I must look sceptical. “It’s a fantastic opportunity!” he says. “But it’s going to take time to fix. And it’s not going to be easy.”
Almost everyone has a different take on why Australian rugby is broken. Some blame the referees;others blame the rules;it’s AFL’s fault,or rugby league’s. It’s stupid coaches,overpaid players,inept leadership. When I ask Eric Tweedale what he thinks the problem is,he says it all began when the game went professional,which seems as good a place to start as any.
According to legend,rugby began in 1823,at Rugby School in England. For most of its history,it was staunchly amateur. But successive World Cups,in 1987,1991 and 1995,saw the game explode in popularity,increasing the demands on players,who insisted on being paid. In 1995,the three most powerful southern hemisphere rugby unions,New Zealand,South Africa and Australia,formed a body called SANZAR,to oversee Super Rugby and the Tri Nations. SANZAR approached Rupert Murdoch,who paid $US555 million over 10 years for the rights to broadcast the games on his nascent cable network,Foxtel. Sensing the momentum,the world’s governing body,the International Rugby Board,declared the game professional in 1995.
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Australia’s cut of the broadcast rights was $35 million a year. Despite this,the game’s peak body,then called Australian Rugby Union,remained an amateur outfit,with no fewer than 21 committees overseeing everything from finances to player selection. The committees were run by honoraries,whose positions as such gave them considerable status within the rugby community,not to mention good parking and the best seats at games. When former NSW State Bank chief John O’Neill became CEO of the ARU in 1995,he set about abolishing the committees outright,seeding a bitter antipathy from the honoraries,or the “blazer brigade” as he called them,that would bedevil rugby for years to come.
O’Neill didn’t want for confidence. (In his 2007 book,It’s Only a Game,he writes of becoming “quite depressed” to discover how “over-qualified” he was for the job.) But there was no doubting his ability. He broadened the game’s appeal,boosted participation,and presided over the hugely successful 2003 World Cup in Australia which left the ARU with a $45 million profit. He also attempted to centralise authority and take power away from the states,particularly NSW and Queensland,whose squabbling had hobbled the game for years. “They didn’t like that,” he tells me. “They thought I was too influential.”
After the 2003 World Cup,O’Neill still had a year on his contract,and intended to stay until 2007. But his enemies had other ideas. In late 2003,O’Neill,then acknowledged as one of the country’s finest sports administrators,was pushed out. Rugby writer Peter Jenkins wrote that O’Neill’s “only crime was being high-profile,and of daring to challenge his directors”. Australian rugby had begun a long tradition of shooting itself in the foot.
O’Neill and his deputy Matt Carroll had wanted to put the $45 million World Cup windfall in a trust. “The idea was that it’d be a future fund,” says Carroll,who is now CEO of the Australian Olympic Committee. “If they’d invested that money back then,it’d probably be worth $100 million now and be producing a yearly income for rugby.”
But they didn’t. Instead,the money was given to the state unions and ploughed into a new competition called the Australian Rugby Championship (ARC),featuring eight teams from around the country. The ARC,which was announced in mid-2006 by then CEO,Gary Flowers,was intended as a pathway from the club system to Super Rugby. But the model was flawed from the outset. The teams had no history and no local followings. It was expensive and attracted almost no sponsorship. It also detracted from the established club scenes in Sydney and Brisbane,angering the game’s grassroots. By the end of the first season,the ARC had lost $4.7 million,with forecast losses of $8 million by the end of 2008.
At the same time,the ARU was struggling with inflated player salaries. When rugby went professional in 1995,Murdoch had faced competition from rugby league,which had attempted to sign up most of rugby’s best players. At the same time,fellow media mogul Kerry Packer was backing a rival competition called World Rugby Corporation. Players were in demand,and in order to win,Murdoch was forced to pay top dollar. Salaries skyrocketed,and were pushed even higher thanks to competition from cashed-up clubs in the northern hemisphere,some of which had billionaire owners.
“In comparison to other sports,rugby players were getting a higher proportion of the revenues,” says management consultant Michael Crawford,who has advised the ARU for 20 years. “This left less money for development and created further anger at the community level.”
