Rugby Australia might not want them in their Super Rugby Pacific competition, but the Melbourne Rebels could find a new home in the mooted global franchise league that threatens to change the world order.
On Friday, a bombshell report revealed plans were being hatched for a new global rugby competition that promised riches for the game’s elite and, importantly, would halve the number of games played at a time when player welfare is increasingly becoming an important issue.
Taking cricket’s Indian Premier League and LIV Golf as inspiration, insiders say the concept is for a grand prix-style travelling rugby competition featuring eight men’s franchises and a professional women’s competition over 14 weeks, including a final.
Backed by an unnamed firm, tournament organisers are hoping to attract up to 280 male players for the competition.
A new global rugby competition is planning on swooping on the game’s elite players. (Photo by Franco Arland/Getty Images)
Top-tier players could earn up to AU$2 million – a number fewer than five players in the world earn currently, according to The Times.
On Friday, The Times revealed as many as 20 players had been approached and were considering whether to join should the tournament get up and running in the coming years.
The radical tournament, which comes three decades after Australian Kerry Packer failed to get a similar rebel league off the ground, is garnering plenty of interest because of the game’s current inadequacies.
While Super Rugby Pacific is a sprint played over five months, elsewhere in the world like France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa, competitions are marathons and run for as long as ten months. Add in the international component and it’s a 12-month, all-year long game.
That might work for some games, but when players are being asked to run into giants, including South African ‘bomb squads’, and the threat of injury and mental fatigue is great.
It’s partly why players have been waiting for the status quo to be rocked.
“I love the sound of it,” one unnamed Test player told The Times. “It would free up a lot of money for the club game, if the big players left. Rugby needs to be disrupted.”
Although scant details exist of where franchises might pop up, with non-disclosure agreements being signed worldwide, The Roar can reveal representatives for the league engaged with Rebels figures a fortnight ago about the prospect of Melbourne housing a team.
Melbourne Rebels figures have been approached by representatives for the new global rugby tournament. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
For a franchise that was booted out by RA in May after falling into $23m debt in January and locked in a legal battle with the governing body after suing them for $30m in damages, any prospect of Melbourne getting back on the field is welcomed news.
More conversations are intended over the coming days, but it’s believed the Victorian Government, who signed an eight-year, $20m deal with Rugby Australia in late 2017 on the proviso of having a franchise included in Super Rugby, would support any prospect of seeing the Rebels return.
In addition, the Victorian Government, unlike other state governments in NSW and Queensland, wouldn’t have a conflict of interest given they’re not involved in Super Rugby.
League figures would be encouraged by the potential financial capital in the game in Melbourne, with a private consortium, led by business heavyweight Leigh Clifford, previously pledging to tip in $30m to keep the Rebels involved in Super Rugby. The consortium’s efforts however failed to get off the ground with Rugby Australia saying they weren’t provided enough details to see whether it was a viable option.
Melbourne is also considered the perfect destination because of its reputation on the global stage as the sporting capital of Australia.
Given Albert Park hosts the Australian leg of the F1 and the current existing rugby structures in Melbourne, US financers believe it’s another reason why the city could house a franchise.
Former Rebels winger Darby Lancaster on his way to the tryline against the Highlanders at AAMI Park on April 13, 2024, in Melbourne. (Photo by Josh Chadwick/Getty Images)
The mooted breakaway competition was revealed just hours after former Wallaby Brett Robinson was confirmed as World Rugby’s incoming chairman.
Robinson, who sold himself on the campaign as a safe pair of hands and the right figure to guide the game through rough seas, has increasingly warned figures of the need to be financial prudent, nimble and forward-thinking.
He has also spoken of the need to bring costs down in the game.
“One of the great challenges for us is this tension around the economics of the game and the global macroeconomics of revenue versus cost,” Robinson told The Roar Rugby Podcast in September.
“We have wage inflation pressures not being supported by revenue that we can create.”
Robinson’s commentary will go down like a led balloon to players and their agents.
While top-tier Wallabies aren’t necessarily the target, with the winners of the past five World Cups, the Springboks and All Blacks, preferred, half-a-dozen of Joe Schmidt’s regular starters are off contract next year and none of them currently have offers on the table.
Wallabies coach Joe Schmidt says World Rugby figures must take seriously the threat of a breakaway competition. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)
For a Wallabies side that just exploded back onto the international radar after knocking off England at Twickenham, they are ripe for the picking by ambitious clubs across the world.
Schmidt did his best to laugh off whether he feared a playing exodus but added that LIV Golf’s ability to lure a huge portion of the world’s best players away from the traditional tours meant World Rugby had to take any potential breakaway tournament seriously.
“I know nothing about it. The players don’t talk to me anyway really too much,” Schmidt quipped during an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald.
“I guess golf is similar at the moment. There’s a traditional tour and there’s the LIV Golf tour. So I guess maybe in that context something could run alongside the current format of the competitions we play in.”
Schmidt added: “But the player pool is not that big. If you took 280 players out of a pool for a prolonged period of time – because 14 weeks would suggest 20 weeks probably across the preparation window – that very quickly becomes around about half a year. And that would seriously impact on the current format of the global club and international calendar.”
