Rugby union's sniffiness around making money is exhausting

A “branded, fundraising exercise”, according to The Times. The commercial imperatives have been “hammered home”, according to The Guardian. Elsewhere, the phrase “cash grab” has inevitably appeared.

There has been a curious sniffiness around Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry, as if South Africa and New Zealand have committed some breach of rugby etiquette by discovering that people might pay good money to watch the two best teams in the world play each other.

Of course they want your money. But so does everyone else.

The Six Nations is a money-making exercise. The British & Irish Lions is a spectacularly successful money-making exercise. The World Cup is one. Every replica shirt, television deal, hospitality box and £9 pint at Twickenham exists because somebody wants to make money. This column is a money-making exercise.

Professional sport is the peculiar business of convincing people that something fundamentally unnecessary matters enormously, then charging them to experience it. Why should rugby be embarrassed when it succeeds?

Perhaps some of the discomfort comes from somewhere else. For once, the Home Nations are not at the centre of rugby’s universe. Think about the sport’s great commercial monuments. The Six Nations revolves around them. The Lions quite literally gathers four northern nations together and dispatches them south, where the hosts wait every 12 years for rugby’s travelling circus and the financial windfall that accompanies it.

This time South Africa and New Zealand have built the circus themselves. No England. No Ireland. No Wales or Scotland. No Lions jersey required to lend the occasion gravitas. Just two southern nations looking at more than a century of shared history and realising: hang on, we own something valuable too.

There is something strange about calling this a fundraising exercise as though fundraising itself were disreputable. Rugby desperately needs funds.

SA Rugby generated record revenue of R2bn in 2025. That sounds enormous but it also spent roughly R500m on its national teams and high-performance structures, including R281m on the Springboks alone. Staging its home Tests generated R402m but cost R213m to deliver.

After bringing in two billion rand, the organisation still reported a pre-tax loss of R40m. So where exactly should the money come from?

The Springboks are the greatest commercial asset South African rugby possesses. Their success helps sustain a system encompassing the women’s game, sevens, junior rugby, development structures and provincial unions.

New Zealand faces the same equation. NZ Rugby brought in a record NZ$304.2m last year and still recorded a NZ$7.5m net deficit.

These are not organisations sitting on oil wells. They own rugby teams. Their job is simultaneously to win Test matches and somehow make those Test matches pay for the rest of the sport.

And they have finally looked at the Lions and taken notes. What, after all, is more nakedly commercial than the British & Irish Lions?

Every four years, four unions combine their best players, put them in the same red shirt, package 140 years of history, nostalgia and scarcity and sell the result around the world. It is magnificent. It is also a money grab.

Last year’s Lions tour helped transform Rugby Australia’s finances. After a A$36.8m loss in 2024, RA reported A$262.2m in revenue and a A$70.6m operating surplus in 2025. Matchday revenue reached A$146.8m and the union emerged able to repay its credit facility and declare itself debt-free.

Nobody watched Hugo Keenan score that winning try in Melbourne and thought the emotion was counterfeit because somebody had made a few quid. Why should this be different?

SA Rugby and NZR have formed a 50-50 commercial partnership around the Greatest Rivalry, sharing income from tickets, sponsorship, merchandise and broadcast rights. Taking the final Test to Baltimore is projected to generate between US$4m and US$6m more than playing another match in South Africa. Ker-ching.

Rugby has always sold its history. South Africa and New Zealand have simply realised that history belongs to them as well.

The better criticism is not that they are trying to make money. It is what happens if they become too good at it.

If the Springboks and All Blacks discover that bilateral blockbusters are substantially more lucrative than the Rugby Championship, then Australia and Argentina have a problem. If the biggest brands can increasingly retreat into premium events of their own making, the sport risks becoming less a global ecosystem than a collection of gated communities.

Cricket fans in South Africa and New Zealand already know what happens when the richest brands discover they can make more money playing among themselves.

Commercialism can deform sport. It gives us dreadful kick-off times, billboard jerseys and adverts squeezed into every available pause. But that is not the argument here.

The problem is not that Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry is commercial. The problem would be if commerce became the only thing that mattered.

For now, though, the sporting case is hardly difficult to make. These two nations have won seven World Cups between them. Their rivalry predates professionalism by decades. This is the first full New Zealand tour of South Africa since 1996. There is substance here before anyone sells any merch.

The Springboks and All Blacks are doing what rugby’s established powers have done for generations: monetising history, scarcity and tribalism because those things have value.

The only difference is that, this time, the Home Nations are not the main characters.