Flowers stood down in 2007,opening the way for O’Neill and Carroll to return. They immediately scrapped the ARC. But the performance of the Wallabies,the financial engine of Australian rugby,was going from bad to worse. In 2009,Australia lost four matches to the All Blacks,two to the Springboks,and one to Scotland. Super Rugby was also faltering. The three Australian teams,the ACT Brumbies,the NSW Waratahs and the Queensland Reds,had all at one time or another enjoyed considerable success. In 2006,a fourth Australian team,the Perth-based Western Force,was added to the competition,followed by a fifth team,the Melbourne Rebels,in 2011. The idea was to give the game a national footprint and generate more broadcast dollars.
But it soon became apparent that Australia didn’t have enough talent to go around. According to a2017 Senate standing committee report into the future of Australian rugby,the expansion from three to four to five teams saw a step down in performance,from Australian sides winning 60 per cent of their games to 50 per cent to 40 per cent. When the teams began to go broke,their owners – the state unions – ran to the ARU for a handout. By the end of 2011,the national body was funding the Super Rugby outfits to the tune of $25 million a year.
The obvious answer was private ownership. “In the US and Europe,90 per cent of professional sporting clubs are privately owned and have strong business models,” says Colin Smith,director of the advisory firm,Global Media and Sports. “And that’s because they focus on the profit motive.”
“The parochialism and backward thinking are crippling rugby. It’s a self-made destruction.”
In 2008,Smith was charged by the ARU with getting the state unions to consider private ownership. But according to Smith,“the general reaction[from the states] was,‘Under no circumstances’.” A board member of one union told Smith that he didn’t want to sell his Super Rugby team because he might miss out on free tickets to the games. “The thinking[was] incredibly myopic,” says Smith. “It just shows a complete lack of understanding of how the business of sports works.”
Smith has worked in sports for 30 years. There is virtually no market that he has not run the ruler over,no major club that he has not scrutinised. But rugby is special to him. “The first game I attended was in the early ’90s at Twickenham between England and the Barbarians. It was absolutely scintillating,and I was hooked.” But he now despairs for the game in Australia. “The parochialism and backward thinking are crippling rugby. It’s a self-made destruction.”
Rugby is played in more than 120 countries,with 9.6 million registered players worldwide. Outside Australia,the game is booming:the 2019 Rugby World Cup,held in Japan,drew a total broadcast audience of 857 million over six weeks. (When Japan played Scotland,54.8 million people in Japan watched it on television,nearly half the population.) Such events showcase the lore and legend of each national team,together with their signature playing styles:the mercurial French,the doughty Scots,the flamboyant Fijians,and the Welsh,whose scrum could push down mountains.
The Wallabies used to be famous for “running rugby”,a swaggering brand of free-flowing football made famous by the Ella brothers and David Campese,among others. Now,not so much. Indeed,the saddest thing a rugby fan can hear is that the game in Australia has become boring. Observers blame the referees,who have become increasingly pedantic. But the complexity of the rules is also a problem,especially compared to rugby league or AFL.
For years,rugby administrators have tinkered with the laws to make the game a better spectacle,but it’s a slow process. “Rugby is a global game,” says Brett Robinson,former Wallaby and current member of the World Rugby Council,which oversees laws,regulations and player welfare. “League and AFL are essentially domestic sports. It’s easy for them to make rule changes,but we have to influence over 100 nations to make changes that can be applied across the world and ultimately at a World Cup every four years.”
Rugby connoisseurs claim the complexity of the game is part of its beauty;that rugby is chess to rugby league’s checkers. But sometimes checkers is all a sports fan has time for. This is especially true in Australia,which has no less than four football codes – league,union,AFL and soccer – all competing for hearts and minds. And in an era when sport has become mass entertainment,being dull is death.
Rugby connoisseurs claim the complexity of the game is part of its beauty;that rugby is chess to rugby league’s checkers.
