LONG READ 'The greatest speedbump for The Rugby Championship is its marketing'

If there was one disappointment from the surprising development last month that Qatar’s reported £800m Nations Championship hosting deal had been scuttled, it’s that SANZAAR missed an immediate opportunity to learn how to market a major tournament from its Six Nations colleagues.

With the southern hemisphere nations open minded about the offer – mainly due to their financial state, no matter what kind of moral concerns they may have held – and even with some of their northern partners said to be considering it seriously, the deal was ultimately quashed after Six Nations Inc voted against it.

The rumoured offer from Qatar – split into £200m slices for the first four iterations of the new tournament’s finals to be played in Doha from 2026 – reportedly had England, Wales and Scotland’s support, despite having “no doubt about the potential for a fierce backlash and accusations of hypocrisy, given rugby’s long-standing habit of trumpeting its so-called ‘core values’,” Chris Foy wrote in the Daily Mail in late July.

France and Ireland, it has since been reported, were the main objectors, and with the Six Nations constitution requiring a bloc approach to voting on such matters, the offer was rejected within the exclusive negotiation period. Subsequent reporting suggests The Rugby Championship partners “could now demand millions of pounds in compensation from the Six Nations sides” for the lost windfall.

But where the Six Nations competition itself has firmly cemented its place as the biggest international rugby tournament outside Rugby World Cups, the 2024 Rugby Championship emerged into being this month, with some squads named only last week before their games were played on Saturday, and a general feeling of ‘oh yeah, it’s on again’.

Sadly, it speaks to the significantly different scale of operations of the respective tournaments. Since investment from CVC Capital Partners in 2021, the Six Nations has become far bigger than just an annual international rugby tournament.

Strangely, this has been lobbed as a criticism of Australian rugby, as if there is some kind of law being broken that says people living and working in Australia can’t buy tickets with Australian dollars.

SANZAAR, the joint venture partnership of the South African, New Zealand, and Australian national unions created when the game went professional in the mid-1990s, and expanded to include Argentina in 2016, remains a small logistics and tournament management organisation run out of an office in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

Where the Six Nations roars into life with its all-consuming presence every February and March and with global broadcasting, marketing and sponsorship campaigns behind it, The Rugby Championship just kind of… happens.

The respective competition websites illustrate this difference starkly. In the week leading into the first round of matches on the first weekend of February this year, the Six Nations website lists no fewer than 20 articles to build up to the first round. Come the final round in mid-March, a similar number were published in the last three days alone.

Last week, The Rugby Championship website featured one article on each of the four teams being named for their opening round match, and one more on the law variations in play for the tournament. That was the extent of the first round preview.

At the time of writing, and including touring squad announcements and subsequent match reports from the Brisbane and Wellington games, just 11 articles have been published on The Rugby Championship’s own website since July 24.

It’s hard to imagine the social media channels would be significantly better.

Yet despite all this, and driven almost completely by the unions themselves and the general rugby media in the four countries, round one served up two matches worthy of a significant international tournament.

South Africa’s record 33-7 win over Australia was their first at Suncorp Stadium since 2013 and proved yet again there will be no World Cup hangover, while Argentina’s incredible 38-30 triumph in New Zealand was Los Pumas’ first win over the All Blacks at Sky Stadium, and just their second in New Zealand in The Rugby Championship.

After Suncorp Stadium’s first sell-out rugby crowd since the 2013 British and Irish Lions Tour, much of the build-up for the second match in Perth will be focus on how the similarly large South African population in the west translates into thick swathes of Springbok green in the Optus Stadium stands.

Strangely, this has been lobbed as a criticism of Australian rugby, as if there is some kind of law being broken that says people living and working in Australia can’t buy tickets with Australian dollars, and then go along and support their original home country. The same criticism doesn’t seem to apply in Europe, where rugby fans literally cross borders to attend games.

Across the Tasman, as much scrutiny as there will be on new All Blacks coach Scott Robertson and all the areas he’s already said his team needs to “get better” in, there will also be a narrative about the crowd in Wellington and why it didn’t reach usual expectations.

And there we find a similar tale. How well was the game marketed?

After Kiwi social media commentator Ella Ferguson highlighted the absolute lack of action on The Rugby Championship Instagram feed just two days out from the first game, fellow socials commentator and NZ Herald columnist Alice Soper took it further after the Wellington crowd discussion took hold.

Seeing a lot of discourse on Wellington’s lack of attendance at the rugby.

Yes, our city has experienced a lot of job loss so there is less disposable income.

Yes, it’s revealing of how rugby’s dominance is slipping.

But given these two points, it makes @EllaFerguson28..

— Alice Soper (@alicesoapbox) August 11, 2024

“We don’t know how to market our national game cause for years we haven’t had to. Now those years are catching up,” she wrote in a thread of posts on X.

“Tell stories, seed rivalries. Make on-ramps for new fans. Don’t just assume everyone knows and cares.

“There’s a whole heap of sports on at the moment with the Olympics, easy to get lost. So make your match unmissable.”

And it’s a great point. Rivalries are there in The Rugby Championship, but they’re there because they always have been. The four nations all have their history and love nothing better than beating each other.

But The Rugby Championship can’t just let the four nations tell their own versions of their rivalries, it has to be deeper than that.

Tell fans in Australia and Argentina why the South Africa-New Zealand thing is so strong. Outline the history and the meaning of the Bledisloe Cup. Explain why (until Saturday, at least) South Africa had a hard time winning in Australia. Argentina have now won twice in their last three starts in New Zealand, so build that up!

The stories are certainly there, though. For this weekend alone, we now have both teams in Perth with their injury concerns, and we have two back-rows heading to Eden Park in Auckland, but the one dominating is not the one that’s never lost there.

And so yet again, it feels like the greatest speedbump in The Rugby Championship is how the tournament is marketed across the board.

So why can’t SANZAAR do more? Well, because they’re a committee funded by the four nations themselves. And the four nations aren’t going to cough up more money that might be spent in another country, because they’ve got their own marketing concerns in their own back yards.

Self-interest has always been a major player in southern hemisphere rugby, and so SANZAAR will only ever operate as well as they can with the level of funding the four member nations are comfortable providing.

Hence, the tournament plods along despite, or even sometimes in spite of itself. With the four nations spread so far apart, there’s little room for storytelling outside what suits the home market of those telling the story, and leaving the situation where the average Australian rugby fan doesn’t know much about the new generation of Springboks players coming through who have only played in the URC.

And that’s a great shame, because it’s clear from the weekend this South African team is a very special one, quite likely among the best to ever land on Australian shores. We’ve only got a few days left to take note of how good they really are, because we’re just not going to see much said about them in Australia until they return in two years’ time.