The ties that bind

For more than a century, the rivalry between the All Blacks and the Springboks has been the pinnacle of world rugby. The bonds grew deeper in the professional era with more regular contact through Super Rugby and the Rugby Championship. Today, the South Africans are looking to forge new connections with European nations. Where does this leave rugby's greatest rivalry?

Part 1: The final whistle

This is maybe it, the last All Blacks tour of South Africa as part of the Rugby Championship. This is maybe the Southern Hemisphere entering its last throes before the inevitable commercial and population power of Europe pulls the Springboks into the Six Nations and Europe becomes rugby’s Death Star, equipped with a traction force that will suck players, fans, sponsors and broadcasters from all over the globe into its orbit.

Such predictions have been made before of course. South Africa have previously made several veiled threats to quit the Sanzar alliance and throw their chips in with the Six Nations.

But the prospect has never been real. South African rugby executives in the past have been happy to sporadically let this idea run loose in the media as this is the nature of Sanzar politics. It runs on the power of agendas and perceived leverage. The partners like to posture, pretend they are ready to take extreme positions to extract a compromise or concession.

Whatever has been said by South Africa or previously believed, they have never seriously contemplated walking out of the Rugby Championship. And nor, previously, have they had even a remote hope of being invited into the Six Nations. That all changed on the back of four specific acts – the first of which happened in 2018 when, after agreeing to reduce their Super Rugby presence from six teams to four, the South African Rugby Union negotiated for the discarded two – Cheetahs and Southern Kings – to enter the European Pro 14 which featured provinces from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Italy. There were, quite suddenly, real links with Europe rather than just vague, aspirational noises about one day aligning.

The second and third factors that dramatically changed the landscape were connected. The pandemic hit in early 2020 and with New Zealand’s government suggesting that the international border would likely be closed for up to two years and hard quarantine measures in place, Super Rugby, as it was – a 15-team competition featuring five clubs from New Zealand, five from Australia, four from South Africa and the Jaguares from Argentina – had to be suspended.

In the hiatus, New Zealand Rugby, sniffed an opportunity to take control and reshape Southern Hemisphere rugby to its own masterplan. Commercially, NZR didn’t feel that the presence of South African teams worked: too many of their best players had moved to Japan or Europe and their teams had low appeal to New Zealand fans, made worse by the fact games in the Republic typically kicked off in the dead of the Oceania night.

There was also a growing belief in the NZR boardroom that if Super Rugby had a single owner, it would become more attractive to private equity investors. In July 2020, the national body declared it would run a new format with eight-to-10 teams, likely five from New Zealand, one, or possibly two from the Pacific Islands and a maximum of three from Australia.

South Africa no longer featured in the plan. It was a tactical failure by NZR chair Brent Impey (above) as South Africa were most likely going to kick themselves out of Super Rugby. They didn’t need to be pushed so NZR became the instant bad guy, accused of unilaterally blowing up the competition which made it easy for SARU to reject an approach to be involved in some kind of play-off series between their respective champions.

“I see we are being deemed as having been kicked out of Super Rugby,” SARU chief executive Jurie Roux would say in September, 2020. “If anything, New Zealand kicked themselves out of it. “The market has corrected itself, and that was due anyway. In terms of pay-TV and structures around broadcasting, and the way we consume rugby, a change was due, and we will undergo that change now due to Covid.

“I wouldn’t be doing my job not to look at Plan B or Plan C. I’ve been doing that for a long time and there are a few options on the table.” Plan B for SARU was to add its four discarded Super Rugby teams – Bulls, Sharks, Stormers and Lions – to the Pro 14 which is now called the URC and to commit to the Boks playing in the Rugby Championship until the end of 2025.

But that commitment being seen through became yet more tenuous on account of the fourth major change in the wider rugby ecosystem – which was the arrival of private equity firm CVC as a stakeholder in the Six Nations. In March 2021, the investment firm paid $750m for a 14.3 per cent share of the commercial assets of the Six Nations.

CVC has come on board to grow the financial footprint and fan appeal of the competition.

More importantly, however, the arrival of CVC has brought a fresh and powerful voice to the notoriously conservative and at times politically self-interested Six Nations and if the door was previously always shut to South Africa, it no longer is, despite reassurances of change not being on the agenda.

“Our current focus is the July and November windows and how we can improve them,” Six Nations chief executive Ben Morel (above) said late last year. “We believe it could be a great platform for all countries to create global growth for the game.

“It’s not a question of what I’d like. South Africa is committed to the Rugby Championship. The Six Nations have added and reduced its teams very few times in its 140 years, so it’s something we’d be very cautious about doing.”

