Editorial: Elite sports contest a nonsensical idea

Photo / Thinkstock

From time to time, the owners of the biggest teams in England's Premier League talk of breaking free and establishing their own elite competition. They advance all sorts of reasons for this but the underlying motivation is always the wish to more easily feather their own nests.

A similar process now seems to have taken place with seven of Auckland's biggest and most successful sporting schools which have discussed breakaway super-league competitions for rugby and soccer.

The schools talked airily of maintaining "sporting excellence" and raising the bar in secondary school competition.

But it is likely that Manoj Daji, the chief executive of ASB College Sport, got close to the nub of the matter when he said the move was a knee-jerk reaction to regulations to protect the even playing field and stop the poaching of pupils. In effect, the seven schools believe these rules are too restrictive, negating the way they want the competitions to run.

It is telling that spokesmen for the schools talked in secret and tried to play down these discussions. They know the malign consequences for the present competition.

It is also pertinent that they have excluded from their ranks some of the region's best rugby nurseries, such as Wesley College and De La Salle, both low-decile schools. That, in itself, makes this exercise nonsensical.

So, too, does the fact that players from the seven schools surely want to beat all-comers from the region, not just a select few.