NFL approach to investment would serve NZR better than San Diego showcase - Gregor Paul

The next NFL superstar may come from New Zealand shores. Photo / AP

THREE KEY FACTS

The All Blacks play Fiji in San Diego on Saturday, kickoff 2.30pm NZT

NFL scouts are in Auckland to recruit players to its Academy programme

Silver Lake private equity outfit invested $200m into New Zealand Rugby

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.

OPINION

There’s an incredible coincidence taking place this week that the All Blacks are in the US trying to convert American Football fans to rugby, while the NFL is in Auckland trying to persuade a muster of young athletes to take up American Football.

This is modern sport – globalised and strategic, reflecting the fact that all codes recognise professionalism is effectively a version of the nuclear arms race where survival is based on an ability to win more fans, generate more money and drive interest, exposure, participation, influence, audience and any other key metric to keep the whole growth cycle moving.

What’s interesting is the different strategic approaches – with New Zealand Rugby using a boots-on-the-ground philosophy, hoping that by showcasing the All Blacks in San Diego, they will win media coverage and draw in existing rugby fans and those who have never seen the game played before.

The premise of this thesis is the rugby will prove to be compelling to an audience already hooked on collision sport and that once they become rugby fans, they will gravitate towards the All Blacks given the legacy and the allure of the historic story behind them.

The NFL is in Auckland to recruit players to its Academy programme, essentially searching for athletes aged 12-18 to offer them a chance to learn the sport as part of their education.

It’s a long-game play by the NFL – they make a significant investment in a cohort of young kids from Oceania and maybe one makes it far enough to earn a contract and if they do, there are instant new fans in New Zealand and Australia following that player and engaging with the league.

Younger audiences are happy to follow individuals rather than teams, and worldwide this has been seen in the growth of megastars such as Ronaldo, Le Bron James and Patrick Mahomes.

To some extent, it has been evident in New Zealand, too, where there are thousands of people following Steven Adams in the NBA – not only buying subscriptions to watch content but happily paying to buy the merchandise of whatever club the Kiwi giant is at.

The English Premiership is another major league to have seen its audience boom globally through individual acquisitions – and the arrival of South Korean international player Park Ji-Sung at Manchester United in 2005 opened the Asian market.

The advantage these established leagues have is their financial heft and their budgets to invest in long-term initiatives such as international academies and the acquisition of foreign stars.

NZR, historically at least, hasn’t had the necessary capital to invest in initiatives that have relatively high start-up costs and no ability to deliver short-term returns.

Playing offshore tests comes with a payday and so taking the All Blacks to San Diego is a cost-neutral means to market the game and brand to a foreign audience.

But these offshore ventures have been part of the plan since 2008 when a Bledisloe Cup test was played in Hong Kong, and it’s debatable whether these games – there were Bledisloe Cup tests in Tokyo, Hong Kong again and Yokohama, while the All Blacks also played Ireland in Chicago – have had any tangible impact in lifting the profile of either rugby or the All Blacks.

Anton Segner is not yet eligible for the All Blacks but would bring German fans if he were selected. Photo / Photosport

The second time the Bledisloe was played in Hong Kong, the stadium was barely half full, and other than Japan – where rugby has grown primarily as a result of hosting the 2019 World Cup – the game has not grown in popularity in either Asia or the US.

The objective of trying to grow an international audience makes sense, but hawking the All Blacks all over the world to do it has failed to work so far and there is no reason to believe it ever will unless there is a deeper, longer-term strategy to support it.

If the NFL is running a recruitment muster in Auckland, why can’t the All Blacks do the same thing in San Diego now that they have $200 million of capital investment from US fund manager Silver Lake?

Surely now, not all NZR commercial strategies have to come with an instant financial return and the whole point of taking private equity investment was to open up long-term, sustainable revenue streams.

Trawling the world for foreign players to bring to New Zealand and ultimately convert to All Blacks seems like it would be a more successful long-term strategy than simply turning up in an overseas venue for seven days and playing a game in front of what will inevitably be a stadium full of already hooked rugby fans.

Why not bring 20-30 foreign teenagers to New Zealand as part of an All Blacks Academy programme – and offer them both a rugby and real education?

If this sounds fanciful, it shouldn’t because it’s already just about happening as it is, with an estimated 100 kids a year coming out of the Pacific Islands to New Zealand schools.

Some of these young men are coming on scholarships linked to religious charters, some are just coming to bunk down with relatives and chase their dream, but ultimately, it’s an unsupported system in the sense that the education of these boys is not always well managed or scrutinised, and should they excel at rugby, they are open to the vagaries of a market that operates with a few unscrupulous and predatory agents.

This traffic flow seems unlikely to ever stop given the potential rewards to those who do make it to the professional ranks, and so the opportunity is there for NZR to accept it is already a beneficiary of this migration flow and step in to formalise it, regulate it and control it in such a way as to better support and protect those who come here in the hope of becoming All Blacks.

And by controlling it, NZR can move further afield from the islands and recruit out of Europe, Asia and North and South America.

Again, to some extent, this is already happening with Blues player Anton Segner deciding to leave Germany as a teenager to chase his rugby dream, with Highlanders lock Fabian Holland doing much the same from the Netherlands.

Holland, who is not yet eligible for the All Blacks, will almost certainly be picked once he is, and the financial impact of that will likely be considerably more significant than any benefits that come from the test against Fiji in San Diego.

Many in the Netherlands rugby community – there are 25,000 registered players there – will become All Blacks followers willing to buy merchandise and access to watch games.

The holy grail of this academy would be to produce an All Black with Chinese heritage – a story, especially if it was told via TikTok, that would have far more chance to engage potential new fans than playing Bledisloe Cup tests in Hong Kong ever did.

Throw in the fact that the process of recruiting for this All Blacks Academy would make watchable content for NZR+ and it seems incredible that it’s not already up and running and handpicking a generation of foreign athletes to unlock commercial markets that rugby has so far failed to crack.