Growing rugby’s fan base is essential. One way of doing that is by winning games;the other is to create new audiences. “To me,the biggest wasted opportunity has been the failure to bring more people outside the narrow culture of rugby into the sport,” says James Curran,a Sydney University history professor who is writing a book about David Campese. “Rugby officialdom hasn’t been able to move beyond those who were supporting the game in the 1970s.”
Most of rugby’s elite players are still drawn from a small number of private schools in Sydney and Brisbane. The same goes for the game’s leadership,at both national and state levels,an inordinate number of whom come from Sydney’s most exclusive private schools,including Newington,Scots or St Joseph’s. One school in particular,Shore,figures prominently.
No fewer than eight recent RA and NSWRU office holders are Shore old boys,including current chairman,Hamish McLennan,recently departed CEO Rob Clarke and director Phil Waugh.
When the ARU went looking for a new CEO in 2012,it conducted what it described as a worldwide search before turning up Shore old boy Bill Pulver,in Sydney’s affluent harbourside suburb of Mosman. (Living,as it happened,right next door to ARU director John Eales). Pulver received a ringing endorsement from then ARU chairman,Michael Hawker,another Shore old boy who had played rugby with Pulver in the school’s First XV some 35 years earlier. “The whole thing is so incestuous,” says Colin Smith. “It’s not good for the game.”
It also reflects a fundamental disconnect to the game’s grassroots,which attracts a far broader demographic. “Many of our players are scaffolders or concreters,” says Craig Moran,general manager of Western Sydney Two Blues rugby club,in Parramatta. “They’re not rich people.”
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Founded in 1879,Two Blues is a Shute Shield stalwart. The club is operated almost entirely by volunteers,including Dennis “Muncher” Garlick,the 71-year-old waterboy,and the helpers who run the canteen,which provides much of the club’s revenue. But clubs like Moran’s have over the years been variously ignored or held in contempt by the ARU. In 2014,when the ARU was facing insolvency,Pulver requested the clubs forgo their annual $100,000 grants. Two years later,when the clubs requested the grants be reinstated,Pulver refused,reportedly saying he didn’t want them to “piss it up the wall”. (Pulver declined to take part in this story.)
State administrators have been equally out of touch. For decades the NSWRU has appointed a development officer for Shute Shield clubs,including Two Blues. But,according to Moran,it never understood the cultural dimension of the job. “Western Sydney has a large Islander population but we didn’t have any development officers who were Islanders. Development officers have to understand the social conditions. You can’t just send someone from Manly to be a DO in Merrylands.”
Moran says the game is “cannibalising itself”. Recent years have seen lavish pre-season launches at exclusive nightclubs;catered corporate events and runaway overstaffing. Last year it emerged that RA had spent $19 million on corporate costs in2019,and just $4.3 million on community rugby,and was employing more than 200 people.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Scott Allen,who was appointed assistant coach to the women’s national rugby team,the Wallaroos,in 2016. “I remember walking into ARU headquarters on my first day and there were people and desks everywhere. And I thought,‘What the f… are all these people doing?’ ”
Pulver had some wins,including a $285 million,five-year broadcast deal with Foxtel. But he also oversaw the disastrous axing of the Western Force Super Rugby team in 2017. The decision enraged Force fans,and saw the West Australian premier threaten to sue the ARU. Thousands of people protested in Perth,led by mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest.
“The process was a charade,” Forrest tells me. “It was shocking leadership and governance.” Former Wallaby Nathan Sharpe described the decisionon Twitter as “the biggest mistake the ARU could have made”. The episode effectively ended Pulver’s term. He quit,in August 2017,pocketing a $300,000 bonus on his way out the door.
Not all of rugby’s woesare self-inflicted. You can’t blame administrators for time zone differences,which mean that games involving Australian teams overseas are often broadcast here at 3am or 4am. It’s also hard for Australia to compete with the financial might of the northern hemisphere unions,which regularly poach our best players. Then there’s Israel Folau,the star Wallaby whose homophobic social media posts wound up costing RAmillions of dollars in legal fees and saw the game ensnared in a high-profile debate over free speech that it could not win.