With South African clubs integrated into European competition, a strained relationship between SARU and NZR and an ambitious external investor in the Six Nations, it would be naive in the extreme to rule out the Springboks quitting the Rugby Championship.

The days of empty threats are over – this time the prospect of a Southern Hemisphere break-up on an epic scale is worryingly real.

Part 2: A complicated history and the greatest rivalry

South Africa was complicated long before it was cool for people to say, “it’s complicated”.

It’s a country with a history of conflict which can be seen in the multitude of contrasts which exist today: contrasts which reveal the division and serve as a reminder that the country’s unity is sometimes only a veneer.

The first test of this tour was in Mbombela, formerly known as Nelspruit, and the changed name is itself another reminder of the torn history.

Nelspruit was once a Boer stronghold: a city that in the 1970s and 1980s, forcibly removed non-whites to the townships.

The Government renamed it Mbombela in 2009, but never found enough money to change all the road signs and so you are heading for Mbombela one minute, Nelspruit the next.

Strangely, everyone still calls if Nelspruit, almost nostalgically, which makes little sense.

But this is how it is in South Africa – though, a country which only seems to want to partly to escape its past.

It’s a land where ex-pats tell you about the unrivalled beauty of the country, the incredible lifestyle it offers, but also the dangers it presents.

Everyone who has lived there, has a story to tell - about the time they, or a friend or relative, were on the floor with a gun at the back of their head or at an ATM with a knife to their throat.

The ubiquitous barbed wire that lines the houses in Johannesburg’s upmarket Sandton is a reminder that there are haves and have nots. So too are the street signs in the City of Gold, that every hundred metres or so warn you to be vigilant for bag snatchers and brazen attempts to grab mobile phones out of your hand.

There is all this mugging and murdering, violence and break-ins and yet everyone you meet has a smile, a kind word and a genuine desire to welcome people to their complex country.

The stark poverty can be seen in the pot-hole riddled roads that lead to the Kruger National Park. Roads which pass through shanty towns of breeze block and corrugated iron and where stragglers crowd the street corners, carrying the wares they have gathered from the dusty wastelands.

There’s the sporadic sighting of someone, always a woman, walking roadside, an obviously heavy vessel, probably full of the family’s drinking water, balanced on their head as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

If you don’t know you are in Africa on the way to Kruger, you do once you get there and see the giraffes towering over the Baobab trees that the elephants are eager to tear down and eat.

There is a bit of English spoken and there is a passion for rugby, but South Africa is a vastly different country to New Zealand.

South Africa, while it is part of the Commonwealth, carries little of the homogenised cultural familiarities of its fellow rugby elite.

It manages to simultaneously present as both a developing country and a developed one – politically volatile, economically unstable, riven with poverty and yet has opulent pockets, an emerging black middle class and stadia infrastructure superior to New Zealand’s.

Yet somehow, the shared love of rugby has enabled South Africa and New Zealand to become not only unlikely friends, fiercely bonded by their history and mutual respect, but the game’s most valuable, enduring and compelling rivalry.

What the All Blacks have with the Springboks is different to all their other relationships.

It’s the depth of respect and their ability to test each other in the most intense ways that sets it apart and that’s why the likes of Jerry Collins and Schalk Burger could be the most ferocious enemies on the field and the best of friends off it.

And that’s why, for the past 20 years, the All Blacks players have been happiest in the company of the Springboks.

Back in 2010 when the All Blacks decided to make it a thing again to invite their opposition in for a beer after the game, the South Africans always came. Friendships were formed and the connection deepened and former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen even wrote the foreword in former Springboks coach Heyneke Meyer’s biography.

It was different with the Aussies, they only ever wanted to come for a drink when they had won.

“Talking to [former All Black] Gary Knight who is a good family friend – dad played a lot of rugby with Gary – there has always been that connection,” says All Blacks veteran lock Sam Whitelock.

“I think one of the major reasons is the old tours where you had time to connect with the opposition because you were there for four or five weeks.

“Australia is closer, so it is always a little bit in and out and we are gone. We have great relationship with a lot of the countries we play against, but we definitely have a great relationship with South Africa.”

But it’s what the Boks bring on the field that makes them different with the Dutch influence so strong in their gene pool, they breed genuinely enormous humans.

And it’s not just size they bring, but a mentality of wanting to see how tough their opponents are. The Boks want to break people, run at them all day and look for a touch of fear.

“I’m aware that is their DNA and that is something you have to talk about – embracing the physical encounters,” says Whitelock.

