Interest in women’s rugby is at an all-time high, and several players have become mega stars following the exposure they gained from the 2022 World Cup win. With the Black Ferns back in action for the first time since they were crowned champions last year, Gregor Paul asks - Can
Inside the Black Ferns’ gold mine: The complexities of cashing in on women’s rugby
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND - NOVEMBER 12: Ruby Tui of New Zealand celebrates winning the Rugby World Cup 2021 Final match between New Zealand and England at Eden Park on November 12, 2022, in Auckland, New Zealand. (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
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The growth in popularity of women’s rugby is not only undeniable, its hugely important in its quest to find new sponsors and commercial partners.
The money flows to where the audience is, and the Black Ferns have shown they can succeed in the perennial quest for eyeballs.
Their style of football has appeal and any lingering doubts about whether women’s rugby can sustain enough interest to build itself a viable commercial future was surely eliminated by the extraordinary figures produced in the recent Six Nations, where 58,000 came to Twickenham to see England play France.
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The data only tells half of the story though about the potential of women’s rugby to be commercialised.
That epic final, in which the Black Ferns beat England 34-31, did more than deliver New Zealand its sixth World Cup title.
It was a final, and indeed a tournament, which redefined the Black Ferns’ relationship with New Zealand and alluded to the potential of women’s rugby to become a high-value commercial property.
The team, loaded with relatable and down-to-earth personalities such as Ruby Tui, Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, Sarah Hirini and Stacey Fluhler, captured the hearts and minds of a new audience.
This was a team that forged a deep and lasting connection with the public and it’s likely that most of their new fans will stay on the journey with them through to the next World Cup in 2025.
The data showed that 59 per cent of the people who attended World Cup games last year had never previously watched the sport.
The tournament also proved to be an inspirational force, with female participation in New Zealand forecast to be up 40 per cent in 2023, with the number of female coaches and referees also up 22 per cent and 24 per cent respectively.
Women’s rugby is booming, and its new-found popularity has presented NZR with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cash in and build a thriving sport at both the community and elite level with the commercial base to support a viable and sustainable professional competition.
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“The growth of the viewership demonstrates that there is an appetite for this, and brands and corporates are realising that people watch it,” says Nicky van den Bos, who is chief executive of Women in Sport Aotearoa.
“There has been an awakening. Sport isn’t only going to appeal to a male audience and brands are probably thinking that they only used to put their money here because it was a male demographic watching.
“Whereas now it is a much more diverse audience watching therefore brands are saying they want to appeal to wider New Zealand to grow brand awareness. There is a niche audience that they have not been able to access historically through men’s sport.”
New Zealand Rugby showed its intent to chase the opportunity hosting last year’s World Cup has presented, when it unveiled in March its 10-year strategic plan to grow women’s rugby.
It is investing almost $22m this year to build better development pathways from schools to clubs, to embed talent management programmes, organise more tests for the Black Ferns and create a range of new commercial and high-performance positions exclusively dedicated to the women’s game.
“As we stepped into the Rugby World Cup and knew we had this opportunity, the question I kept asking is how do we leverage this opportunity and build a base,” says NZR’s head of women’s rugby, Claire Beard.
“It is a complex change management process. The player base, the commercialisation of the game, the growth of the fan base, the people at the board table, keeping girls safe in rugby with age-appropriate talent programmes - you can see the complexity and the inter-dependency of all these things that need to be done.
“Over 75 per cent of our player pool are under 18. How do we move more of those girls safely and effectively into having an awesome experience into the senior rugby framework.
“We want more domestic tests, NZR and our provincial partners need to work together to build a healthy rugby system.”
How healthy the system is remains a source of debate. This year Super Rugby Aupiki was contested by four professional teams, with the Black Ferns scheduled to play eight tests, including hosting the inaugural WXV tournament later this year.
Having a fledgling professional club competition, and a meaningful programme of tests in a competitive format is a vastly different situation for women’s rugby than even five years ago when there was no Super Rugby Aupiki and the Black Ferns played just four times.
But while the beginnings of a professional structure are starting to be built, there are mounting concerns it is not being built fast enough.
“I did hope that it would expand a bit more,” Chiefs Manawa captain Kennedy Simon said about this year’s Super Rugby Aupiki.
Rival professional opportunities are popping up all over the world – be it sevens in Japan and the USA, the English club competition or the NRL, and they are proving attractive to New Zealand’s best athletes.
Tui has taken a sabbatical playing sevens in the USA; Hirni is doing the same in Japan, while Tyla Nathan-Wong is in Australia playing in the NRL.
Super Rugby Aupiki, with just four teams, runs for barely a month and offers part-time wages. “There’s a lot of other competitions that are starting up and offer good money to players,” Hurricanes Poua coach Victoria Grant said this year.
The women’s game is in a battle for talent, where those codes and leagues which provide the best money and opportunity are likely to lure the most players.
Kelly Evans, who runs her own athlete management company Cultivate Group, and who is New Zealand’s only registered female player agent looking after some of the country’s highest profile women players, says: “Super Rugby Aupiki needs to expand beyond four rounds, it just has to for its continuation and sustainability.
“That is the ideal to expand into a transtasman competition, but I think we also need to have more than four rounds in Super Rugby Aupiki to build that fan base and commercial viability, it needs to be longer.”
But despite the danger of losing players to rival countries and codes, Beard says that the key to delivering long-term success is developing the women’s game at a sustainable pace.
She says the game needs to establish a wider, stronger, better-prepared player base before Super Rugby Aupiki can expand. “We have to build a product that is right and develop it at the right pace,” she says.
