SA Rugby's Eyes Wide Shut With Super 15 Franchise Bid

Melbourne or Mandela Bay?

The decision as to which franchise gets the 5th Australian based and 15th Super Rugby franchise, will be announced on the 21st October by SANZAR. This has not been a simple bid process in which prospective Super Rugby franchise teams simply respond to the criteria of the bid document in a free and fair selection process, which the press releases trotted out by SA Rugby &; the ARU would have you believe about their respective "compelling" bid presentations, state of readiness, financial sustainability and player pool.

There is a more complex, dare I say, sinister, cunning and very naive approach towards selecting an additional Super Rugby franchise to participate in the Super 15 tournament from 2011-2015 and you can decide for yourself which labels can be attributed to which union. This is why.

Sooner, rather than later, it will be revealed that the South African rugby administrators tasked with upholding and increasing the value of SA Rugby's intellectual rugby properties in the international and Southern Hemisphere rugby markets, were duped spectacularly and succumbed to the Australian and New Zealand agendas, so much so, that they will ultimately be responsible for the failure of South Africa to acquire the 15th Super Rugby franchise.

It also speaks volumes in endorsing that age old legendary Mafiosi statement, "that you do not bring a knife to a gun fight", which is what SA Rugby did. And there are two reasons for this that are and will be fatal to the submission of the Southern Kings bid.

The first, is that in 2008 the ARU championed and sold the 3-conference Super 15 Rugby system of 5 Super Rugby Teams for each of the South African, New Zealand and Australian rugby unions, from 2011-2015. This was "sold" to all at SANZAR, under the pretext it is more cost effective, involves less travelling (which SA Rugby was always on about) and especially that local derbies attract higher gate attendances which is key to the fans and especially the paymaster Newscorp & SuperSport vis a vis increased viewership for their advertisers.

Then, the second and most lethal reason, is the agreement signed off by SA Rugby, in May, in which Marinos the Acting MD for SA Rugby & Hoskins the President of SA Rugby, in Dublin, unanimously agreed with SANZAR, to a 3-way split of the Super Rugby broadcast revenues, because each of the SANZAR partners would now have 5 Super rugby teams apiece in each of the 3-conferences.

This had to be agreed upon before going into the proposal to Newscorp regarding extending the broadcast agreement through till 2015.

Quite apart from this drop in share of broadcast revenues, for SA Rugby, from 38% to 33.3% which represents a loss of R10m over five years to each of SA Rugby's 14 unions, for a total of R150m, it also means that this revenue now fills the treasuries of the NZRU & ARU to the tune of R150m, which in time will come back to haunt SA Rugby for years to come.

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