With a scaled-back Commonwealth Games planned for Glasgow in 2026, three sports dear to New Zealand affections face the boot; a shock Scottish vote paves the way for a Southern Hemisphere boss of World Rugby; And Black Ferns winger’s cheeky dig at the All
Sports Insider: Rugby, hockey and netball in danger of being dumped from the Commonwealth Games
The Blacks Ferns Sevens celebrate gold at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games. Photo / Photosport
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Only swimming and athletics have been deemed as definite so far, with the other eight sports still to be revealed.
The last time Glasgow hosted the Games in 2014, 17 sports featured. The most recent Games, in Birmingham in 2022, had 19.
But, at this stage, Glasgow organisers don’t even know what month of 2026 it will host the Games. Victoria was set for March at the end of the Aussie summer, but that won’t work with the Scottish weather, say officials.
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Settling on suitable dates is becoming a real problem and is a key reason why rugby sevens and hockey are in peril of being cut.
Both sports have men’s World Cups set for 2026, which will almost certainly take preference over the Commonwealth Games. Hockey is set for Amsterdam in the European summer while the Sevens World Cup host city is still to be decided – but is likely to be at a similar time.
Two years into the Olympic cycle means many sports are due to hold their own quadrennial events in the European summer months of July and August.
The European Athletics Championships are also set for Birmingham from July 30 to August 9 and will attract the attention of the Commonwealth’s best track and field stars.
An even more cluttered global sports calendar will make it almost impossible to find a clear space if they run in late July or early August, as Glasgow did 10 years ago.
Games officials will also need to avoid clashing with the men’s Fifa World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States from June 11 to July 19, or risk mass attention being diverted away from them.
If the male versions of rugby sevens and hockey do get the boot, it’s hard to see how organisers would retain the women’s versions of both, given the pressure to cut the number of sports.
That means no Black Ferns – the double Olympic champions – and the Black Sticks not being involved in a Commonwealth Games for the first time since 1998.
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But they could also be joined by netball’s Silver Ferns, with the sport also in danger.
Netball does not have an established international men’s programme and presumably sports played competitively by both genders will have an advantage.
It’s not news that would be welcomed at New Zealand Netball, as the sport struggles for profile and talented athletes in this country against the likes of basketball, rugby, rugby league, football and cricket.
Netball’s best chance of survival probably lies in lobbying the Scottish organisers to retain sports peculiar to the Commonwealth, like lawn bowls and squash.
Netball NZ officials have surely been regularly beating the path a few hundred metres up the road at Auckland’s Parnell Rise to the New Zealand Olympic Committee to lobby their support.
Netball’s ultimate fate could be decided by the attitude of the Commonwealth Games Federation, which is fighting for relevance in the modern sporting world.
Is Glasgow the final hurrah and therefore a celebration of Commonwealth sports?
Or will the scaled-back version unashamedly feature populist sports in a bid to reinvent its future?
Scotland’s ‘White Shark’ beached in bid for World Rugby’s biggest job
It’s been a dramatic few days in the byzantine world of international rugby politics.
Former British and Irish Lions star John Jeffrey, known as the “White Shark” during his fearsome playing days as a hard-nosed flanker, has been ousted as a contender to become the chair of World Rugby.
Jeffrey, who was once famously banned from the game after damaging the Calcutta Cup trophy during a marathon drinking stint after a 1988 Scotland-England test, was the favourite to succeed Englishman Sir Bill Beaumont.
But in a stunning turn of events, the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) has declined to endorse his candidacy, stopping his bid dead in its tracks.
Jeffrey didn’t take the snub kindly, immediately resigning as World Rugby’s vice-chair and quitting his role as an SRU board member and as president of the Six Nations Council.
The 65-year-old claimed he had been done over by the SRU for political reasons after his fierce opposition towards a governance review into Scotland’s national union in late 2022.
“To say I was surprised would be an understatement,” Jeffrey lamented. “There is no love lost between myself and the Scottish Rugby Union board over the governance review. And I still think it goes back to that, personally.
“My view is that it is still a personal grudge against me speaking up against the governance review.”
Jeffrey accused his union of self-sabotage, given he believed he had the votes to secure the World Rugby chair role.
“Scotland had the chance to have somebody as chair of an international federation. That doesn’t come round very often. You probably have one chance in rugby... the Scottish Rugby Union has now pulled the rug from our chance to do that.”
Jeffrey’s withdrawal from the race won’t be mourned in New Zealand and opens up the chance for the Southern Hemisphere to hold the prized World Rugby post for the first time.
He is an arch-conservative with protectionist views (as evidenced on his stance against the SRU’s governance review) and New Zealand was not intending to support him with its vote.
Instead New Zealand Rugby is backing former Wallaby Brett Robinson, who is now the new favourite.
