Where to for Super Rugby?

[blues recovery]

I cannot agree with the word 'nothing' above.

This emerging monetary imbalance re player salaries, local tax breaks etc and this general trend line have been known about for years now.

If as part of a well and thoroughly conducted strategic analysis a major code manager like the ARU can clearly see 'we will have to allocate more funds to elite player salaries or we will see a collapse of our local product quality over X period and that collapse could imperil the entire code's viability so dealing with this issue is one of our highest priorities'....

..then, as responsible leaders, you must take pro-active, comprehensive action to fix that issue. It's called 'good executive leadership'.

There are numerous avenues to so fix in this case:

(a) you are utterly ruthless re priorities and cull all expenses that are not consistent with them and allocate the savings to code-saving priorities only. E.g, you cull 7s programs completely, you cull failing franchises that require large amounts of cash subsidy but induce no compensating incremental income or game success outcomes, zero corporate overheads that are not demonstrably productive or essential, etc.​

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(b) you ensure you have an extremely efficient Target Operating Model code-wide that culls all unnecessarily duplicated costs so that, amongst other key priorities, elite player income can be maximised not unduly constrained​

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(c) you ensure you build excellence in your carefully selected number of elite teams so that team success over time induces positive revenue flows (esp from major sponsors) that can in turn permit greater income allocation to, inter alia, elite player salaries​

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(d) you have well-managed and very well-coached franchises inducing consistent excellence in team cultures and therefore a greater likelihood of elite players wanted to stay and develop within those cultures (noting (c) and (d) cross-reinforce each other)​

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(e) fed by a reasonable quantity of operating and fan success as a code you skilfully play to regional governments to maximise grants and such like govt income by furthering these governments' desire for a range of well-profiled sports seated in their communities​

..and there are more I could list.

Our ARU and State RUs have effectively done, or achieved, 'none of the above'.

I could not agree more . The point I made about the guys overseas earlier was that moving them out of the country was a result of a specific plan of the ARU to reduce the cost of the professional player pool in the country to try to help dig the game financially out of the mire . What was not understood was that the third order consequence would be a dramatic drop in the quality of our Super teams and the then subsequent loss of sponsorship revenue , gate takings and membership revenue to such a point that any savings generated by reducing player costs is eaten up by the various revenue reductions . This is what is actually happening and is the result of a desperate bout of short term thinking .
All the arguments about the attractiveness of playing overseas are completely valid , but they from my experience have always been there at least for the last 10 years . I challenge anyone with the time or inclination to check how many Wallaby standard players were playing full time in Europe or Japan in 2012 compared to now .
I stand by my opinion that this is one of the fundamental issues in our demise

 

[WorkingClassRugger]

Why the Spirit, Rising and Vikings and not the Force, Rebels and Brumbies, as well as the Reds and Waratahs?

The Waratahs just have to have a cross town rival or two. They would be the perfect villain team in Sydney as they just can't shake their elitist image. And with a Sydney rivalry they could embrace it. I don't think it would take too long to build a passionate and tribal rivalry between the Waratahs and a 2nd Sydney team - or perhaps 2 other teams.

I was just using the NRC equivalents. They could keep the Super Rugby names. But if you were to do that it would require some tweaking on behalf of the Tahs and Reds. To Sydney and Brisbane.

If you were to go down that route then you'd be better served looking to just elevate the NRC. Which isn't a bad idea. This way the Reds would have an in state rival while the Tahs would have two in WS and NSWC.

 

[Omar Comin']

I was just using the NRC equivalents. They could keep the Super Rugby names. But if you were to do that it would require some tweaking on behalf of the Tahs and Reds. To Sydney and Brisbane.

I don't think they'd necessarily have to change to Sydney and Brisbane. It doesn't really make any difference in my mind. There could still be other teams within each state or each city either way.

 

[Slim 293]

They could just remove the 'NSW' or 'Qld' out of the name..........

Although that might confuse Wambers.

 

[kiap]

They could just remove the 'NSW' or 'Qld' out of the name....

True.

But there wouldn't even be a "need" to do that, to have more than one team in each state.

Everyone knows the teams are the Reds and Tahs anyway.

 

[Sauron]

Why not just make the NRC sides professional, and save the Reds and Waratahs names for a 'state of origin'?

 

[Braveheart81]

Why not just make the NRC sides professional, and save the Reds and Waratahs names for a 'state of origin'?

