The Super Rugby axe has swung once again, this time falling on the neck of the Tokyo-based Sunwolves, following a decision made in the same year the Rugby World Cup will be held in Japan. As with previous cullings, the move raises many questions and serves as just the latest example of the mess Super Rugby has found itself in over recent years.
The competition began as Super 12 and that is how it remained for the first nine years, but since then it has expanded and contracted as Sanzaar sought a model to appeal to broadcasters. Ignoring warnings, Sanzaar expanded to an unwieldy 18 teams in 2016, adding the Sunwolves and Argentina’s Jaguares, but has since scrambled to undo the damage expansion caused.
Australia axed the Western Force, while South Africa re-located two teams – the Cheetahs and Southern Kings – to Europe in order to downsize to a 15-team competition last year, but that did not fix the problem of the unpopular three-conference system.
The Sunwolves have now been sacrificed so that Super Rugby can go back to a 14-team competition, which was how it was from 2005 to 2010, and ditch the conference system, allowing every team to play each other in the round robin.
The reality is the Sunwolves should never have been admitted to Super Rugby in the first place because they were not ready, but cutting the Japanese franchise now just compounds the mistake. The Sanzaar partners had yen in their eyes when they admitted them, believing the franchise would help them to cash in in a country of 127 million people, which constituted the third largest economy in the world behind the US and China.
But the real money in Japanese rugby is not with the Japanese Rugby Union, who operate the Sunwolves, but with the Top League competition, owned and run by wealthy corporations. When the Sunwolves bid for the Super Rugby licence, there was a belief the franchise would have the support of the Top League, but there has been little, or no, evidence of co-operation between them.
The Sunwolves should have been the de facto Japanese national team, a side good enough to upset the Springboks at the 2015 World Cup, but many leading Japanese players only played for their Top League teams, while others actually played for rival Super Rugby teams.
The club were forced to delay announcing their squad for their inaugural season while they desperately chased players, many of them rejects from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. There were rumours they would be axed from the moment they entered the competition.
While the Sunwolves were embarrassingly uncompetitive in their first three seasons, they have just started to perform consistently well this year.
With the World Cup to be held in Japan later this year there is a tremendous opportunity to grow the popularity of the game, something the Sunwolves would potentially benefit from. The post-World Cup period was precisely the time to persevere and try to grow the game in Japan. Instead, the Sunwolves’ last season in Super Rugby will be 2020, the year immediately following the World Cup.
Having admitted them to Super Rugby, Sanzaar has shown little patience with the Japanese side, perhaps regretting they let them in. But the culling heightens the sense that putting a team in Japan was all about a cash grab and little, if anything, to do with growing the game in Japan or Asia.
The push to get rid of the Sunwolves came from South Africa, which was always disgruntled about the extra travel the Japanese added to the competition. The South Africans tend to get their way around the Sanzaar board table because they bring in most of the broadcast revenue, a direct result of South Africa lying in the European time zone.
Ironically, Australian franchises opposed the Sunwolves’ axing because much of their sponsorship comes from Japanese companies. But franchises have little, or no, say in the running of the competition which they participate in, a good reason for the introduction of an independent commission.
Since the advent of Super Rugby in 1996 Sanzaar has had no clear vision of what the competition is meant to be, let alone a cohesive strategy to achieve its aims. The national unions of the Sanzaar partners – South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina – govern the Rugby Championship and Super Rugby by committee, but their priorities often differ.
Sanzaar desperately needs an independent commission, like the AFL and NRL have, to achieve better decision-making, particularly in relation to Super Rugby, and take self-interest out of the process.
You have to wonder not just about the future of the Sunwolves and other teams, but of Super Rugby itself if Sanzaar does not adopt a modern governance structure to deal with the competing agendas of a multi-national sporting competition.