My 2 cents for what it is worth.
Rugby in Australia cannot fund itself. The interest is simply not there because it is a third string game in a country with a smallish population. Rugby league has first pick of the majority of talent because of the support and money it can offer the elite talent. The grassroots game suffer because of this greater interest in league.
The key thing to note is that Australia is the only place in the rugby playing world where union is not the primary rugby game so lacks access to the best rugby talent. The Wallabies are the prime source of revenue for Australian Rugby.
The Australian rugby market place has a limited revenue making capabilities unless we can change the level of interest in the game from the public. This is highly unlikely as we are not going to unseat League and AFL as the principal winter sports.
The structure of the Super Rugby competition also makes it's playing model far more expensive than AFL and Rugby League.
The Super Rugby sides and Rugby Australia cannot compete with the financial drawing power of Europe or Japan as the funds just do not exist in this market.
So what do we do?
Well, there are no magic bullets that can raise the revenue of the game in Australia unless some major benefactor decides that he is happy to burn money on behalf of rugby in this country. Private equity partners are not the answer they will just be a sugar hit and will expect Rugby to start making a return on investment in a very short period of time and expect that return to grow.
Given revenue won't be easily lifted the only thing you can do from a business perspective is to lower costs to make the game sustainable. Now, I love the Super Rugby competition with games against New Zealand sides but the current model is just burning money which Rugby Australia do not have.
I don't know that the professional game in Australia can survive, the game can but not in it's current form. Our population will only support professional sports at the pointy end of the landscape and there is simply not enough room for the also rans which unfortunately includes Rugby. Maybe we need to embrace the fact that the game as a non-professional has a chance of surviving long term but the current professional version of the sport is doomed. Let the best players go overseas to earn as much as they can. Pick the Wallaby squad from players from anywhere. Get rid of the travel and high salaries for the domestic competition and reign in the cost bleeding that is going on with the game.
This is a very negative outlook I know but I fear it might be the realistic one.
Willfully relegating rugby to non professional status in Australia is a bad idea. Call me crazy but trying the utmost to avoid the death of our sport seems a reasonable goal to have (realistic? not sure, but fuck knows we should try).
That said, your points about Australian Rugby's unique commercial realities are valid. So, I therefore propose the following (1st draft posted on the NRC thread).
What if we ran a two tiered model for the pro game which seeks to take all the elements of our rugby landscape and use them for their best fit purpose (and minimising their downsides).
1. Our Super Rugby participation should be kind of like a champions league type thing for us. We consolidate our participation to 3 teams max (called by their franchise names, centrally controlled by RA) and have our best players playing in it with each other against NZ teams, Drua, Moana Pasifika.
- Helps to reduce costs a bit and should improve our cohesion (and hopefully performance) for a lot of our top players to best prepare them for international duty.
- This runs from Feb-mid June at a sprint (round robin, 4-6 teams finals series).
- Domestic club rugby competitions (which remain amateur in scope) run parallel to it (might start a couple weeks earlier and finish a week or two later depending on the number of teams and local needs, but should be broadly similar).
2. The Wallabies then assemble for the international season to start with the inbound tour while the rest of the pro players have a brief break/conditioning period . The international season would then flow through inbound tour (July), rugby championship (Aug/Sep/Oct) and spring tours (Nov).
- Parallel to this you run the equivalent of Super Rugby AU (but call it the Asia-Pacific provincial championship) with 5 Aussie teams (called by their state names, not franchise. Encourage tribalism) + Fiji and a hopefully a Japanese side. which is semi (or part time) professional rugby (i.e at lower salaries than Super Rugby 65-100k).
- Home and away round robin + 4 teams finals series.
- Critically, this competition
cannot clash with Japan League One (which is December to Feb) or to a lesser degree MLR (which is Feb-July), because if experienced players who don't crack super rugby squads in a given year (as it will be more difficult) want to earn some yen or USD rather than play club rugby but still put their hands up for domestic pro rugby later on
we want them to have this opportunity. These players can remain full time pros, but still have the option to play in Australia and compete for national recognition and the following years Super Rugby squads by participating at this time of the year. There are many many players in NZ's NPC which do this and it's a significant factor in creating their depth which flows through to Super Rugby (these players earn 30-50k from their NPC side, then 70-120k from a Japanese club or similar).
The calendar looks like
Late Nov (or Late Oct for domestic players) to early Jan = Off season
Jan-Mid Feb = Pre-season
Mid Feb - Mid June = Super Rugby + club rugby
End of June to mid July = Inbound Tour + 2nd pre-season for non Wallabies
End of July to end of October = Rugby Championship + Asia-Pacific provincial championship
November = Spring tours
We can therefore use all the currently competing elements in our game for their best fit purpose to support high performance i.e club rugby for developing amateurs and young players, Super Rugby to battle harden our top players for Wallabies duties, Asia-Pacific for grooming early pros or fringe internationals to take the next step and the fringe professional comps (Japan League One) to allow the players who haven't cracked it as a regular Wallaby yet keep getting paid more that we can expect to offer them for the domestic comp alone (allow us to leverage the current relationships e.g QLD-Panasonic, Melbourne-Kintetsu, ?Brumbies-Suntory.)