Scott Robertson will take over as All Blacks head coach next year, tasked with not only winning tests but helping New Zealand Rugby exploit the brand power of the national team. Gregor Paul, whose new book Black Gold looks at how commercialisation of the All Blacks has impacted the team’s
Inside the money-hungry All Blacks machine: Scott Robertson may be surprised by what he finds
Scott Robertson. Photo / Photosport
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Robertson’s All Blacks will be the most commercialised rugby team in the world, under pressure to meet ambitious financial forecasts that are aiming to double revenue to $500m in the next five years.
Having taken the greatest financial risk in its 131-year history by selling an equity stake to Silver Lake, NZR needs the All Blacks to not only stay at the top of the world rankings but for Robertson to be a facilitator of his employer’s commercial ambition.
Winning, by itself, won’t be enough to deliver the sort of financial returns NZR needs and Robertson, who famously breakdances when the Crusaders win Super Rugby and who presents as an engaging and at times, alternative thinker, is viewed as someone who can transform the public image of the All Blacks to reposition them as a modern brand with relatable stars encouraged to give a global audience better digital access to life inside the team.
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So much of NZR’s financial plan hinges on the ability of the All Blacks to deepen their digital footprint to transform the scale of the next broadcast deal.
And in Dunedin last week, there was a strong hint of what’s to come, as the national body gave media a sneak preview of its soon-to-be-launched content hub and streaming platform, NZR+.
The platform is going to be a content-hungry beast, with strong expectations that coaches and players will showcase themselves and the brand to help their employer capture the data of millions of fans, to whom it can sell merchandise, tickets and in time, live content.
Razor is therefore seen by NZR as the perfect coach — capable of producing a team that can win tests and one who can lead a brand overhaul and not stand in the way of commercial ambition.
That last point is critical, because for almost a decade now, there has been an internal conflict inside the All Blacks — one which has seen the two worlds of commercialisation and high-performance collide and battle it out for control of the team.
As much as anything else, NZR hopes that Robertson will end this war by effectively giving the commercial operation the sort of buy-in it was never able to win under Hansen or Foster.
Four years ago, Hansen stood down as All Blacks coach, not relieved to be out of office as such, but certainly aware that the job he took on in 2012 was vastly different by 2019.
If, by some mad series of unexpected events, he was asked to take on the role again, he’d have to think long and hard about whether he would — not because of his age or fear of tarnishing the legacy he built, but because the commercialisation of the All Blacks, which he felt was starting to impinge on the ability of his team to perform, has intensified.
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France, Ireland, South Africa, England and Australia all present real threats to the All Blacks, but the biggest enemy they currently face, and what may end up destroying their incredible legacy, is the naked ambition of New Zealand Rugby’s commercial arm.
In the four years since the last World Cup, the All Blacks have seen the total value of sponsorship on their kit grow from about $35m a year to $60m, having agreed new deals with Britain’s richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe and French billionaire Mo Altrad.
NZR has also struck sponsorship deals with Japanese pharmaceutical company Taisho and German tech giant SAP, and in 2021, the value of its broadcast contract jumped almost 40 per cent to $100m a year.
But the question Hansen and many of his senior players were increasingly asking themselves towards the end of his tenure, was at what price was this commercial growth coming?
The coaching staff and players increasingly felt commercial demands were impinging on their high-performance preparation and from about 2017, when NZR began forecasting that expenses would outstrip income for the foreseeable future, an internal battle to control the All Blacks broke out.
NZR needed more money, and its only asset with the requisite brand power to derive the sort of income it needed, was the All Blacks.
From co-existing mostly harmoniously through the professional age, the commercial and high-performance arms of the All Blacks were frequently clashing.
The All Blacks were playing more tests, the additional fixtures netted NZR anything from $1m to $4m per game and were typically played in the USA or Japan to showcase the brand to a new audience.
And with Super Rugby having expanded into Asia and Argentina — all to try to make more money, the players began to feel the physical and mental impact of more travel and more games.
“We noticed it,” says Kieran Read, who captained the All Blacks between 2016-2019. “Guys noticed we were playing these extra tests and it made it quite a massive year.
