Harping on about NZ rugby

The lure of European money looks set to trigger a slow but inevitable decline in the fortunes of NZ rugby. For those of you who think it was inevitable, I strongly disagree - it didn't have to be this way. The NZRU could have played it much better.

Consider this: England hosts the world's premier football competition with a global audience and fanbase. It's not the most populous or weathiest country in the world, but it has by far the strongest football brands. The market in which these brands trade is global, with American and Russian billionaires pouring money into the Premier League.

New Zealand is similarly well positioned - the All Blacks are synonymous with elite rugby. So it should have been possible to build a similar global audience for the NZ club competition. Right now globetrotting fat cats should be outbidding each other to buy our clubs. Pay TV networks should be queueing up for broadcasting rights. Canterbury club shirts should be selling in their millions.

Instead the NZRU's need for total control has resulted in clubs being treated with a mixture of indifference and fear. This is evident in the way that they're created out of thin air when needed (e.g. for the Super 14) and prevented from having any degree of self-determination.

The problem with this is that clubs have personalities. They engage the fans, make them care, make them worry about what's going to happen on Saturday. The net result of the NZRU's machinations is that I care more about how Aston Villa and the Manly Sea Eagles fare on the weekend than anything going on in rugby.

If NZ hosted the world's premier club rugby competition, it would be isolated from the threat of international money - in fact the competition would be a huge money and player attractor. Instead it would be the rest of the world complaining that NZ was luring its best away! As it is, if a Russian oligarch even wanted to buy a club here, there'd be absolutely nothing to buy.

It's probably too late to reverse the trend, but surely it's worth a go! What do we have to lose? At least union isn't in the position of league, which has a limited global audience and is too similar to union to prevent players switching to the bigger code.