{"id":21179,"date":"2017-04-11T20:18:27","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T10:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=21179"},"modified":"2017-04-11T20:22:32","modified_gmt":"2017-04-11T10:22:32","slug":"rugby-in-australia-is-pretty-much-finished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=21179","title":{"rendered":"Rugby In Australia Is Pretty Much Finished"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rugbythumb\"<\/a><\/p>\n

T<\/span>his week, the ARU is faced with a choice. \u00a0They must choose to dismantle\u00a0either the Western Force or the Melbourne Rebels<\/a><\/strong> as an Australian representative in the Super Rugby competition as of next season.<\/p>\n

There are two reasons for this. \u00a0Firstly, neither side makes money. \u00a0In fact, both lose money by the millions. \u00a0Secondly, there are not enough quality players to put together five competitive Australian teams in club rugby. \u00a0To be completely honest, there’s probably not enough good quality players to put together even three competitive teams. \u00a0That is how far Australian rugby has plummeted. \u00a0And there’s nothing to suggest the situation won’t continue to worsen.<\/p>\n

Cards on the table time.<\/p>\n

This is the state of Australian rugby as it stands today:<\/p>\n

Club Rugby<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"superrugbyconference\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the current Super Rugby season, Australian teams have lost twelve games against New Zealand teams and won zero. \u00a0One of the losses was an eye-watering 71-6 massacre of the Melbourne Rebels at the hands of the Hurricanes. \u00a0The Brumbies are the top Australian team and sit fourth in the ladder thanks to the magic of the conference system but they have the same number of points as the 10th placed team<\/em>. \u00a0Not a single Australian team has won more than half their games.<\/p>\n

\"super-rugby-ladder\"<\/a><\/p>\n

International Rugby<\/strong><\/p>\n

At an international level, the Wallabies are currently enduring one of their worst ever run of results against their trans Tasman rivals, the All Blacks. \u00a0They have won just 4 out of the last 30 games.<\/p>\n

\"wallabiesallblacks\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Grass Roots<\/strong><\/p>\n

At a grass roots level, the game has had a seismic collapse in participation rates with men, women and children abandoning the sport in droves. \u00a0The number of people who play rugby in Australia is now a paltry 55,000, which makes it the 26th most popular sport in Australia, where it’s slightly less popular than ballroom dancing and just above archery.<\/p>\n

\"7182a\"<\/a>

Roy Morgan Research data on the most popular sports in Australia<\/p><\/div>\n

By virtually every other metric – tv ratings, attendances at games – rugby in Australia is shrinking and withering on the vine. \u00a0How did it come to this? \u00a0And what happens from here?<\/p>\n

Why It Went Wrong<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"quadecooper\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s tricky to pin point one key area that has lead to the downfall of rugby in Australia. \u00a0Tricky because almost every administrative aspect of the sport has been a colossal failure since the turn of the century.<\/p>\n

Consider a young Australian kid today who adores rugby and might one day be interested in\u00a0playing rugby professionally as an adult.<\/p>\n

Firstly, they need to be male. \u00a0Whereas soccer, AFL and cricket have made great strides in recent years promoting domestic competitions for women with leagues that have national tv deals, rugby has (with the exception of a hastily thrown together Olympic Wallaroos squad) almost exclusively remained the\u00a0domain of men.<\/p>\n

If that kid wants to watch rugby on free to air television, he can watch the Wallabies get thrashed annually by the All Blacks in the Rugby Championship. \u00a0The Wallabies might fare a little better against Argentina and South Africa as they compete for second place in a four team competition.<\/p>\n

If the kid wants to watch domestic rugby (the National Rugby Championship), their family must have a Foxtel subscription. \u00a0If the kid wants to watch Super Rugby, their family must have a Foxtel subscription. \u00a0If they do, they can watch five (soon to be four) absolutely woeful teams get demolished by their vastly superior opposition in New Zealand. \u00a0Half of the games in the competition will be played against South African, Japanese or Argentinian teams and will kick off after 10pm.<\/p>\n

Somehow, if that child still remains motivated to play rugby, they’ll be developed in the cash starved grass roots system that the ARU currently oversees. \u00a0Last year, an article in the Australian<\/strong> <\/a>suggested that of the ARU’s $105 million dollar annual budget, $25 million was spent on head office salaries, $56 million was spent on the national team and $4 million was spent on growing the game at a grass roots level. \u00a0Of that $4 million, the vast majority of it is spent in Queensland or New South Wales so if you live anywhere else, you’re pretty much shit out of luck.<\/p>\n

All of this of course, is assuming the kid lives in a bubble and isn’t wooed by AFL, NRL, Big Bash, A-League and practically every other major sporting code in Australia which currently does a superior job marketing their product to youngsters.<\/p>\n

In short, the administration of Australian rugby is\u00a0in a shambolic state from top to bottom. \u00a0The tv coverage of the sport is expensive, restrictive and airs at weird hours of the night. \u00a0What coverage there is shows Australian teams under performing badly. \u00a0Should a potential player still decide they want to pursue the sport professionally, there’s no money to develop them and they’re screwed if they live outside of NSW and Queensland. \u00a0The live audience for the sport is shrinking, the televised audience for the sport is shrinking and there are no young players coming through to improve the quality of the teams on the field.<\/p>\n

The proposed solution by the ARU to axe one team doesn’t address any of the other issues affecting the game.<\/p>\n

Where To From Here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"super15final\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Where to from here? \u00a0Things will get much worse before they get better.<\/p>\n

Until there’s a wholesale clean out of the current administrators of the game, its impossible to see a path to recovery for rugby in Australia. \u00a0All of these problems would be bad enough if they were occurring in a vacuum but the Australian sporting landscape is getting ever more crowded with other sports doing a far better job connecting with their audience.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to note that New Zealand has no vested interest in helping out Australian rugby. \u00a0The collapse in the quality and competitiveness of Australian teams both at a Super Rugby and international level has not hurt television ratings or attendances of trans Tasman matches. \u00a0In short, New Zealanders are happy to watch noncompetitive games where the Kiwi sides win by massive margins over their lacklustre Aussie counterparts. \u00a0If Australian rugby enters a malaise where they cease to be competitive in SANZAR fixtures, I don’t believe New Zealand rugby administrators would care one tiny bit. \u00a0It’s not like New Zealand sports fans really have anywhere else to turn.<\/p>\n

At the height of my rugby fandom, I was a Queensland Reds season ticket holder and would stay up at strange hours of the night watching World Cup games and Wallabies tours of the Northern hemisphere. \u00a0Today, I am a lapsed fan. \u00a0I barely tune in the sport and am lucky to catch more than half a dozen games a year.<\/p>\n

I want to come back. \u00a0I really do. \u00a0But rugby in Australia has been badly neglected by its custodians and where it stands today, it’s a very long road back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Musings on the collapse in popularity of rugby union in Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":21180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[148],"class_list":["post-21179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-rugby"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21179"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21212,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21179\/revisions\/21212"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}