“Suddenly we are flying around the world three times a year, or four with Super Rugby and it just turned it into a massive thing, and you can’t help but notice and think, ‘I hope they are making some money from this because we are doing a tonne of work for them’.”
Tensions between the team and the commercial arm intensified when Amazon Prime wanted to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the All Blacks called All or Nothing.
The US streaming giant was offering $3m to film the team preparing to play the British and Irish Lions and then in the Rugby Championship.
The presence of cameras never sat well with the team nor the coaching staff and Sir Wayne Smith — who served as All Blacks head coach between 2000 and 2001, and then as assistant between 2004 and 2011, before returning as defence coach in 2015 through to 2017 — found it a distraction.
“There was no comparison at all,” Smith says of what he encountered in 2000 and what he experienced in 2017.
“The obligations on us [in 2000] were few and far between as I remember it. If you compare that with 2017 where we had something that I was against, but it got voted on, which was being followed around by Amazon to do that documentary.
“I found that intrusive and it was difficult. It changed behaviours to the extent that guys that you would joke with on the field previously, wouldn’t come over because it would come over on my mic what they were saying. It changed everything.
“It was a microcosm I think of where the pressures have ramped up. As the money has got bigger the obligations have got bigger and that is just the nature of it.”
The All Blacks drew the series with the Lions — something Hansen blames himself for, citing his desire to win getting the better of him — but he didn’t think the documentary helped.
But the need to make money to balance the books had reached desperation point, and as Hansen would discover, his last two years in the job were largely spent pushing back against commercial demands.
He had to fight a proposal to take the All Blacks out of business class and have them travel the world in economy seats.
He had to contend with stakeholders such as AIG and All Blacks tours having access to training sessions he would rather they didn’t get to see, and with more sponsors and more relationships to manage, he was constantly having to say no to specific requests that would come in late or hadn’t previously been discussed.
More worrying was the desire to sell intellectual property, leading to those inside the All Blacks to fear it was demystifying the legacy the team had built over more than 100 years.
It wasn’t just the All or Nothing documentary that gave insight into what makes the All Blacks tick, in 2019 NZR’s commercial team sold an executive leadership programme to Mitsubishi — one that contained many secrets about the inner sanctum.
Hansen, bullish and ultra-protective of his players and the All Blacks legacy, had the force of personality to say no to the commercial team — something which ultimately made him unpopular with the NZR board, but was appreciated by the team.
“We knew it was going on, but he kept it away from the team,” says Read. “In the environment we wouldn’t speak ill of the commercial stuff because it was the reality of what we had to do.
“And because we had to do it, if you were pissed off about doing it, then it was going to affect your next training or your next game because that whole mindset thing carries on.
“In the perfect world you wouldn’t have them, would you? If your one goal is to play well then you would do everything in your week to get to that point.
“I don’t think you want to be selling your IP. The IP of who we are, it is shown in the way teams play against us, that if you don’t quite have that fear factor, then it is an advantage you have lost.”
The arrival of Covid in 2020 brought a truce as NZR effectively switched to survival mode, but the war between the commercial desire and high-performance needs has flickered back to life in the past 12 months or so.
When ticket sales for the second Bledisloe Cup test at Eden Park were struggling in 2021, Foster came under pressure to publicly promote the fixture, with suggestions made by the commercial team that the All Blacks coach should have a social media presence to better engage with fans.
The arrival of Ineos as a kit sponsor has also come with a requirement for the All Blacks to share information with other teams with which the petrochemical company has an association, and last year, after losing the home series to Ireland, Foster came under pressure to be openly vulnerable in front of the media, to give the brand story more drama and a human touch.
How detrimental this commercial incursion has been, is best illustrated by the contrasting statistics produced between mid-2021 and 2022.
In that period, the All Blacks signed sponsorship deals worth an accumulated $400m and took $200m of private equity investment in what was their most commercially successful 12 months in history.
It was also a period in which the All Blacks posted a 65 per cent win ratio, losing five of their first six tests in 2022, before going on to lose to Argentina for the first time in NZ.
The enormity of what lies ahead for Razor is hard to comprehend, as so far it hasn’t been possible for NZR to fulfil its commercial ambition without damaging the ability of the All Blacks to perform.
