Jamie Joseph pinpoints where Highlanders repeatedly fell short in 2026

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That won’t be the case the way the Highlanders are run now.

If they bring back Brown and have two Smiths on their staff it will absolutely see young players chose them more and more. There is just too much talent coming through these days (if the system keeps working and not just a magical burst).

And so giving the Landers free stars is a meaningless venture, they might win, but it’s not down to what they do. Moments like 2015 are special because they were against the odds. No one will care if you strip that away. Sure they might have a higher average of crowds by having no luls but all they really need to do is compete and not stuff up so badly. In my system they would simply be demoted and a team that is performing well takes their place, which is even better (using a non draft system).

What I’m saying is that test experience needs to be included in your salary.

It is, that’s why Landers haven’t been spending their cap. The problem is that they didn’t have an environment or the money to use it on someone special.

Again, first you need to come up with a solution. It would be great if they had enough money to spend on high cap players like that, but they don’t.

Agreed the broadcast solution is mutli faceted. SA is a terrible market, the whole reason they had to leave was the dollar fell through the roof. Sure, even their smaller contribution would be a good starting point, same with the small market SR used to have in GB (back when what they got 20mil off them). That will come naturally though. I’m not really an Impey fan and I can see him complaining about having to carry SA, to SARU, and being perceived as a snobby nosed a hole, causing them to leave but SARU really wanted to run roughshod over the competition didn’t they. Right now some improvements are needed and we can immediately look to make up that shortfall from the Australian market. Get progress there and we can move on to better timezone markets that will cause the SA’n and Aus (at least in the immediate future) value to pale into insignificance.

I like the idea of tryng to split up rights packages like they do in US and places, having a friday team and sunday team etc, another like FTA shows saturday club and school rugby on TV (no top pro stuff). Really stretch it out. Would love to hear your ideas. Interested in what Peters is talking about with Moana too.

In an article from years back, the Highlanders were mentioned as spending far below the salary cap compared to the other teams in the competition, particularly the Crusaders and the Blues with a key factor being more difficulty attracting top young talent. Part of that is because they’ve been historically the least successful team in the competition and that’s not always just mismanagement - they’ve visibly had less talent than most of the other teams in the competition for a number of reasons. Part of this is of course having the smallest population base out of all the teams but they’ve also the University of Otago not attracting as many players to the area out of high school as it used to. How is that the Highlanders’ fault? They can make do with other teams’ scraps but let’s be honest here - most of the other teams will be claiming their top talent first and their blue chip import talent will be guys from surplus positions such as winger (e.g. Tangitau) or players from outsider situations like Tavatavanawai (coming from Fiji and Moana) or Holland (latecomer to NZ and at a position that was covered in most other SR franchises).

That’s where you need to find parity. A different draft system could be “pick an All Black coach for your team” and the draft gives you dibs on who out of the ABs team becomes and assistant at your franchise. One cool way to ensure a key factor in acruing talent.

You can have great coaches in charge (and I’ll still vouch for Joseph given what he’s able to do with the rosters that he has) but if their talent level isn’t there, it’s not going to instantly add parity - putting an ABs coach there is not going to instantly fix the team and attract top talent. Given that (at least at the moment) SR and NPC are separated, they can still stay at their home unions for NPC in the SR offseason if they don’t get selected for the ABs so it’s not like they’re uprooting their lives in the same way as draftees in say the NFL or AFL.

Why should a choice of SR team affect your All Black payments?

What I’m saying is that test experience needs to be included in your salary. A salary cap is not going to serve it’s purpose if the salaries don’t reflect a player’s actual value to the team. It’s why NRL teams like the Panthers regularly give away vets like Crichton and Luai so they can get paid what their worth and why Super Bowl winning NFL teams don’t always get back to the big show right after - because they often lose good players to free agency because their performances in playoff runs demonstrate their potential value to other teams - it means that they can’t hoard talent forever and it maintains more parity.

Given that NZR is adamant that they need to be playing in NZ to play for the ABs, it shouldn’t be that much of a stretch to include their ABs money into their SR salary caps. They could even have some sort of tiered system e.g. setting minimum salaries for players with certain number of test caps etc. The players still get paid for assembling but it would function as their retainers and would give the league a better determination of parity.

But you talent is from the rural areas. We want participators more than viewers. Our broadcast revenue can come from some other country. It’s the logical way forward in that area.

Except you’ll also have less participators at the highest level if they don’t see the financial pathway at home and the money comes from viewers, both on TV and live. More and more players are jumping over to league or heading overseas to USA or Japan before even playing NPC because the money and hype isn’t here for players like them.

In terms of broadcast rights (something I am actually qualified to talk about), raising that broadcast revenue would require:

1) International interest (ideally from places with bigger population bases) - this is the other part of losing the South African teams that hurt SR possibly as much as losing regular play time vs the South Africans - losing a country with 60 million potential viewers, driving up what they could charge for sponsorship and the number of markets to sell broadcast rights to. They’d either need to get another international team from a big market to come in (e.g. regaining the SA teams or setting up teams in high population areas like Japan or Hawai’i as done/pitched in the past), have regular contact with international teams (e.g. some sort of club challenge with European clubs or Japanese clubs and share the broadcast money with those areas) or attract more international talent to do excursions/sabbaticals in NZ (e.g. up and comers from Japan, Argentina etc). Personally I think the latter two would be the easiest options there since you can do it with the teams that already exist.

2) Much more rights competition. Sky basically screws us at home because they have no competition for broadcast rights. Obviously a problem in NZ is the lack of actual channels (the US or UK for example have like 5-6 TV channels or streaming services at a time in bidding wars over the share of a season’s broadcasting rights that drive the prices way up) but if NZR was able to encourage other channels like TVNZ or Three to bid, they’d force Sky to pay more to keep their rights. The difference with above is that NZR would probably have to hope for some outside help here. Australia for example benefits from having anti-siphoning laws that mean a share of a season has to be on free TV (meaning that pay TV channels have to bid against them to maintain their share). Would also mean more national exposure and interest growing as a result (and hopefully even more valuable broadcast rights). The issue here being that it may require some more outside action (perhaps a job for the rugby lobby…).

Of course, opportunity is only one of the factors.

Highlanders have been their own worst enemy in that regardly. Only themselves to blame just like with Richie.

That’s where you need to find parity. A different draft system could be “pick an All Black coach for your team” and the draft gives you dibs on who out of the ABs team becomes and assistant at your franchise. One cool way to ensure a key factor in acruing talent.

Why should a choice of SR team affect your All Black payments?

But you talent is from the rural areas. We want participators more than viewers. Our broadcast revenue can come from some other country. It’s the logical way forward in that area.

Not against good ideas for parity.

“the teams growing, getting stronger every year…” Not on the basis of evidence it’s not. The Highlanders have been on an inexorable downward trend since Mauger left, broken only by the single year Dermody was in charge, while Joseph has made things demonstrably worse, apparently without consequence. The Teflon Man.

Execution was a big problem this year. Far too many times we’d be within 10m of the try line and we dropped the ball or poor decisions etc. Also at times it looks like backline wasn’t in sync and playing for themselves. I really like Tavatavanawai but something I think he’d be better at 13 than 12. Our scrum was a highlight but often we’d throw away the good work in the backline.

Injuries hit hard and to much bloody kiki Jamie Jo Landers box kick way to much and as talented as JRK and Nareki they put it on boot far to often