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New Zealand Rugby should treat Beauden Barrett like a French footballer
I see France have made the Fifa World Cup final again.
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France boasts a largely developmental professional league, featuring one massive club – backed by the government of Qatar – and not a lot else.
What players France produces, predominantly play in leagues in England, Italy, Spain and Germany.
France are now vying for back-to-back Fifa World Cup titles, a feat last achieved by Brazil in 1958 and 1962.
They’re not alone, of course. Brazil is another example of a footballing superpower whose elite players are involved in leagues elsewhere.
I could go on.
The point is that, in real professional sport, players go where the money and the competition is. They’re not forced to stay at home by their national bodies.
Players go with everyone’s blessing and are picked for international duty if they’re good enough.
Maybe they’re playing their club football in England. Maybe it’s Belgium or the Netherlands. Sometimes teams such as Brazil will even select someone out of China.
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If you’re an elite player, then the standard of the league you play in should be irrelevant.
All of which brings me to Beauden Barrett and New Zealand Rugby.
Barrett would like to play overseas and still be eligible to play for the All Blacks. New Zealand Rugby (NZR) have said no.
Now there’s a few strands to the argument, but let’s deal with Super Rugby first.
That competition is a pale imitation of its former self because of NZR. They’ve expanded and contracted, fallen out with South Africa and Australia, rested All Blacks wherever possible and generally undermined the integrity of the competition at every turn.
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I read and hear that the floodgates would open if Barrett left. That fellow All Blacks would follow suit and Super Rugby would be irrevocably weakened.
And my counters to that are a) who cares, it’s been happening for years. And b) the French football team.
Rugby in New Zealand is struggling financially because of our Nanny State model. We don’t have professionalism, we have a state-run competition.
Like the old USSR and Cuba, we insist our best rugby players stay home. We’ll have no defectors here, thanks.
Well, NZR needs money and needs deals with Silver Lake and the like because they keep trying to meet the player wage market. Why bother? Why not get Toulon or Toshiba to do the heavy lifting instead?
So what if Super Rugby goes down the gurgler or becomes solely developmental. We’ve already given up on provincial and club rugby, so would anyone actually mourn the passing of Super as well?
We also have this idea that playing in France or Japan is no good for your rugby. Maybe.
But what about treating players like men? What about appealing to their sense of professionalism?
Do we honestly believe that Barrett – without having NZR micro-manage his life – would get fat and out of form by playing overseas? And so what if he did? We wouldn’t be the ones paying him a million dollars anymore and would be under no obligation to pick him.
Players would get match fees and per diems while in All Blacks camp, but their wages would be someone else’s problem.
That’s professional sport and that’s surely the route we’ll eventually go down.
We can’t keep players here forever and frankly nor should we try.
Imagine if our focus suddenly turned to development, rather than the All Blacks. If we coached from the bottom up and gladly sent our best players to glamorous clubs overseas.
There’d still be money to be made from test rugby, but without a lot of the hassle and compromise that comes from trying to run high-performance professional rugby in a tiny market.
It’s not conceding defeat, it’s not giving up, it’s simply following the long-established and successful example set by football.
I think its not right to compare with football. that is something I see a lot of folks trying to compare rugby with football. You simply cannot compare the 2 because football particularly French football is very sustainable because of the sheer amount of fans it has not only within France but internationally particularly in Africa.
The moment Super Rugby starts to lose its All Blacks then you're leaving yourself vulnerable for NRL to build deeper roots in NZ. Future stars of the calibre of Richie Mo'unga will not be playing professionally in European rugby but will instead be playing rugby league in the NRL. As super rugby loses its all blacks what will end up happening is a lot more younger kids will gravitate more towards the NRL because of its star power and its closer ties to NZ. In fact right this moment NRL teams have a much stronger connection to the NZ public than professional European and Japanese rugby clubs. Its going to be tough future for NZ rugby
Good article. Whether these international clubs would ‘release’ our players is another story.
It would be the end of professional rugby in New Zealand.
Does it NEED to be professional to produce these players?
Agree that our players should be permitted to play wherever they choose. Their standard of play would improve immensely by playing against TOP rugby teams/players, instead of the “same old, same old “ like happens now. Look what happens when the AB’s go North, they struggle against different styles of rugby as there’s no variation of style between Southern Hemisphere teams. Well written article & thanks
I agree with most of this Hammish. You made some excellent points. The trend is obvious - its a global, capitalist market now and rugby talent is chasing its worth (and rightly so). The system will soon resemble soccer and NZRU can either embrace it or lose. They should start toggling with a variant of Australia's Giteau law.
I also dont think the domestic game will be affected much. NZ has never had a problem with producing talent and Ive no doubt fresh talent will fill the void left by star players (assuming the NZRU properly funds and nourishes young talent). Importantly there needs to be a culture in which players return home in the twilight of their career to give back (playing, coaching, promoting etc).
Hamish sorry mate but this is another article by you that is tainted by your obvious irrational dislike of NZR.
You ask who cares if Super Rugby went down the gurgler? Well I care. I think the decision made relating to Beauden Barrett is absolutely the right call.
I agree that the administrators have undermined the competition in the past but I think the direction they are heading is the correct one and it is vitally important that we build the comp up and make it as strong as possible.
Dislike of NZR isn't irrational, they've been a shambles since Steve Tew retired.
South like Rugby Pass is trying to stir up some comments regardless of actual reality. No harm in that I guess, but good on Northandsouth for putting up another opinion.
Based on the fiction that the reluctance to allow ABs to be picked from overseas is about standard of competition: great article. Given this is an absurd fiction that only exists in your head that in no way reflects the NZR rationale for not picking ABs from overseas: rubbish article. No one is saying that. Not to mention the actual fact that you deleted from reality: the France football team competes in competitions where every other country does the exact same thing, so there is no competitive disadvantage whatsoever. Come on Rugby Pass, we know we need a range of views in these articles but can't we find some that are better than arguing against imaginary positions and relaying on lazy false equivalence?