If this is becoming your new main competition that you hope drives support and revenue, you're sacrificing an awful lot if you forgo the two biggest team brands you have.

 

[Rebels3]

If this is becoming your new main competition that you hope drives support and revenue, you're sacrificing an awful lot if you forgo the two biggest team brands you have.

Agreed, people like to see brands they know. You just don't throw away all that history.

In fact I am still a proponent that our nrc should be the 5 franchises + Fiji for a 10week competition (5home 5away). No new entities, extra content so franchises can engage with fans and opportunity for franchises to take games to different areas. Eg. Reds v tahs on the Gold Coast, or tahs v Fiji in western Sydney.

 

[dru]

If this is becoming your new main competition that you hope drives support and revenue, you're sacrificing an awful lot if you forgo the two biggest team brands you have.

Part of the problem here is that very few are proving to value those brands to that extent.

Reds players get dispursed through the qld teams; Qld Reds return in SOO end season.

Waratah players get dispursed through 3 or 4 SS teams, determined by the SRU as being promoted. Then return for a Waratahs SOO.

I'd put ACT, Vic and WA players into a third SOO team. Like Qld in the early days of SOO, let the representation rules favour them to get the juices running with our "smaller" brother.

The Brand value is now rebuilt, let's start seeing full houses for the State teams. And build the hoopla forward to the WBs.

But do it on the back of true domestic comp with a true national footprint.

 

[Braveheart81]

Part of the problem here is that very few are proving to value those brands to that extent.

It's still over 10k people each year that are signing up as paying members.

If you effectively dissolved that membership base I think you would lose a huge number who don't become a member of a new side.

It would be a huge risk to take and I don't think a wise one.

 

[dru]

It's still over 10k people each year that are signing up as paying members.

If you effectively dissolved that membership base I think you would lose a huge number who don't become a member of a new side.

It would be a huge risk to take and I don't think a wise one.

In Sydney thats 10,000 between 4 teams. In my plan anyway. With you'd hope full house at State rep time. Plus we pick up the tribalism that goes with the traditional SS teams who come through.

There are plenty of risks going domestic. Add this to this list.

There are plenty of risks in where the ARU seem to be taking us as well.

 

[Braveheart81]

In Sydney thats 10,000 between 4 teams. In my plan anyway. With you'd hope full house at State rep time. Plus we pick up the tribalism that goes with the traditional SS teams who come through.

There are plenty of risks going domestic. Add this to this list.

There are plenty of risks in where the ARU seem to be taking us as well.

If you're trying to leverage off Shute Shield tribalism, you also lose all the fans who follow a different team that is no longer part of it.

Does the tribalism of Shute Shield where you pay $15 for entry translate into a professional competition where entrance prices need to be substantially higher?

If you make the cut the number of games for the team that currently has all the paying members to a couple of home games a season, how do you recoup all the lost membership income?

Surely you need to try and mitigate your risks rather than just say there are lots of them and keep ploughing ahead.

 

[Quick Hands]

IMO, a good, thoughtful article by Russ Tulloch in The Australian, May 9:

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/spo...s/news-story/5886dd69d60a69ff899fbced1a51a779

An extract:

When rugby became professional, the then CEO John O’Neill dismantled and abandoned all the existing grassroots programs. The ARU’s staff numbers multiplied. A High Performance Unit was created and the approach was to simply focus on the ‘‘star performers’’ via the talent identification programs in schools. ​

The problem was it disenfranchised many highly talented players, who for whatever reason, were missed by the opaque selection process. Gaining a contract became the goal as opposed to joining a club and playing for a team.​

It is interesting to note that most of the players in the winning 1999 RWC had come from the amateur programs and were coached by people from the Clark/Marks/O’Shea program that was swiftly dismantled by O’Neill. Both Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones were developed under this program.​

The ARU policy under O’Neill was ‘‘if the Wallabies are going well, everything else will follow’’. Yet there was only so long that they could live off the fruits of the clubs’ hard labour. As Alan Jones, former Wallabies coach commented: “It was like building a house starting with the roof.” Without strong foundations, things would inevitably come crashing down — and guess what? That’s happening now.​

So thanks to the top-down approach, we have lost our strong base of players and we’re faced with the dilemma of having to cut a Super rugby team.​

My second reason for believing rugby still has further to fall is due to the mismanagement of the ARU by the CEO and board. There seems to be a secret election process to the ARU board designed to keep the top-end of town in control. The current board, in fact the boards over the professional era, seem to have contained some prominent people but none have been able to get in and do the hard yards necessary to turn the future of the game around.​

Yes, yes, yes and a thousand times yes.