New Zealand Rugby’s alarming digital strategy
Not content with burning $11 million in a year on its ill-conceived NZR+ digital venture, it seems New Zealand Rugby (NZR) is doubling down on its flawed media strategy.
The Herald yesterday revealed further detail of NZR’s misguided aspiration to become an international over-the-top (or in the industry’s parlance, OTT) streamer.
Building a successful OTT broadcasting platform comes at enormous expense, but that hasn’t stopped it becoming catnip to ambitious sports all around the globe.
Silver Lake, the American private equity company with a 7.5% ownership of NZR’s commercial assets, is a huge promoter of the OTT strategy, pointing towards the phenomenal success of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), in which it holds a majority stake.
Silver Lake certainly seems to be whispering in NZR’s ears on the evidence of this week’s story.
Certain sports with international broadcast appeal, like the UFC and basketball’s NBA, have the global scale to command success as individual platforms – but you can count their numbers on one hand.
Single-sport OTT services are increasingly failing, especially in niche sports.
Australia’s A-League football competition basically squandered an A$140m ($154m) investment from (guess who?) Silver Lake chasing an OTT strategy via an ill-fated digital venture called “KeepUp”.
KeepUp was quietly mothballed last year, its 40-odd employees fired and the over-ambitious platform left to die.
But despite its questionable advice, there were few ramifications for Silver Lake. It still owns 33% of the A-League with club owners and the league now stuck with horrendous annual dividends payable to the Americans.
KeepUp also featured live matches, just as NZR+ is now planning.
Is nobody learning here?
For a while, it seemed like the new boss of the joint venture company formed by New Zealand Rugby and Silver Lake recognised the flaws in an OTT strategy.
Earlier this year, Craig Fenton moved the national union’s long-form content produced for NZR+ to a primary new home of YouTube after NZR’s app failed to draw the hundreds of thousands of registrations predicted.
The move was designed to draw more eyeballs for NZR’s exclusive content but comes at the price of reduced commercialisation, given YouTube takes the lion’s share of income generated by its platform.
Of course, it also raised questions about the initial OTT strategy and the cost that has come with it.
But now Fenton and New Zealand Rugby Commercial (NZRC) seem to be doubling down on that strategy, this time with live matches featuring the All Blacks XV.
Like NZR, Britain’s Women’s Super League (WSL) football competition has also been investing in an OTT platform in recent years, until it decided on a new media strategy this year.
In an experiment, it shifted some of the WSL’s match inventory from its owned-and-operated “FA Player” service to YouTube.
Historically, the best-ever recorded audience for a WSL match on the FA Player OTT system was 78,000.
In the first weekend of matches last month, one game attracted 200,000 viewers on YouTube.
London City Lionesses, a new club, had a 50,000-strong audience for their first game against Newcastle United.
How long before NZR’s live-match experiment also pivots to YouTube?
The horse has bolted – and the rider is YouTube.
It’s time New Zealand Rugby wised up to that and stopped wasting money.
Black Ferns winger’s cheeky call-out of the All Blacks
Bravo to Black Ferns winger Katelyn Vahaakolo for her cheeky call-out of the All Blacks during the current WXV tournament.
Vahaakolo used her Instagram account to highlight the presence of South Africa’s two-time World Cup-winning captain Siya Kolisi, who showed up in Cape Town last weekend to watch the Springboks women in their WXV2 clash against Australia.
Kolisi even promoted the match on his own Instagram channel beforehand and gave an inspiring media interview on why he was there.
The post led to Vahaakolo pointing out that Kolisi’s support included him wearing the women’s replica jersey while tagging her national male squadmates with a message: “@allblacks can’t wait to see you guys at some of our games!!!”
That’s a bit hard with the Black Ferns currently in Canada – but you can’t argue with the sentiment.
More power to you, Katelyn.
Team of the Week
Hawke’s Bay Rugby Union: 25 years of turning a profit when all around them are hemorrhaging money. The union was also one of the few who invested the $1m it received in Silver Lake disbursements, reaping a tidy $78,000 annually to reinvest into its clubs.
Penrith Panthers: Five NRL grand final appearances in a row and four wins on the trot. The Ivan and Nathan Cleary-led juggernaut is officially the best rugby league team of the modern era after last Sunday night’s triumph over Melbourne. Which reminds me of what could have been for the Warriors...
Ellie Killdunne: The electric-haired outside back for England’s all-conquering Red Roses has taken Portia Woodman’s mantle as the best women’s rugby player in the world. Killdunne, player of the tournament in this year’s Six Nations and leading test try-scorer in 2024, made the Black Ferns’ lives a misery in the WXV 1 championship.
LeBron and Bronny James: The first father-and-son combination to play on the same NBA team with “son of” making his debut alongside Dad when the Los Angeles Lakers played the Phoenix Suns in a pre-season game.
