Cape Town's waterfront sports stadium; Paralympic medallist Anna Grimaldi; All Blacks winger Sevu Reece; cyclist Aaron Gate. Photos / Photosport, 123rf
OPINION
Trevor McKewen has worked in the sports media and administration businesses for 45 years and was NZME’s inaugural Head of Sport from 2015 to 2018. He was also a senior executive for New Zealand Rugby and the Warriors NRL franchise and has a special interest in the commercial side of sport.
Australian and Argentina rugby are abandoned as Southern Hemisphere rugby coalition falls apart after years of dysfunction; A leading American sports podcaster takes aim at Auckland.
Next April marks the 30th birthday of the rugby coalition we came to know as Sanzaar. There won’t be any celebratory cake. A tombstone would be more appropriate because if Sanzaar isn’t dead yet, it’s almost certainly in its final throes.
The death rattle was last week’s confirmation of an alliance between the South African and New Zealand national unions for reciprocal tours from 2026 onwards. It signalled the sad demise of a coalition designed to foster all of Southern Hemisphere rugby.
In that goal, Sanzar (an acronym for South Africa New Zealand Australia Rugby, later altered to Sanzaar to add Argentina) has failed miserably.
And now the two biggest boys are taking their ball and playing elsewhere, ending the Rugby Championship as a true rival to Europe’s Six Nations tournament and condemning Australia and Argentina (and Japan) to bleak commercial futures.
The annual Southern Hemisphere tournament is already truncated every four years due to the World Cup. Now it will be reduced further every second year to accommodate South Africa and New Zealand’s self-interest and greed.
There’s a certain irony in New Zealand and South Africa’s joint turning-of-the-back on Rugby Australia, given it was the prize of domination of the Australian pay-TV market that forced rugby to turn professional in 1995 following a monumental scrap between Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer.
“Sanzar”, then comprising the three founding unions, emerged from the chaos as the shiny new hope for international professional rugby, creating the annual Tri Nations test tournament and Super Rugby franchise competition as its prized jewels.
And, for a while there, it worked incredibly well. The Tri-Nations regularly produced more spectacular rugby than the Six Nations. And the thought that any European club team could hold a candle to the winning Super Rugby champions was considered laughable.
How the wheel has turned.
After bringing in Argentina, Sanzaar flirted for decades with Japan and exploited rather than assisted the Pacific Island nations (with New Zealand and Australia the main beneficiaries).
But in the end, the opportunity to build a southern version of the Six Nations alliance was squandered. And for that, New Zealand Rugby (NZR) has to shoulder most of the blame.
NZR’s hubris before and during the Covid pandemic when it attempted to become the sole owner of the Super Rugby competition to entice a bigger fee from private-equity suitors Silver Lake has bitten it back harder than anybody could have predicted.
It resulted in the South Africans taking their Super Rugby teams to Europe, kicking off an unforeseen but predictable decline in New Zealand rugby standards through the loss of regular contact with the Republic. And it alienated the Australians and Argentines.
Little wonder what we’ve ended up with: a limp Super Rugby Pacific competition still dominated by Kiwi franchises, a Wallabies team that are a mere shadow of the John Eales-led era when they (temporarily) became the All Blacks’ greatest foes and Argentina stalled as a growing superpower by being handed fewer games against the Boks and All Blacks.
Murdoch paid US$555 million ($903m) for the first 10 years of Sanzar’s broadcasting rights, which at roughly a third each per national union represented around US$18m ($29m) to Rugby Australia annually.
Three decades on, the same Australian rights are only worth an extra two million dollars at A$29m ($31m) – a massive failure by Sanzaar given the explosive growth of sports rights globally.
Sanzar’s inability to work collectively to develop the most lucrative broadcasting market available to it is a glaring example of its negligence as a meaningful rugby body.
In the wake of Sanzaar’s implosion, NZR has thrown its arms up in despair and headed for the exit door on the arm of South Africa, who suddenly is our new beau.
That, of course, has everything to do with short-term opportunism.
With the Richie McCaw-Dan Carter era consigned to fading memories, the Springboks have suddenly stepped forward as the game’s new giants.
That’s inconvenient for us, given the narrative NZR sold to gain private equity investment (you know, “you’re buying into the best team in the history of world sport”). But it also presented the only real commercial growth opportunity identified since jumping in bed with Silver Lake.
In a sentence, “let’s hitch a ride on the South African express”.
That’s what last week’s announcement of a “strategic alliance” with the South Africans was really about.
There’s money to be made out of the historical battle between both nations. Indeed, should we be surprised that the marketing theme for the new pact is “The Greatest Rugby Rivalry”?
It makes sense because fans in both nations have a hankering for the nostalgic return of “old-style tours” and All Blacks-Springboks clashes are consistently a cut above all other tests (when not ruined by match officials).
What doesn’t make sense is how the commercials worked back in the tour days.
Under International Rugby Board (the IRB, before it became World Rugby) rules, host nations retain all commercial rights including broadcasting from tours while paying the visiting team’s travel and accommodation expenses.
It is also why an extra test – beyond the three to be played in the Republic in 2026 and three here when the Boks tour in 2030 – has been scheduled. It will be played offshore, probably in the US or Europe, to further raise the revenue haul for the two unions.