Don't know who Russ Tulloch is, but this is what many of us having been saying for 15 years and have constantly dismissed as dinosaurs and/or naysayers.

Well done Mr Tulloch

 

[Quick Hands]

I'm surprised that no one here has as yet picked up the clear inferences for Australian rugby of M Lynagh's very complimentary remarks above re the rapidly emerging quality of the England Premier Clubs' developmental, player support and skills improvement systems. He's highly qualified to make such assessments.

When combined with the obvious, ongoing degradation of the equivalent Australian rugby systems and the regularity of the humiliating w-l ratios of our professional teams here in front of shrinking crowds, the motivation for our best players to leave Australia will be decreasingly about just money, but increasingly about also joining English teams to make them better players (thus enhancing their longevity as players or earning power or both) and to get into a winning side (or a side more credible in winning regularly than ours).

The meaning of 'vicious circles'; negative trends become exponentially worse when the conditions driving them are exacerbated and/or new conditions arrive that even further aggravate them.

One of the many reasons the mooted 'coaches' crisis summit' is a bad joke.

We need fresh, innovative, radical, and genuinely strategic perspectives (like many of the examples given in this thread). And certainly some from the best game strategising sources outside Australia so's to counter our obviously worn-out biases that have in part got us into this 'crisis'.

Instead we believe that assembling our hapless group of failed or failing Super coaches and adding a bit of early 1990s-dated Aussie expertise will come up with good-enough answers that the ARU's HPU (forgive the acronymic oxymoron) says will 'fix our problems reasonably quickly'.

(My personal favourite in this context being when the new QRU CEO stated 'we don't want any hand grenade throwers though (in the summit)' when in truth that is exactly what we need.)

Absolutely RH, I've made the point a number of times on various threads how well the RFU and rugby en England are going.

Of course, as we know, rugby in Australia is so unique that we can't learn anything from anyone.

 

[Quick Hands]

If this is becoming your new main competition that you hope drives support and revenue, you're sacrificing an awful lot if you forgo the two biggest team brands you have.

Alas, those two biggest team brands are becoming irrelevant in the Australian sporting landscape.

 

[Brumby Runner]

Mate, you totally lost me when you blame Australian rugby for losing players to countries whose salaries dwarf ours.


Is that not the biggest factor, that disparity? Wearing the Wallabies jersey has some value, but sorry to say, not much in dollar terms.


I know that if I were a kid with a professional future, I would be looking at the money first, and the glory second. That is the way the young think these days, as far as i can see.

The whole sorry situation was exacerbated when Cheika introduced the 60 test rule. One of the apparent reasons the ABs continue to keep their experienced players at home is that they know if they go off shore they will not be selected for the ABs.

 

[Braveheart81]

Alas, those two biggest team brands are becoming irrelevant in the Australian sporting landscape.

Replacing them with non-existent brands hardly seems the way forward though.

 

[Sauron]

People said the same thing about the bigger NSL sides (granted, none of their brands were nearly as popular as the Supe sides)

 

[Quick Hands]

Replacing them with non-existent brands hardly seems the way forward though.

The Rays and the Rams have both made a good start to being recognised, although they still have a way to go. Being part of a season long competition would certainly help.

Melbourne Storm, NQ Cowboys, WC Eagles, GWS Giants and all the BBL franchises have all started as non-existant brands. It's not as novel as one might think.

 

[Sauron]

The Rays and the Rams have both made a good start to being recognised, although they still have a way to go. Being part of a season long competition would certainly help.

Melbourne Storm, NQ Cowboys, WC Eagles, GWS Giants and all the BBL franchises have all started as non-existant brands. It's not as novel as one might think.

Smaller grounds are starting to get redeveloped around the place as well (or at least there's talk of it). Money's still set aside for an upgrade of Brookvale Oval, which would be perfect for the Rays, Ballymore will get an upgrade if that new Brisbane soccer team gets the green light, the new stadium at Parra looks good- the only challenge is the Country sides. If you dropped them and added Fiji and another team (not sure where from though- weren't Adelaide after an NRC side?), you'd have a good little comp.