“Our women have only transitioned from having other careers. They need this building at this own pace to ensure it is viable so that fans, supporters and players are happy.”
NZR has taken the plunge and has invested almost 10 per cent of its annual revenue in trying to grow women’s rugby this year.
But as well as the question of whether it is moving quickly enough, there is the issue of whether sponsors, broadcasters and other commercial partners are also ready to invest in professional women’s rugby.
Women’s rugby has historically been a no-go for big brands and if NZR, which lost $47m in 2022, can’t find big-money backers, it won’t be able to fulfil its strategic vision.
If Super Rugby Aupiki is to expand, it not only needs more players but a stack of cash to pay them, and the whole future of the sport for women is now dependent on how significantly it can be commercialised.
Sceptics, certainly, will look at the lack of corporate investment in the last decade and argue that there simply isn’t and never will be any commercial interest in women’s rugby.
But those immersed in the field believe otherwise. With new fans being pulled in, there are plenty of well-placed observers who say NZR could now be sitting on a potential gold mine with the Black Ferns.
“Gold mine is a great way of putting it because there is a huge opportunity for the commercialisation of women’s rugby,” says van den Bos.
“I can see the tides shifting. I suspect that looking internationally where the dollars always are, we are seeing big corporate alignments in women’s sport.
“The appetite is there. This is an opportunity that won’t come along again in this way because this is the moment on the back of big events where people are starting to watch.”
Several factors are fostering confidence that the women’s game will soon be announcing major sponsorships.
One of those is the arrival of dedicated staff at NZR working exclusively on women’s rugby and hunting down commercial partners for Super Rugby Aupiki, the Black Ferns and the WXV.
The improved professional inventory and growing certainty that there are now going to be regular fixtures for the Black Ferns has also helped garner interest from potential sponsors.
“We haven’t separated building a high-performance and talent system out from the commercialisation of women’s rugby,” says Beard.
“We have intentionally put things under the same pillar. We have to connect with fans, understand who they are and what they are looking for and in what ways our commercial partners can connect with our fans and Black Ferns.
“We haven’t previously had a lot of rugby to sell in the women’s game. The Black Ferns have barely played in between World Cups, and there hasn’t been consistency of product offering or visibility. It was temperamental and it is hard to commercialise something when you haven’t had consistency.
“Now we have a product to sell and the commercial interest we have had post World Cup has been amazing, not just supporting the Black Ferns but women’s rugby in general.
“There will be some imminent announcements about commercial partners coming.”
What is driving the most confidence about the commercial viability of women’s rugby, however, is the attraction of the individual athletes.
In the wake of the Black Ferns victory, Evans says she has seen an explosion in the number of her clients who now have commercial relationships.
A decade ago, there were maybe two or three players who had local sponsors, now there are international companies offering more money to a greater number of players.
“It is undeniable what the RWC did for women’s rugby not only here but globally,” she says. “What we are seeing is the rise of women’s rugby in the last year or two has created an opportunity where brands are seeing the value of the sport and of these individuals and are interested and wanting to work with them. Brands are really interested in working with female rugby.
“You can see the commercial partnerships that are out there – there are at least eight or nine female players with individual partnerships and then further down with the emerging younger players there is an opportunity that might last for three months or with social media campaigns.”
The uninhibited nature of the players, especially the likes of Tui and youngsters Maia Roos and Sylvia Brunt, is the Black Ferns’ trump card in the battle to snaffle corporate dollars.
Mark Callander, who is chief executive of 2degress, says his company made a significant investment in Super Rugby Aupiki precisely because: “When I look at Aupiki and women’s rugby, what really brought it to life was the personalities which captured the nation.”
Women’s rugby is standing on the edge of a bright, new, well-funded future where it generates enough money to sustain an expended Super Rugby Aupiki and grows its elite and community player base.
More than 35,000 girls and women will play rugby this year and even the lowest paid of the 35 contracted Black Ferns will earn more than $100,000.
This was unimaginable six years ago when World Cup-winning Black Ferns players earned just $12,000 in 2017.
The fight to get to this point has been relentless. It took a long and public battle for the Black Ferns of 2022 to be awarded individual bonus payments for winning the World Cup – whereas the men have long had a clause in their collective contracts to pay them six figures should they win the Webb Ellis trophy.
There was also the unfortunate scheduling double-up last year which saw NZR arrange an All Blacks test against Japan that overlapped with the Black Ferns quarter-final – leaving the nation to choose between the two.
And there was also a damning review in early 2022 that lifted the lid on serious cultural and management issues within the Black Ferns at the end of 2021 that somehow went undetected by the NZR executive until they were brought to light by one of the affected players on social media.
That the Black Ferns have thrived through all this, and women’s rugby has continued to attract new fans and participants, is largely due to the determination of the players to drive change through their performances and their refusal to accept inequity and injustice.
Through sheer hard work, brilliance on the field and the authenticity and exuberance of the athletes to portray themselves and the reality of their struggle in an unfiltered light, women’s rugby has won the sort of audience and media coverage many never thought it would.
And because the viability of its future depends on its ability to attract corporate dollars, the single biggest challenge for women’s rugby is retaining the essence and character of its personalities.
Once the professional network develops and the athletes are asked to train more, play more, and talk to the media more, can they preserve their authenticity and unreserved, open access?
Will the pressure of more scrutiny and more focus on results and the greater exposure to professional environments institutionalise the athletes and dampen the personalities?
“My level of fear of that happening is very low,” says Beard. “They are humble, connected, they wear many hats. Some are mothers and the culture of the Black Ferns and the history, acknowledgment of their whakapapa is huge. There is something magic about our women and I am not fearful we will lose it.”
