Richie McCaw and Dan Carter were criticised by some before winning the 2015 World Cup. Photo / Brett Phibbs
From humble beginnings, the World Cup has become the most important seven weeks in the rugby calendar, and it’s such a big event now that it brings instant and enduring fame to those who can say they have won a World Cup.
But what about fortune – does it bring that too? Do World Cup victories make individual players rich?
Is being part of a title-winning team a gateway to untold riches? Gregor Paul looks at how previous tournaments have impacted the brand value of individual All Blacks and asks who, if anyone, will financially capitalise if the national side wins a fourth title later this year.
Winning the inaugural World Cup in 1987 had zero direct financial benefit for the All Blacks players.
If anything, it came at a cost for each of the 26-man squad who were required to take time off work and only received a paltry daily allowance from the New Zealand Rugby Union to cover their incidental expenses.
Famously, all of the squad were back at work on the Monday after the final and, as world champions, all the players managed to leverage was a paid-for night out to celebrate the victory.
No one in the 1987 squad made anything from winning that World Cup and for one player, Craig Green, the tournament proved to be his last act for the All Blacks as he could no longer endure the financial hardship that came with playing for the national team.
“If you weren’t there [at work], you didn’t get paid and at the end of the day it was why I left New Zealand rugby,” he said in a 2019 interview.
“You couldn’t pay the rent to stay in the flat, yet you were running around representing your country. It got to the stage where I thought, ‘Oh well I might be better moving on’.”
Green went to Italy, to play for the Treviso club, which was owned by the fashion brand Benetton, who like the major corporate-owned Japanese clubs, were skirting the existing laws around amateurism by hiring players as employees.
For some such as John Kirwan and David Campese, it is believed there were six-figure salaries, a car, and free accommodation as part of the package, but they were the exceptions.
The more effective way All Blacks players could leverage their profile to make money back then was to defect to league and being part of the 1987 team unquestionably helped fullback John Gallagher win what was thought to be a record offer of £350,000 offer from Leeds, which converted at the time to about $1m a year.
By the time the All Blacks headed to the 1995 World Cup, there was some ability for the best-known players to trade off their profile.
In 1994, New Zealand Rugby sanctioned the creation of the All Blacks club, where sponsors such as Coca-Cola and Philips would pay leading players up to $50,000 to hold ambassadorial roles.
It was while the players were at that tournament in 1995 that everything changed. They went as amateurs and came back as professionals, as while they were in South Africa, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch offered US$555 million to buy the broadcast rights to the newly created Super Rugby and Tri Nations.
Once the players returned to New Zealand, they were offered professional contracts that were worth, for the highest paid, up to about $400,000 a year.
The exception was Jonah Lomu, who earned global fame at the 1995 World Cup and was in demand in multiple codes.
His contract with NZR was believed to be close to $1m a year and he likely earned six-figure sums through endorsement deals with Reebok and McDonalds.
No other player – and he was never part of a winning team – has leveraged their brand value at a World Cup in the way Lomu did.
His fame stretched beyond rugby and in countries such as the UK, France, Italy, South Africa and even the USA, he was arguably better known than the All Blacks, and his estimated $2m of annual income - from salary and sponsorships combined – made him the highest earning player in the world in 1999.
Lomu enjoyed another great tournament that year, but the All Blacks didn’t – bombing out in the semifinal after spectacularly melting down against France.
If they had pushed on to win, it’s probable that Lomu’s brand value would have doubled.
Lomu shot to fame at a time when rugby had no experience with commercial partners and no institutional knowledge about what individual sponsorships might be truly worth.
As Lomu’s late manager, Phil Kingsley-Jones, told the Herald in 2016: “It was like that back in the day. They offered a meat pack or a fruit basket. Can you believe the cheek of it? We were the first ones who started saying ‘No. You’ve got to pay us’.”
How much rugby has matured professionally and what winning a World Cup can now do for an individual’s brand value is best illustrated by the enduring wealth Richie McCaw and Daniel Carter continue to accumulate on the back of their exploits.
McCaw, who signed what was believed to be the second-highest-paid contract ($800,000 per year) in NZR history a few months before the 2011 World Cup, then saw the endorsement offers roll in after he captained the All Blacks to victory.
The former captain had long been one of the few All Blacks with relatively strong international appeal, and he played at the 2015 World Cup with agreements in place with Mastercard, Adidas, Westpac and the Apple-owned Beats.
When the All Blacks won again in 2015, the offers kept coming for McCaw, even though he was no longer playing and, by 2016, he had nine endorsement partners, which included Air New Zealand, AIG, Versatile Homes, Mercedez Benz and Fonterra.
McCaw was a household name by his early 20s, renowned as a tough and brilliant All Black, but captaining the All Blacks to successive World Cups cemented his place as the greatest player in New Zealand history.
Winning World Cups enabled McCaw to own a prominent place in the history of a tournament that now generates more than one billion viewers and has growing audiences in major economies such as the USA and Japan.
Those two wins not only elevated his earning power, but they also gave his brand longevity, and it’s probable that McCaw continues to earn more than $1m a year trading on his reputation.
Carter’s story is similar in that he too was able to use his World Cup winner’s medal to leverage a three-year playing contract with Racing Metro in Paris in 2016, which was reportedly worth $2.6m a year.
And like McCaw he continues to make more from endorsements with Adidas, Mastercard and Tag Heuer than many of the highest-profile All Blacks will be earning from their individual sponsorship agreements.
The 2023 tournament is being played in France, and not in South Africa which was independently evaluated as World Rugby’s preferred host, because the commercial returns are going to be at record levels.
In theory, the level of post-tournament personal financial opportunity is higher than it’s ever been given the number of people who will be watching and the number of corporate players looking to find a way to have an association with rugby.
Certainly, many Black Ferns have been swamped with commercial offers since they won the World Cup late last year, but there are factors working against individual All Blacks seeing a similar post-tournament commercial boost should they win.
Firstly, NZR is focused more on leveraging the All Blacks brand rather than the individuals within it, and chief commercial officer Richard Thomas told the Herald that he’s not sure whether that will change.
“We all think there is a real opportunity for our players to have stronger personal brands and to touch and connect with their fans,” he said.
“The question is, how do we balance that with this idea of team first, the All Blacks legacy and not losing the DNA of the team. We don’t have the exact answer yet and I am not sure whether we will ever have a perfect answer.
“But it something we are talking about with the All Blacks management team and the players.”
While there will be a handful of players in France who were part of the successful 2015 campaign, there are probably only two players – Beauden Barrett and Sam Whitelock – who have left a deep enough footprint in history to still be of interest to major corporate sponsors once they finish playing.
How much brand value they can leverage will depend on how prominent a role they are able to play in France.
What made McCaw and Carter so valuable was that their contribution to the All Blacks was indisputable.
McCaw was as good in his final test – the World Cup final in 2015 – as he was in his first, and Carter signed off as World Player of the Year.
Barrett, who has twice been World Rugby Player of the Year, has not had anywhere near the same influence since 2020 and Whitelock plays in a position where much of his work is unseen.
A World Cup win in 2023 will unlikely see any of the All Blacks usurp McCaw, Carter and Lomu as the three most valuable individual brands.
But what it will do is net each player a bonus of $150,000. And with the best paid among the squad on contracts of about $1 million a year, the 2023 All Blacks will contain the highest salary earners in New Zealand’s professional history.
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