As rugby officials embark on their public relations blitz of the country's 26 provincial unions in an attempt to sell the idea that flogging the family jewels – equity in our national game for what is believed to be an offer of $465 million from a UStechnology investment company – an even more sceptical audience, the New Zealand public, awaits.
The provincial unions, many of which were in financial difficulty even before Covid struck, may be easier to convince. The presentations will be glossy and persuasive, with a cash injection for the grassroots game a key point made from the deep south to the far north.
The unions will be shown worrying financial graphs and told that an agreement from the majority of them, rubber stamped at New Zealand Rugby's annual meeting in April, will secure their future.
The obvious potential pitfalls are the loss of control of the All Blacks' brand and a further disconnection between the grassroots and the elite.
Many club teams even on Auckland's highly-populated North Shore are now regularly defaulting due to a lack of players and in the meantime the Blues are understood to be negotiating with Kiwi companies to help fill potential new recruit Roger Tuivasa-Sheck's bank account to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hopefully those issues are addressed on NZ Rugby's summer roadshow and maybe it will all work out for the best.
And yet, such game-changing plans – for that's what they are - probably deserve to be met with scepticism if not cynicism because NZ Rugby's track record, along with Sanzaar's and the other Sanzaar nations Australia, South Africa and Argentina, has not been spotless in terms of decision making.
The rush to expand Super Rugby from 12 teams to 14 to 15 to 18 and then back to 15 again was short-sighted to say the least. At its heart was the intention to "leverage" new markets. This, despite waning public interest and a constant drip of negative media coverage.
Most of us could all see the writing on the wall but Sanzaar and its member nations seemed to be looking in the other direction. Instead of growing market share we got a near incomprehensible conference system in which some teams (the 2017 Lions come to mind) won an immediate reward by avoiding New Zealand teams in the round robin.
Crusaders players celebrate. Photo / Photosport
Seasons got longer, almost by the year. The start of the Super Rugby season in late January and early February, depending on the format, should have been met with excitement by NZ Rugby but instead franchises were advised to dampen down media coverage least they overload the Kiwi public with rugby in the middle of the cricket season, an attitude that said it all about what was a broken model.
What New Zealand Rugby's consideration of Silver Lake's capital offer highlights is their inability to make money, and to make money from the All Blacks, one of the world's most successful and respected brands, in particular. They are now looking for someone to do it for them and that someone will obviously have its own revenue-generating potential at the top of its priority list.
Many people believe the game changed for the worse when it went professional in 1996. It turned off fans who became bored at the near constant loop of what seemed to them like increasingly meaningless games played by teams they had little affinity with against teams in cities they would struggle to find on the map.
Players got bigger, faster, wealthier and more vulnerable to injury, including concussion. Now a high-profile All Black playing for his club is big news for its rarity. Back in the day it was as commonplace as a set of goalposts in a suburban park.
We're on the cusp of another watershed moment in the New Zealand game and the irony is NZ Rugby, the organisation, had just started to listen to their public. Covid forced the issue but what we will have over the next few months in Super Rugby is far more family-friendly afternoon kick-offs. In a major breakthrough, the two Bledisloe Cup tests in Wellington and Auckland last year kicked off at 4pm. It's what most of us have wanted for years.