“They understand that if they create an opportunity, whatever they find, they know how to exploit it and that’s what they are good at.

“They find a weakness and they will keep hammering at it and they won’t get bored of doing the same thing.”

That’s what excites the All Blacks – the raw brutality of it all and the depth of courage and innovation the Boks force them to find.

It’s rugby well outside the comfort zone and as John Hart, the only man to coach the All Blacks to a series win in South Africa, says: “The whole nation hits every ruck and the whole nation carries the ball.

“The way we won that series [in 1996], we had to match them physically, but use our speed, skill and ability to move the ball.”

Both countries would be lost without each other. A little piece of their souls would die should the bond ever be broken.

They have survived apartheid, international condemnation, unprecedented civil unrest and Bakkies Botha, and so it seems unlikely the connection will ever be lost, but yet here we are, not sure if that’s the case.

The African sun was beating down when the All Blacks played their first test in Mbombela.

It was winter, and 31C, the car park at the splendidly giraffe-themed stadium was thick with the fug from the braais, seemingly everyone there having received the memo to wear their replica Springboks shirt.

There were big beards, bigger bellies, ute tailgates open for easy access to the slabs of Castle Lager.

The music pumped, the fans roared, the noise was deafening and when the Springboks ran out – after an incredible firework display that would have left the health and safety obsessed jobs worth’s in New Zealand horrified – the All Blacks must have felt a little like the gladiators at the Colosseum.

Atmospheres are rarely that intimidating, but despite the poor performance and the result, New Zealand’s players wanted more than anything to be in that kind of hostile environment.

South Africa is New Zealand’s players’ happy place. The country with whom they have the strongest connection, deepest respect and the country they enjoy visiting more than any other.

If they were told they could only play one country for the rest of their careers, to a man, every player in the All Blacks would pick South Africa.

And specifically, they would all say that taking the Boks on at Ellis Park is the most important and treasured assignment with which a New Zealand player can be tasked.

“Nothing compares to it. This is the pinnacle [Ellis Park], where you want to be playing, against a team that is just awesome,” Richie Mo’unga said ahead of the second test.

“The noise, with 60-odd, thousand, the altitude you know, you can feel the blood in your lungs and you can taste that. But just understanding the history – it is a privilege to have the opportunity to play at a place like that.”

Hart summed it up perfectly with his observation that: “They are part of our DNA.”

And yet, as much as the players want South Africa to be at the centre of their high-performance universe, the pandemic combined with commercial imperatives, has seen New Zealand’s administrators re-position Super Rugby as a Pacific competition, leaving the Rugby Championship as the only link to the Republic.

And even that now is in doubt, because not only is there a real prospect of the Six Nations making the Springboks a compelling offer to shift North, there’s a fundamental question of how sustainable it will be for South Africa to run their provincial teams in Europe and their national team in the Rugby Championship.

That scenario will create serious issues around welfare and burnout and inevitably there will be problems with players contracted to French, English, Japanese and Celtic clubs gaining release for test duty.

More than anything, New Zealand’s players want to go back in time to find a way to keep South Africa in Super Rugby.

They miss the interaction – the impossible to replicate challenges that playing in South Africa brings. Reconnecting at Super Rugby level is the best way to ensure that the two nations stay connected at international level.

But players can’t just come out and say it straight – that they think their employer could and should have found a way to keep alive the prospect of Super Rugby featuring South African teams.

It wasn’t possible to keep Super Rugby in its pre-Covid form when the pandemic hit and shut borders for the better part of two years, but the alliance was permanently rather than temporarily severed.

NZR made a smash and grab play to create and own a trans-Tasman Super Rugby competition and, in their rush to do so, sent the South Africans scurrying into the arms of the Celts and Italians and now there appears to be no way back.

Now, it’s almost impossible to see how South Africa can be welcomed back to Super Rugby and how the players can get their wish of more exposure to the Republic.

New Zealand and Australia are trying to negotiate a long-term future for Super Rugby Pacific.

Australia has intimated that it may walk away after next year and do its own thing, but the more likely outcome is that it will strike a long-term agreement about preserving Super Rugby Pacific as is, so they can then agree on an improved broadcast deal.

And if a long-term Super Rugby deal is struck, it will kill the prospect of South African sides reappearing, and also the faint hope that New Zealand’s players appear to be clinging to that there is a way back.

“It’s awesome to come here and tour,” said All Blacks midfielder David Havili.

“We love coming over here and Super Rugby definitely misses them and I would like to think that they would like to think they would like to come over to us and that they are missing us as well. You never know in the future.”

