The Crusaders celebrate with the Super Rugby trophy. Photo / photosport.nz
THREE KEY FACTS:
– Super Rugby Pacific can’t run long-term with an odd number of teams.
– Moana Pasifika have secured their future by striking a significant deal with a new financial partner.
– There is growing support for Super Rugby to open dialogue with the Japanese clubs.
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He’s won multiple awards for journalism and has written several books about sport.
OPINION
The collapse of the Melbourne Rebels has not only left Super Rugby Pacific with an ugly 11-team format to run in 2025, but it has also presented a bigger question: whether the competition would be best-served contracting further or expanding in its quest to give itself a long-term sustainable future.
It can’t run long-term with an odd number of teams – it creates a logistically compromised draw – and so the conversations around various board tables in recent months have been focused on asking whether it makes more commercial and high-performance sense to operate with 10 teams from 2026 and the beginning of a new broadcast cycle, or expand Super Rugby to either 12 or 14 teams.
The question as it relates to reduction isn’t so much about considering whether to proactively chop another team, but assessing whether any of the current teams are likely to succumb to the same fate as the Rebels and fall over of their own accord due to accumulated debts and lack of income.
These are universally tough times and Super Rugby has felt the double whammy of a high cost of living impacting ticket sales and an almost catastrophically bad broadcast deal in Australia reducing income flow, which has created distressed balance sheets across the competition.
The worry for Super Rugby has been that by this time next year, another club may be forced to raise the white flag and call in the liquidators, and so why look to bring in new teams when it’s possible that natural attrition may be the better strategic plan and deliver an organic solution to the format problem.
And of all the clubs battling financial headwinds, none have been more challenged than Moana Pasifika, who have yet to find a home base and build a dedicated following and therefore have been deemed to be carrying a high degree of financial vulnerability.
But the Herald can reveal that Moana have secured their future by striking a significant deal with a new financial partner.
The club have confirmed that the new partnership has given them long-term security, and with that, they can now offer prospective new players the certainty they need to join Moana.
And with the Fijian Drua operating profitably off the field and with some success on it, they too have shown that they are a viable long-term proposition for Super Rugby Pacific.
In Australia, the Western Force have the backing of billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, the Reds continue to post annual profits and the only club with a question mark hanging over them is the Brumbies, who reportedly owe Rugby Australia A$1 million, but continue to pay it back as per the conditions under which it was borrowed.
Playing Super Rugby Pacific with 10 teams from 2026 is only shaping as an option if either Rugby Australia or New Zealand Rugby are prepared to proactively cull one of their clubs.
And it is unlikely there will be any appetite on either side of the Tasman to do that – especially not in Australia, where the fallout from the decision to axe the Western Force in 2017 was prolonged, messy and ugly.
Super Rugby’s future in the next broadcast cycle is likely, then, to be either as a 12-team or 14-team competition, prompting the question – from where will these teams come?
The answer is becoming increasingly obvious to many investors and stakeholders in Super Rugby – Japan.
In fact, Japan is the only option open to Super Rugby if it wants to restore itself to a viable, even-team format in 2026.
There had been earlier suggestions that the Jaguares from Argentina were being lined up to make a comeback, but this was a move that never had support from the Super Rugby clubs and highlights the conflict that exists in trying to determine a long-term solution for the competition.
What the national unions of New Zealand and Australia want may not align with what the clubs want.
Bringing the Jaguares back would be a move with just one purpose – to appease Argentina at an institutional level after the Pumas were given a place in the Rugby Championship in 2012, then a Super Rugby slot in 2016, which was all part of a strategic plan to help them bring their players back from Europe and align them with the Southern Hemisphere season.
All that happened, only for NZR to unilaterally blow up Super Rugby in 2020 and leave Argentina’s players with no choice but to go looking for club contracts in Europe again.
The Jaguares, despite being successful on the field, didn’t engage fans, and bringing them back would be a return to games being played at times that simply don’t work for the wider Pacific region.
It would also add significantly to the operational costs and create logistical dramas given the difficulties of travelling there from New Zealand, as there are no longer direct flights.
The United States, for all the same reasons as Argentina, is not a viable option to set up a Super team, and it’s impossible to imagine that the South Africans can now up sticks and walk out of the arrangements they have made in Europe.
New Zealand are maxed out with five teams – technically six given Moana are based here – and Australia can barely sustain the four they now have.
The only viable country that comes into the equation is Japan.
To some, this represents a regressive move given Super Rugby has been there and done that with the ill-fated Sunwolves, who were briefly involved between 2016 and 2020.
But any relationship formed would need to be fully committed for it to work, and there is growing support to open dialogue with the Japanese clubs about three of them joining the competition from 2026.
The Super Rugby clubs’ preference would be to effectively bring in Japan as a replacement for South Africa – a deal that sees them fully involved in the decision-making of the competition, with equal rights to those enjoyed by New Zealand and Australia.
Because if Japan is fully embraced, it opens the prospect of clubs using their financial power to sign world-class players and lift the quality and glamour factor of Super Rugby.
Which three clubs would be up to the Japanese to determine and how it all works at their end would be their business – on the premise that three, well-resourced teams with heavy corporate backing are committed to playing in the competition each year.
There is no viable alternative but to head down this path of trying to persuade Japan’s clubs to commit to joining Super Rugby, because the future without them is an 11-team compromised format or a politically inspired and ultimately doomed return of the Jaguares.
Hagley Oval has a new head groundsman ahead of the first test of the summer.