The All Blacks' financial and commercial landscape has changed beyond recognition in the last two years. Gregor Paul reports on the concerns, tensions and projections from all the major players.
When US investment firm Silver Lake slapped a $3.1bn price tag on the All Blacks earlier this year, it surprised no one inside the team.
What it did in the minds of the players and coaching staff was confirm that they are part of a big business enterprise – something they have, as a consequence of the professional game being buffeted by financial headwinds these last few years, increasingly been made aware.
Hosting the British and Irish Lions in 2017 netted New Zealand Rugby a $45m profit, but that tour was the fiscal finger in the dyke.
The real picture was bleak and parlous: in 2016 NZR lost $7.5m and between 2018 and 2019, another $9.2m and the professional game had a significant and seemingly unfixable problem that it was consistently spending more than it earned and had only one profitable entity, which was the All Blacks.
Because the national body had spent most of the proceeds of the Lions tour in advance of earning them, 2017 ushered in a new era of heightened pressure to find alternative revenue streams and squeeze more out of existing ones.
It was the All Blacks who felt NZR's commercial arm wrap around them and steadily tighten its grip, making, according to those inside the team, increased and often poorly considered requests to service relationships with sponsors and stakeholders.
The team were also told they would be working with a film crew from Amazon Prime to make a behind the scenes documentary called All or Nothing – a project that particularly troubled head coach Steve Hansen who was not supportive of cameras poking into parts of All Blacks life that he, the players and his fellow coaches wanted to keep secret.
The All Blacks had long accepted their commercial obligations and their role in facilitating the money flow. For the last decade there had been a mostly high-trust relationship between the All Blacks and NZR's commercial team.
But by 2017, that trust started to erode. Although they were mutually dependent on one another, they were regularly pulling in opposite directions.
Hansen says he found himself pushing back against last minute requests for players to do more for sponsors – for big name stars to be on their feet for hours, forced to battle through heavy traffic in congested cities such as London, Tokyo and Chicago when they needed to be resting.
There were occasions when the captain was asked to meet and greet various stakeholders at times that clashed with playing-related commitments.
The bigger concern, however, was how much access to intellectual property some partners were given.
This first surfaced in 2014, when the All Blacks conducted a training session in Johannesburg in full view of former England defence coach John Mitchell who was a guest for the day of lead sponsor, AIG.
There was an uneasiness, too, that clients of All Blacks Tours were given access to training sessions and while there were strict rules about not filming these sessions, the Herald is aware of several occasions when this was not enforced.
And in 2019, the commercial team sold a leadership programme to executives of Mitsubishi, which Hansen felt revealed too much about the inner workings of his team.
Hansen's fears that this rapid and aggressive commercialisation of the All Blacks hurt performance are not unfounded.
Between 2012 and 2016, the All Blacks lost just four tests and drew twice, while between 2017 and 2019 they lost six and drew twice.
"The one thing that changed the most was the commercial side of the game because of the need for money," Hansen said in his biography, Steve Hansen: The Legacy.
"You have high-performance on one side and commercialism on the other. Whether people like it or not the only real commercial commodity that the NZR has is the All Blacks and I think that is where most of the pressure came from because it became a real battle to get the balance right.
"And once the balance goes in favour of commercialism over high-performance then it is interfering with how you can play.
"I believe my job was to make sure that never happened. But I think at times that got very close. People didn't understand that what they were doing was demanding more and more of the players, that they were looking to sell more and more of our IP to make a dollar and the risk of that is that the brand would be damaged if we got beaten."
In the two years since Hansen stood down as head coach, the financial and commercial landscape has changed beyond recognition.
NZR lost $34m last year due to the pandemic hitting and will likely post another impaired set of accounts this year given the continued impact of Covid.
But the financial prognosis for 2022 is much improved as AIG will be replaced as the sole All Blacks jersey sponsor by two new names – French construction group Altrad and British petrochemical firm Ineos.