Part 3: Future moves and emerging markets

If New Zealand Rugby chief executive Mark Robinson could have his time again, he’d handle the break-up of Super Rugby in 2020 differently.

The outcome would have been much the same, Super Rugby had bloated to being, by the second decade of the 21st century, the most expensive provincial competition in the world to run.

The cost base had to be lowered and the environmental footprint lessened and so when borders shut around the world in 2020, that was the chance to make the change.

But NZR’s decision to publicly announce in June 2020 that they saw the future of Super Rugby being an eight-to-10 team Pacific-Tasman competition failed to treat South Africa with the respect they deserved.

It felt like a unilateral rather than collaborative decision, and so when NZR tried to engage South African officials in discussions about a cross-over, play-off tournament between their respective domestic champions, the answer was a hard no.

Commercially, Super Rugby had been saved from its own expansion hubris, but as it has transpired, financial prudence has been achieved to the detriment of the high-performance side of the business.

Somehow the equilibrium needs to be restored – the players need more exposure to South Africa, but that can’t happen at any cost.

The respective balance sheets of the NZR and Rugby Australia simply couldn’t cope with a reworked Super Rugby competition that brings back South African teams.

If they did, RA would most likely be bust in a few years and there’s the tricky fact South Africa have made a commitment for their leading provinces to be part of the United Rugby Championship, alongside Europe’s leading teams. They can’t just pull out of that, even if NZR did come asking.

The challenge NZR faces is finding cost-effective ways to interact more with South Africa at all levels.

Ideas are being tossed around at the moment and what’s likely to happen is that NZR will send more age-grade teams to tour South Africa in the coming years.

An Under-19 team is heading to the Republic later this year for a three-week tour and Robinson is hopeful, that maybe New Zealand Super Rugby teams could play pre-season matches in South Africa.

But the most commercially viable way to re-establish regular, or semi-regular contact between the two nations will be though the proposed World Club Championship.

Plans are being drawn up for that to kick-off in 2026 and be squeezed into the gap between Super Rugby and the Rugby Championship.

It would likely require Super Rugby to start a week or two earlier in the year to create a five-week window for a meaningful format, but New Zealand’s clubs have already intimated they are strong supporters of the idea.

This sits on the table as part of plans to also launch the Nations Championship which will be a bi-annual, 12-team international competition – Six Nations, current Rugby Championship teams and two more countries to be added, most likely Fiji and Japan.

The Six Nations will play three away games against three Southern teams in July, and then in November, the Southern sides will travel North to play the teams they have not yet faced.

The consultancy group, Pitch, which is expert in valuing the potential worth of competitions to broadcasters has estimated that if the World Club Championship and Nations Championship are given the go-ahead, the lift in broadcast income to NZR could be anything between 25 per cent and 40 per cent on existing values.

For this to work, South Africa have to stay in the Rugby Championship and just as critically, the Sanzar partners are going to have to work out whether they need to expand the competition when the current broadcast deal expires in 2025.

Research is ongoing as to whether Japan and Fiji should be invited into the Rugby Championship or whether it would be better to find a means for the four current teams to regularly play them outside of the competition.

The danger of bringing them in is that they are not ready to compete at the requisite level and add little value to fans, sponsors and broadcasters.

The bigger issue, however, is that expanding the Rugby Championship to six teams would see a round-robin where everyone played each other just once and the All Blacks would want to play South Africa at least twice a year.

The problem there is if they did organise an additional annual fixture against South Africa, how would they build a narrative around that when it would not be part of the Rugby Championship.

Adding games with Australia outside the Championship has worked because the Bledisloe has long operated like that, but it would be hard to package two disparate tests against the Boks under a compelling marketing story.

But Robinson says with a four-to-five-week gap now between the last Rugby Championship test in September and the first end of year tour game, there is opportunity to play high quality fixtures in that window that could be financially lucrative.

The financial importance of keeping South Africa in the Rugby Championship is obvious.

NZR agreed a $100m-a-year broadcast deal with Sky in 2021 – and with the possible planned changes to the calendar, that could increase by as much as 40 per cent in 2026.

So too could the value of Super Rugby clubs soar if they can play well at the World Club Championship.

The prospect of being in that tournament, with massive global audiences, is one of the reasons Super Rugby clubs are keen to not be included in any extended sponsorship deal Adidas strike with NZR.

The clubs want to be carved off from the All Blacks so they can chase their own apparel sponsors, who will be willing to pay more for the likely exposure that will be gained by playing the World Club Championship.

