Cape Town — Soccer is regarded as the most popular sport in the world, with an estimated four billion fans.
There are many reasons for this, which include the actual easy-to-understand laws of the game, and the simple nature of the sport — you could roll up a few plastic bags into a ball to play, and it’s just about kicking it around and into the opponents’ net.
That has resulted in most global companies investing in the sport, with vast sums of money.
Contrast that to rugby, which is a complex game where the laws are difficult to understand, and which comes from an amateur era ruled by committees. There are only 20 teams at the 2023 Rugby World Cup, compared to 32 for this year’s Fifa World Cup, which will expand to 48 for the 2026 tournament.
Last week’s announcement of Qatar Airways as a sponsor of the United Rugby Championship and Champions and Challenge Cups was a major boost to the sport, as it indicated that a major business wanted to get involved.
But one of the main issues holding the oval-ball game back is a lack of a global calendar. In soccer, almost every major league ties in with the European season of August to May, whereas rugby still sees itself as a winter sport.
South Africa opted to move their franchises to Europe last year after being virtually kicked out of Super Rugby by New Zealand, and it has paid off handsomely, with the Stormers winning the URC and the Bulls being finalists.
But the Springboks are still playing in the southern-hemisphere Rugby Championship with New Zealand, Australia and Argentina, which has resulted in SA players playing virtually all-year round.
“We need a global calendar. Otherwise we will always have this confusion. Players from Europe here at the end of the season, and they are out of sync. So, that discussion is also taking place (this week) in South Africa (where the Rugby World Cup Sevens takes place),” SA Rugby president Mark Alexander said at the Qatar Airways announcement in Doha.
“We have said it so many times, that we are about to get there in the meeting, and then somebody throws a spanner in the works. We need the league representatives in that meeting. You need everybody in the room, and then we will find a way. There needs to be compromise from everyone.
“We would love to start that in 2026 — it would just be better for the players, it would be better for rugby and it would be a better product … it would be a more meaningful competition.
“We need to have a second-tier, as there are a lot of countries knocking on the door, like Georgia, Romania, Tonga, Samoa, Chile, Uruguay … there are a lot of good countries. USA, maybe Namibia.
“We used to get the inbound tours to South Africa in July, and a lot of players don’t come because they are either rested or injured. Then it’s meaningless for us — then we might as well not have the game. We won’t fill the stadium because they announce in the paper, ‘These are the guys who have been rested’.
“The spectators won’t go to the field. And then we play England in November, where they are playing with all their players, and our players playing in the English league are not available. Yet, if you lose that game, your ranking and all that (is affected).”
One of the big talking points in that regard is whether the Boks will feature in the Six Nations in future. How and when that happens is unclear, but Alexander feels that SA’s involvement in the Rugby Championship is coming to a close.
“We would love to move north eventually, but we’ve got contracts with the (Rugby) Championship, and we will honour those contracts – we will not do exactly the same as the partners did, who dropped us,” he said.
“And it might not even be Six Nations … it might be another competition that we are interested in, and I am not saying much as there are moving parts in World Rugby currently.
“The mix currently works for us, but I am not too sure how long it will work. Players talk with their feet. If they find it is too hard to do this – being married and stuff – they move. That is why we have almost 400 players in Europe, and 50 alone in Russia.
“We haven’t firmly asked them (to join the Six Nations) … we will see how things go. We are playing in the URC and Heineken Cup, and let’s see how that goes. Only time can tell.
“Are we in the right competition? Are we doing the right thing? It must always make business sense. Currently, playing in the (Rugby) Championship, the business side of it doesn’t tally up: we are not getting enough money out of there.”
Talking about money, Alexander stated that SA Rugby’s private equity was in the final stages, and the governing body hopes to conclude the deal before the end of 2022.
After slashing R1.2billion from their budget during the Covid-19 lockdown, SA Rugby reported just a small surplus for the year of R8.9million at their AGM in April, while revenue increased by 80% on 2020, going up from R710m to R1.283 billion, which almost took it back to pre-Covid levels (R1.296b in 2019).
So, the private equity deal with CVC – who are already involved with the Six Nations, United Rugby Championship and the English Premiership – will finally give SA Rugby a real opportunity to grow the sport locally.
“It will be a very different SA Rugby. The landscape will change. We’ve got the Eastern Cape, with a player base that you can’t believe. But the socio-economic issues in that region alone is a problem,” Alexander said.
“Most of those kids go to school without a decent meal. You can see them play up until the age of 15, but after 15, you need to have access to nutrition and a gym. The thing about a gym is that you can run for days, and that’s good for running a marathon.
“But in rugby, you need to build mass. You can look at the difference of Lukhanyo Am and Makazole Mapimpi. When we had those four academies (in the Western and Eastern Cape), it wasn’t brick-and-mortar. We had a nutritionist provide nutrition to the players, and we had access to a gym and a little bit of a biokineticist.
“You can look at the difference that has made to a hell of a lot of players. We have 156 of them playing professional rugby locally and abroad. That is the kind of thing we want to get into. There is so much untapped talent.”
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