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Yet infighting and opportunism continue to poison the game. Last year saw a clumsy attempt to overthrow the RA board,when 11 former Wallaby captains wrote anopen letter accusing the game’s leadership,headed by CEO Raelene Castle,of mismanagement. Castle,who is from New Zealand,had taken over from Pulver in 2017,and was wrestling with the financial impact of COVID. At the same time,she had put the broadcast rights out to tender,snubbing long-time partner Foxtel. Castle’s decision would eventually deliver a huge win for rugby,opening the way for a $100 million deal with Nine,part of which involved a free-to-air component.
But at the time Foxtel was furious. Castle found herself under attack from journalists at News Corp (Foxtel’s majority owner). Then came the captains’ letter,the public faces of which were Nick Farr Jones and former Foxtel commentator Phil Kearns. The letter was regarded by many as baldly self-serving of Kearns,who had lost out to Castle for the CEO’s job two years before. Kearns denies this.
“No one from Foxtel ever rang me and said they wanted me to run for CEO,” he tells me. “[And there] was never any talk by the captains explicitly of me going into the CEO role.” It was telling,however,that Kearns and the others had not intervened when the game faced insolvency under Pulver. “In any case,” says Sam Bruce,rugby writer at ESPN,“if they really wanted to help the game,there was nothing stopping them from calling Castle and saying,‘How can I help?’ ”
“The whole episode painted a really ugly picture for the game right when what it needed most was positivity and cohesion.”
As far as Bruce is concerned,the coup was just another power play. “Castle was an outsider,” he says. “She was a Kiwi,a woman,and she didn’t live in Mosman. Her appointment caught rugby’s old boys’ establishment off guard. They thought they were losing control.” Castle resigned in April 2020,her decision prompted by what the then chairman Paul McLean described as a campaign of “abhorrent” bullying,both online and from vested interests in the media. Says Bruce:“The whole episode painted a really ugly picture for the game right when what it needed most was positivity and cohesion.”
In 2012,John O’Neill put together a presentation using a report by US management guru Jim Collins. Collins outlines five key stages of an organisation’s collapse,including Inaction,Crisis and Dissolution. On the last page O’Neill had written:“Where is Australian rugby?” One could ask the same question now.
A commentator on the sports websiteThe Roar suggests the game is facing a “multi-generational battle” to restore its fortunes. AGreenandGoldRugby.com reader proposed that rugby go amateur again. Peter FitzSimons,meanwhile,believes the game’s worst days are behind it. “We have crossed the Valley of Death and are slowly starting to climb to the other side.”
Hamish McLennan is similarly upbeat. “We’ve got some great young players coming through[at the elite level],” he says,when we meet at RA’s Moore Park HQ. “And there’s been a lot of good work reconnecting with the grassroots.” McLennan has stopped the soap opera at head office,and established an advisory board to bid for the 2027 World Cup (Phil Kearns is the executive director). “That’s the light on the hill,” nods McLennan. “We stand a pretty good chance of getting that.”
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Private equity is also in the picture. Luxembourg based CVC Capital Partners has invested $1.2 billion in European rugby,most recently buying a 14 per cent stake in the Six Nations,a yearly tournament between Scotland,Ireland,Wales,France,England and Italy. And American group Silver Lake Partners reportedly plans to put $NZ465 million into New Zealand rugby in return for a 15 per cent share of commercial rights. McLennan says a number of private equity outfits,including CVC,Bruin Capital and Silver Lake,are likewise looking at Australia.
It’s unclear what such an investment would look like. “Do we do it at a competition level,do we include the clubs or not,do we sell a part of the Wallabies or the whole organisation? We have to figure that out,” says McLennan.
There’s a lot at stake. “We’re on the ground floor of a complete rebuild for rugby. But it’s taken a long time getting to this point,and it’ll take quite a few years to get out of it.”
For those who believe the game is beyond salvation here,he points to Argentina,who beat the All Blacks for the first time ever last year. “That’s the thing with sport,” says McLennan. “You can come from nowhere and surprise people.”
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