Sports Insider moles say the deal is already paying off. South African broadcaster SuperSport has written out a massive cheque for rights to the reciprocal tours and offshore tests.
A desperate NZR is also likely to use the alliance to beef up the content supplied to Sky NZ in the next tranche of broadcasting rights, hopefully minimising an anticipated fall in value during negotiations currently under way.
New Zealand is fortunate we are flavour of the month with South Africa right now. We saw the passion of the fanbase at Ellis Park and Cape Town’s DHL Stadium over the past fortnight over a clash with the rugby nation they respect the most.
That’s lucky for us, even if it adds substantial pressure to stop the rot against the Boks. After all, a rivalry is only a rivalry when neither side is regularly dominating the other.
But where does all of this leave Australia?
Sports Insider’s spies across the ditch tell me that Rugby Australia is “seriously pissed off” with their New Zealand colleagues over the diminishing of the Rugby Championship as an annual product.
But the size of the South African SuperSport cheque has allowed NZR to throw the Australians a token gesture.
To compensate the Australians while the Boks and All Blacks wander off to play their own games and the Wallabies and Argentina’s Pumas twiddle their thumbs, we’ve come up with the genius idea of an Anzac Day test.
The All Blacks will play the Wallabies in Perth on Anzac weekend in 2026, giving the Aussies a sap the same year the full tour of South Africa occurs.
Rugby Australia will get much-needed income, including the Western Australian state government hosting Super Rugby Pacific’s “Super Round”, involving all teams, the same weekend as the test.
It means taking All Blacks and Wallabies contenders out of Super Rugby for two rounds and effectively ruining the competition even further, but what the heck... the Aussies needed to be pacified somehow.
If it all sounds crazy and cynical, it might be because it is.
Sanzaar has failed to understand scarcity can be a winner in elite sport. The Six Nations works because each country only plays each other once a year. It’s an occasion and every test counts.
Instead we try to jam in as many as three Bledisloe Cup tests most years and wonder why they have lost their lustre.
Sometimes you need an outsider to point out the bleeding obvious.
Cue American podcaster Ryen Russillo from the huge American sports and popular culture site, The Ringer.
A reader familiar with my ongoing lament over Auckland’s squandering of a national stadium on the waterfront sent me an episode of Russillo’s podcast, from when he visited New Zealand earlier this year.
His popular Russillo On The Road podcasts regularly draw massive audiences among sports fans interested in travelling the world to experience new sport and cultural experiences.
Russillo was a guest of the New Zealand Breakers. His almost two-hour long podcast on his Kiwi experiences is at times funny, sometimes insightful and occasionally piercing.
In short, he loved New Zealand, especially Queenstown, but Auckland... meh!
The City of Sails simply didn’t do it for him. In fact, he likened it to being similar to the “outskirts of a small Canadian city”.
His ultimate advice to his huge audience – “spend a day in Auckland and then get out and go to the South Island”.
Russillo wasn’t being uncharitable. He admitted to long harbouring a desire to visit New Zealand and had anticipated Auckland being the highlight of his trip.
Instead, after a 13-hour flight and checking into a CBD hotel, he went walking and was delighted to find a beautiful harbour at the bottom of the street. The only trouble was “it was all industrial”.
“So got to the hotel, did the excited energy walk... the city of Auckland? Not blown away,” he said. “It reminded me of some of the outskirts of small cities in Canada.”
“It’s got all this incredible water at the north part of the city... but there’s no park. The problem is the waterfront is all very industrial. It’s all just ports... the port is almost the entire line of walking this main northernmost part of the street closest to the water.
“It doesn’t have the layout it should for the waterline that it has... I’m just being honest.”
Russillo was disappointed with how Auckland’s waterfront presented itself. He had expected better. Where’s the sporting precinct? Why aren’t there more public facilities for people to enjoy along the harbour?
At the same time, those of us who tuned into the live rugby in Cape Town last Sunday morning were greeted with spectacular images surrounding Newlands Stadium with fans enjoying food and drinks in brilliant sunshine by the water before a leisurely stroll to a magnificent venue basking in a stunning sunset.
Call South Africa a third world country all you like... Cape Town didn’t present like that to the world last weekend. The stadium and its surrounding areas were vibrant and pulsing.
And so we continue to miss a trick: Eden Park advocates denigrate a waterfront stadium option while expecting the likes of Russillo to check into a motel in Kingsland if he wants to have a sports experience in our biggest city.
So instead of talking up Auckland as a sports destination, Russillo laments the lack of vision while driving past Eden Park as a taxi passenger on his way to the airport to cut short his visit so he can head elsewhere in Aotearoa.
Aucklanders, are you listening?
Anna Grimaldi: Spared New Zealand blushes at the Paralympics by ensuring the team returned with a gold medal and showed off her bountiful personality along the way.
St Thomas of Canterbury College: The little Christchurch school that can successfully defended their national rugby league championship, beating Auckland’s De La Salle in the final and showing the Warriors where the best young talent currently lies.
Aaron Gate: The reigning New Zealand Sportsman of the Year is taking his spectacular mullet and stepping away from the cycling track to concentrate on road racing, signing for a leading European team competing on the UCI World Tour.
Veteran Sam Cane is given his farewell test appearance.