a four-test series between 2008-2010, before dropping to three between 2012-2019 (other than World Cup years).
Australia has been a rugby nation in decline since the Wallabies made the final of the 2003 World Cup and the working theory is that the All Blacks lacked exposure to higher-ranked, more physical and set-piece-orientated teams.
Building a deep immersion experience in South Africa where the All Blacks had to face the world champions four times in four weeks is an incredible high-performance programme, that challenged the players and coaches on multiple levels.
RGR presented the All Blacks with a genuinely brutal and strategically challenging seven weeks that Rennie said was: “A lot tougher than a World Cup. But it’s great, isn’t it? We’ll certainly learn a lot while we’re here, there’s no doubt it’s tough.”
The Springboks have been, and are likely to continue to be, the most authentic benchmark against which the All Blacks can test themselves.
This tour exposed All Blacks deficiencies at scrum, maul defence and the aerial arts and having a genuine barometer of where the team sits 12 months out from a World Cup is invaluable.
It became cliched but it was also true, that all four tests swung on small moments and this is the key difference between playing the Springboks and the Wallabies: make one mistake against the former and the game can be lost, while for much of the last 20 years, that hasn’t been true when playing the Wallabies.
Having another tour parked in 2030 will provide the same opportunity ahead of the 2031 World Cup and not only has RGR deepened the high-performance experience for New Zealand’s top players, but it will also probably act as a retention tool as it has already become something players want to experience.
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.