Super Rugby: Fragile competition reaches a crossroad as financial pressures hit

He is the sort of vibrant, accessible, colourful figure Super Rugby needs to engage fans and sell the competition.

Finding a way to keep Ah Kuoi is paramount, not just for the Chiefs who need his energy and versatility in their mix, but for the wider perception that Super Rugby is valued by talented players on the fringes of test selection.

With the Melbourne Rebels having gone bust at the end of 2025 and now uncertainty about whether Moana Pasifika will be involved in 2027 – there is a white knight investor lurking, but it remains a long-shot that a salvage deal will be done – the competition is economically fragile.

That fragility is amplified by the financial positions of the five (foundation) New Zealand sides – all of whom, including the champions, the Crusaders, are believed to have lost money last year.

“The whole system has to change,” Hurricanes chairman Malcolm Gillies told Rugby Direct this week.

“I don’t think it’s sustainable as it sits right now,” he said.

“If it stays the way it is now, I fear for it. If there’s change, then I believe we’ve got a product. But if it doesn’t, I believe it’s going to die. That’s my honest opinion.”

For the Crusaders to win the title and end up in the red illustrates the key issue with the current set-up – which is that in New Zealand, the competition is partially privatised in what the clubs feel is an imperfect partnership with the national union.

Each of the five clubs has private-equity investors – the Highlanders are thought to be 87% owned by high net-worth individuals.

However, there are commercial restrictions on their respective licences, and it’s New Zealand Rugby (NZR) and Rugby Australia that effectively control the player market and have all the decision-making power around the strategic future of the competition.

This semi-privatised model means that clubs are overly dependent on generating gate income to make ends meet – but they have limited ability to control the draw to play at the best times to maximise attendance, and most would like the competition to be longer so that they play more than seven home games a season.

The Hurricanes lost $1.4 million in 2023 and $700,000 in 2024 (and are predicted to post another loss for 2025) primarily because their average crowd has dropped from around 16,000 pre-Covid, to around 12,000 post-Covid – which has cost an estimated $500,000 of income annually.

Having seen around 24,000 come to Hnry Stadium for the semi-final last year, they likely would have sold out and pocketed around $1m the following week had they not lost – significantly improving their financial outcome.

The Crusaders, who did host the final, weren’t able to capitalise financially as their former stadium only had 17,000 seats.

Should the new stadium in Christchurch with its 30,000 capacity have been available last year, the Crusaders would have likely made a profit.

The clubs are effectively saying that the only chance they have of posting a profit is to host playoff games and hope a bumper crowd turns up.

There was, the Herald believes, some talk late last year of introducing a shared-risk revenue model for ticket sales, but it’s understood nothing came of that.

In recent few years, the Super Rugby sides have won two commercial concessions from New Zealand Rugby – the right to do their own apparel deals (previously Super Rugby was part of the All Blacks agreement with Adidas), and the right to sell competition sponsorships collectively.

But this is peripheral, small margin stuff. The big money lies in broadcast rights, but NZR negotiates these and keeps the income – using it to pay the players.

And this is where Super Rugby differentiates from every other comparable professional competition.

The French Top 14, English Premiership and the URC all operate independently from their national unions and negotiate and share their revenue from media rights.

They have free-market models where private enterprise – albeit the Irish and Scottish national unions run their club teams in the URC – own the players’ contracts, and have unrestricted and full access to all commercial income from gate revenue, merchandise, sponsorships and media rights.

With the current, half-privatised model in New Zealand not enabling clubs to fully control their playing rosters the way they would like, not offering enough commercial streams to be profitable, and not giving them any say in the strategic future as it relates to how many teams, format, geographic footprint or eligibility, the desire for change is strong.

“If you want private investment in these Super clubs, you’ve got to give them something to invest in,” Gillies said on Rugby Direct.

“From what I’ve seen, there’s not a lot there. My belief is it needs to be privatised. It cannot continue the way it is.”

Can Super Rugby be sold to private equity?

What’s clear now is that NZR is at a genuine inflection point, where it must decide how much it needs to change for Super Rugby to build a stable financial footing.

It may feel that the current set-up doesn’t necessarily have to change much at all.

It has, after all, attracted significant private investment and with 60,000 ticket sales this weekend and broadcast figures holding just about where they were last year (they are believed to have been up in earlier rounds but down in the last few weeks), the competition is in reasonable shape as it pertains to the critical measurement of fan engagement.

But there is a pressing reality that private investors can’t keep their money in loss-making ventures long-term, and a lucrative super round in Christchurch is most welcome, but it’s not a true reflection of the competition’s popularity or economic horsepower.

Also, while NZR’s preference may be to tweak the current structure rather than contemplate wholesale change, there is a decade of evidence that says Super Rugby is only going to find financial viability if it goes all-in on private ownership and embraces free market principles,

The greatest leverage the clubs have in forcing change is they are the key drivers and custodians of NZR’s high-performance programme.

It is the Blues, Chiefs, Hurricanes, Crusaders and Highlanders who do most to build All Blacks players, and it is the All Blacks who generate around 80%-90% of NZR’s income.

The question NZR faces is, therefore, one of control, and whether it is willing to greenlight a total privatisation of Super Rugby that would effectively hand the clubs control of the player market, media rights and strategic direction of the competition.

NZR has long been fearful of losing control of its elite players – worried that private investors won’t look after them and that players will turn up for test duty battered and broken.

But fully privatising Super Rugby is not necessarily a high-risk move, and as has been witnessed in the United Kingdom and France, it is possible for investors to have full autonomy of club rugby while acknowledging and respecting the needs of the international game.

All it takes for NZR to have the security it wants is a well-negotiated licence agreement that has binding stipulations around when the competition can be played and how elite talent has to be treated.

The benefit to NZR would be no longer having to pay the $22.5m it currently does in Super Rugby salaries, and potentially, a privatised competition could drive greater overall revenue, keep more players in New Zealand, attract high-profile foreign stars and improve the intensity and quality of the rugby.

For the clubs, the risk is that they would become responsible for paying players and they would be gambling that by having control of the sale of their own broadcast rights, that they would generate the increased revenue they would need to do that.

Inevitably, the clubs would engage a third-party agency to market Super Rugby, grow its audience and profile and generate the metrics to increase the value of sponsorships and broadcast rights.

Privatising would create obvious risks for both the clubs and NZR, but the danger of changing seems less than the danger of keeping things the same.

Ultimately, private equity is not looking at investment in sport to deliver a dividend each year, but to drive up the total value of the competition in which they have put their money to create a high-value exit opportunity.

It was possible 30 years ago to buy an English Premier League football club for a few hundred million dollars and now the biggest ones are worth close to $10 billion.

Super Rugby has not seen any significant growth in overall value in the last decade, yet NZR’s income has doubled over the same period.

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