If South Africa do end up joining the Six Nations, the Rugby Championship would collapse in commercial value.

The value of the TV rights without the Boks would tumble. Sponsors would run for the hills without South Africa providing not only the on-field credibility but also a population of 60 million and fans would find it hard to be engaged by a competition that would most likely feature New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, Japan and Fiji.

South Africa’s presence is vital to maintaining the financial health of the Southern Hemisphere rugby ecosystem, which is why, back in 1995, when executives from New Zealand and Australia began conspiring to build the perfect property to ward off the threat of the emerging Super League, they knew they had to include the Republic.

“We had come off a Super 10 and it was pretty successful and when we put together what we called the perfect rugby property to sell to News Limited, I got a call from [SARU president] Louis Luyt,” says David Moffett, the former NZR and Welsh Rugby Union chief executive who led the negotiations over the 1995 Sanzar broadcast deal.

“He said, ‘You can’t leave us out because I am hearing that is what you are going to do’. And I said, ‘No mate, we cannot do this without you guys. And you are central to all this’.

“He knew that we knew that we needed South Africa for a whole lot of reasons. Not only the TV rights, money, but also we needed the competition. There was never any doubt we were going to include South Africa.”

With South Africa’s inclusion, the first Sanzar broadcast (10-year) rights deal was sold for US$555m, and without them, who knows what the price would have been.

Maybe 60 per cent of that because when it came to split the money in that first deal, the shares weren’t even, with South Africa taking about 38 per cent of the total pot.

With New Zealand winning a 33 per cent share the split reflected where the real value of the competition lay – the rivalry between the All Blacks and Springboks.

As Moffet says: “While the Bledisloe Cup became quite riveting while South Africa was in the wilderness, South Africa-New Zealand trumps New Zealand-Australia. There wasn’t that same history as there was with South Africa.

“There are several real rivalries in the world of rugby. Wales England, South Africa New Zealand. Whatever anyone says, the South Africa New Zealand rivalry is seen as the big kahuna.”

If South Africa stay in the Rugby Championship then it provides a guarantee that the All Blacks will play the Springboks every year.

The certainty underpins the value of the current broadcast contract and associated sponsorships, but there is an alternative view that the regularity may, conversely, also be restricting the commercial potential of the rivalry.

But perhaps this clash could soar in value if the Rugby Championship collapsed as it is recognised globally as the game’s most storied, high-impact rivalry, evidenced by the 43,000 crowd that packed into Mbombela Stadium to watch the first Rugby Championship of 2022.

The All Blacks hadn’t been to South Africa since 2018 and the game in Mbombela was the first of a two-test series that had seemingly doubled the anticipation and hinted that the commercial returns for this fixture may be enhanced by chasing quality rather than quantity.

July this year saw four epic, three-test series go to the wire and major set-piece events are increasingly proving to be the best way to capture the fans’ imagination.

“To not have that annual game here builds the hype,”

said All Blacks midfielder Rieko Ioane before the first test in Mbombela.

“Some of the toughest games I’ve played in the black jersey have been over here," adds Rieko Ioane.

“It went beyond the 80 minutes, and we really had to dig deep. But the hardest games, and the toughest places to pay in, are the ones that you want to be part of.”

As much as the annual contact between the All Blacks and Springboks is a foundation of the current commercial landscape, it may also be acting as a handbrake on the rivalry realising its true financial value.

There is potential for the All Blacks to become the unicorn of world rugby if South Africa head north – building their own itinerary year-by-year.

An itinerary that would include, maybe every two or three years, a three-test series against South Africa and potentially mid-week tour games.

“What professionalism did was stuff up the idea of long tours,” says Moffett. “We had Ireland here for three tests this July, but we never play those number of test matches in the North against one union. I think they miss those mid-week games up in the Northern Hemisphere.

“I know that in Wales for example, they would love for the All Blacks to play Llanelli again. Everybody would but instead they are going to go with this half-cocked World League thing.”

The fan appetite for an old-fashioned, lengthy tour seems strong and Robinson admits that he and others at NZR have given some consideration to what the landscape could look like if South Africa joined the Six Nations.

The All Blacks would effectively have the freedom to build the itinerary that suits them and engages fans and on the back of it, they would have a compelling story to take to sponsors and broadcasters.

Such a scenario could accelerate the national body’s thinking about building and owning their own Over the Top broadcast application where they could sell international rights to All Blacks tests on a pay-per-view basis.

But whatever freedom they would have to set their own playing agenda, everyone realises that the most marketable and highest value asset would be tests and series against South Africa.