Between the two – who will respectively sponsor the front of jersey and the back of shorts – sponsorship income from the All Blacks kit will jump from about $16m a year to almost $60m a year and NZR's total income will climb to about $250m next year from about $200m this year.
There is universal appreciation across the professional game that this money is imperative to preserving New Zealand's envied domestic infrastructure.
However, while the income from these new agreements is welcomed, the Herald has spoken to a range of people across the rugby community, who have said they are more wary than they have ever been about the potential for NZR's commercial ambition to swamp the All Blacks and impact performance.
Partly, what's intensified this low-trust environment is the way the national body aggressively pushed to sell a stake of its commercial revenue to Silver Lake earlier this year.
The players, as the Herald has documented, felt they weren't properly consulted with as per the terms of their collective agreement and were then publicly criticised by former NZR chair Brent Impey, who claimed that by not supporting the deal, they would potentially be endangering the entire grassroots of the game.
It was a comment that infuriated the players, drove a wedge between them and their employer and heightened concerns that NZR's executive team are determined to commercialise the All Blacks at almost any cost.
Some of the tension around the Silver Lake negotiations has deescalated following a change of chairman in June and a dramatic restructuring of the deal.
There are still, however, legitimate questions being asked about whether Ineos is an appropriate cultural fit for the All Blacks and whether Altrad is gaining too much access to valuable intellectual property it shouldn't.
In the week that the Herald revealed that Ineos, labelled by environmentalists as one of the worst polluters of the world's oceans will be putting their name on the back of the All Blacks shorts next year, Adidas, whose logo will be on the front of the shorts, were hosting their Run for the Oceans event – an initiative to raise money to clean tonnes of plastic out of the sea.
Greenpeace are vehemently opposed to the deal, seeing the sponsorship as naked 'green washing', while a group of prominent activists, celebrities and former All Blacks have written to NZR to express their dismay at the deal.
The Kiwis in Climate collective said the deal was a missed opportunity to be a global leader, at odds with key values that usually set the All Blacks apart and suggested it "high tackles our Pacific neighbours" who are hit with the worst effects of climate change and carries significant reputational risk.
NZR chief commercial officer Richard Thomas refutes this and says the sponsorship will promote the UK company's environmental and sustainability programme and reflects the shift it is making towards trying to be a world leader in the development and use of hydrogen.
"We did a lot of due diligence and had a high level of confidence that they are on a really good journey around sustainability," says Thomas.
"The reason they are involved in sport is because they have a passion for this idea of high performance and taking on the big challenges. That's why they are motivated to be part of New Zealand Rugby's journey. They are not in it for green washing."
Reputation damage is not the only issue, however, with the Ineos deal.
The All Blacks will become part of the UK firm's sports performance stable which includes the Mercedes Formula One team, the UK America's Cup boat and French football clubs Nice and Lausanne-Sport.
Ineos promote these investments as high-performance relationships where knowledge about leadership and excellence can be shared, but given the eclectic mix and relative quality within the sports performance group, there are legitimate concerns the All Blacks will be giving away more intellectual capital than they gain.
There is also some confusion about the Altrad deal as it pertains to intellectual property.
Altrad is a sponsor of not only the French national team, but the owner of the ambitious Montpellier club.
Days after the deal was signed, Mo Altrad, the billionaire owner of the company that takes his name, revealed that the agreement would see the All Blacks play a test in Montpellier, that there will be an exchange of coaching skills between the two and that NZR will look to push former test players towards signing contracts with the French club.
Based on what he revealed, one player agent told the Herald it was hard to know whether Altrad has bought naming rights to the All Blacks jersey, or secured Montpellier a pipeline to New Zealand's best talent.
NZR chief executive, Mark Robinson, says that in his dealings with Altrad, he's been convinced the French national understands the legacy of the All Blacks and the need to enhance it.
"He has got a huge amount of respect for all things New Zealand rugby and he certainly cares for the game more broadly," says Robinson.
"He seems to understand there is a strong legacy behind the All Blacks that has to be enhanced and he seems willing to be part of that. He's coming from a good place in terms of his care of the game and the teams that he's backing."
