Wallace Sititi of New Zealand during the Autumn Nations Series 2024 rugby test match between France and New Zealand (All Blacks) at Stade de France on November 16, 2024 in Saint-Denis near Paris, France. (Photo: Jean Catuffe / Getty Images) 
After another weekend of brilliant, tense, skillful and dramatic Test rugby across Europe, Ireland and Britain, there was a whiff of controversy in the air with talk of a breakaway league.
Hours before the Springboks beat England 29-20 at Twickenham and France edged the All Blacks 30-29 in a Paris thriller, news of a breakaway rugby league emerged.
The UK papers were full of details of unnamed American backers, who had “in principle” contracted unnamed hordes of the game’s best players for a breakaway league.
Apparently, 30 players have already signed on to join, which includes several World Cup-winning Boks. No names have been released.
IPL style
The Times wrote: “Taking inspiration from Formula 1 and cricket’s Indian Premier League, the concept is for a grand prix-style travelling league featuring eight men’s franchises and a professional women’s competition to start in 2026.
“Each round of the 14-week season would be held in a different city, utilising some of the biggest stadiums in the world.
“Organisers are targeting 280 of the world’s best male players. The recruitment process is underway and it is understood that around 30 players have committed in principle to joining the venture.”
Figures of £1-million (R23-million) per player year to turn out for franchises in rugby wastelands such as Chicago, Las Vegas and Singapore were widely reported.
Whichever group of venture capitalists is behind this scheme, they at least did some decent public relations by tipping off a select group of influential publications to test the waters.
But the details were in broad brushstrokes because the finer details are buried behind non-disclosure agreements apparently signed by players (and presumably agents too).
What we know through the various stories in the handpicked outlets is that this league will be played over 14 weeks. The premise is that it will still allow rugby’s centrepiece – Tests – to continue unaffected.
That’s all well and good, but it ignores that entire rugby ecosystems in countries such as England, South Africa, Ireland, France and New Zealand could come crashing down.
Ripping a layer
Test rugby needs to be underpinned by strong domestic leagues and, if this breakaway league actually gets off the ground, it will rip a layer of players out of systems that are already struggling.
In terms of players, South Africa might be able to sustain itself if, say, 20-30 top Boks signed up for this league. More than 20 of the 50 players used by Bok coach Rassie Erasmus this year earn their living overseas anyway. From a practical perspective, it would hurt the Boks far less than most countries.
Ireland, for example, with only four professional teams, could ill-afford to lose its top tier of players to an IPL-style league for four months of the year.
And that’s assuming World Rugby, the game’s governing body, would actually sanction the league. If it didn’t, players involved in it would not be eligible for Test rugby.
Rugby also already has a glorified exhibition team in the Barbarians. The old club has always functioned as an All-Star team to take on big, one-off challenges. It’s unlikely that rugby is ready for eight such teams playing in places where the game hardly exists.
All Black No 8 Wallace Sititi on the charge against France. (Photo: Jean Catuffe / Getty Images)
Positives?
Assuming, for a moment, this is a deadly serious challenge to rugby’s status quo, what are the positives?
None is obvious from a spectator perspective. It’s tough enough getting 20,000 to a big club game anywhere in the world – with a few exceptions. Asking rugby supporters to suddenly throw their allegiance behind the Las Vegas Vipers and the Chicago Catfish, or whatever, in a meaningless league, is a stretch.
Perhaps it might attract new fans and open new markets, but even soccer failed to get that right in its first attempt to break into the US market in the 1970s.
Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best and others were lured to the North American Soccer League (NASL) in the sepia-toned past to somehow make the world’s most popular sport America’s most popular sport.
Starting modesty in the late 1960s, the NASL peaked in the late-1970s with a network television deal and fading big names. Its heyday was from about 1975 to 1980, where it attracted a decent, but ultimately poor, average of 13,000 fans per game.
The NASL petered out in the early 1980s and it took more than a decade for another, less flashy, attempt to get professional soccer off the ground in the US with the establishment of Major League Soccer (MLS) in the 1990s.
The point is that a new league might make a small group of players rich, but will it gain traction?
The IPL, of course, has been a remarkable success, but it was launched in a country of more than a billion people, most of whom are obsessed with cricket.
The IPL wasn’t launched in North America, or Singapore.
Players, though, might benefit. A 14-game season in the new league and perhaps 10 Test matches (assuming they won’t be banned) is great from a player welfare perspective.
If there is one area where rugby in its current form is failing, it’s in the area of player welfare. South African players, for instance, are capped at 32 games a year. For top players, playing about 22 games and earning in excess of R20-million per season must surely sound attractive.
Three years ago, a group called World 12s did an aggressive marketing campaign, positioning their smaller version of rugby as the future.
World 12s might still exist as a company and a concept, but no one has received an email from them in two years.
That’s not to say this new league won’t get off the ground and won’t poach a group of good players enticed by big money and better working conditions.
Kerry Packer managed with cricket in the 1970s and it’s fair to say that it did inspire change in the sport and was arguably the seed that eventually led to the IPL.
It’s unlikely to succeed. But rugby bosses would be wise to take this threat seriously, and even wiser to hear why players are likely to find this option attractive. DM