To a large extent the arrival of Covid has re-written the rules around commercial activity because of pandemic protocols.
But there is a concern that after two years of reduced and highly regulated commercial activity, normality will resume next year and because there are more sponsors paying more money, this will increase the burden on players to promote these partnerships and further blur that line between commercial and high performance.
Robinson says that won't be the case: "It is quite clear these partnerships have grown.
What we are entering now into with these new partnerships, across the board, means there is no greater work compared with what there was previously.
"The scale of the partnership in terms of the monetary values continues to evolve but those principals in terms of the players' working week are similar."
But the volume of time devoted to commercial activity has not historically been the problem. It is how that time has been managed which has eroded trust.
The contracts stipulate the macro detail. The micro detail, however, is not only managed on the run but is open to interpretation and sponsors' expectations don't always align with those of the players and coaching staff.
Both Ineos and Altrad have billionaire, hands-on owners and not everyone is sure that their expectations will align with what has been agreed in the contract.
Rob Nichol, who heads the New Zealand Rugby Players' Association, says: "I know there is some concern about whether this Altrad individual is going to suddenly start demanding this and demanding that? But as long as the commercial team have managed his expectations and done their job, that shouldn't become a problem.
"The commercialisation of the All Blacks has always been a challenge and it is going to continue to be a challenge.
"It doesn't matter whether it is AIG or five different sponsors paying five times what AIG paid, if the commercial team aren't organised enough and they are hassling to get a bunch of players on a Friday morning to run down to do a promo at the last minute, it is going to put people under pressure.
"The key is being strategically aligned. The onus is on all of us to get the balance right and it has to be done in a way that doesn't compromise the team."
Thomas acknowledges that tension between his team and the All Blacks is as real as everyone says it is, but he doesn't believe that should necessarily be a surprise given the inevitable divergent needs of the team and their commercial partners.
Where some are seeing this heavy commercialisation of the All Blacks as a threat, he's certain it's an opportunity if correctly handled.
"I would say, honestly, it is pretty good," he says of the relationship between NZR's commercial team and the All Blacks.
"I wouldn't characterise it as clashing. I would characterise it as working together to solve the problems.
"The All Blacks management group are happy to be flexible but also are really clear about where their red lines are.
"We have to learn how to work together to make sure the team gets the performance freedom it needs and that Altrad are able to get some value for the contribution they are bringing to our game. I'm confident we will be able to make that work but there will be a learning phase."
Having extended his contract through to 2023, All Blacks head coach Ian Foster will have a major role to play in managing the team through the new era of commercialisation.
He's confident that strong relationships can be built and he cites Adidas, which has been a sponsor since 1999, as the best example of how a partnership can be mutually beneficial.
"There is an incredible balance between commercial and high performance and it is real and there is always tension there," says Foster.
"What we have learned is that if we communicate and get aligned with our partners, that can enhance rather than drain the relationships. With Adidas, both parties have come to understand the brand values and legacy of each other and adapted their expectations so the relationship has grown rather than stifled each other.
"They are a really good example of a sponsor that has changed some of their expectations once they have understood at a deeper level a bit more about the All Blacks."
The last four years have been fraught and at times turbulent as the commercial needs of the business have grown and intensified.
The relationship between the All Blacks and NZR's commercial team has been tested in the last four years in a way it never was in the first 20 years of professionalism.
But for all the terse exchanges and difficult moments, NZR's balance sheet is in comparatively outstanding shape and the All Blacks continue to sit at or close to the number one ranking.
That line which Hansen talked about – the metaphorical point where players have their preparation compromised by the wrong things – has been hard to protect, but mostly it hasn't been crossed.
There is considerable trepidation across the rugby landscape as to whether that will continue to be the case next year and beyond, but with the deals signed and the money so desperately needed, there is no choice but for everyone involved to find a way to make the commercialisation of the All Blacks a success.
"In the same way we need to get better on the field we have to get better off the field," says Nichol.
"Frankly, in the past we have been good at times and not good at other times. If everyone is on the same page it can work really well."
