Brett Gosper believes rugby not as ‘ruthless’ as ‘spectacular’ NFL and the ‘drastic’ step that could ‘rebalance’ the game
Brett Gosper on what rugby union can learn from the NFL.
When Brett Gosper played rugby his team drew so much attention to itself they filled grounds and captured the attention of an entire nation.
He lined up at centre for Racing Club, who dressed to wind up the opposition and entertain the rest of France.
One week they played wearing berets, another it was pink bow ties. Then came Bermuda shorts, followed by blazers and black bow ties.
“It was one stunt after another,” recalls the one-time boss of World Rugby and now head of Europe and Asia-Pacific for the NFL.
“One time we wore bald head wigs to pay homage to Pierre Salviac, the top TV commentator at the time. In the French Championship final of 1990 champagne was served to the boys on the pitch at half-time.
Back story
“We were doing it partly because we wanted to wind up the southern provincial clubs and play into their cliche of us as fancy Parisians.
“But also because the team was looking to draw attention to itself. We had some natural marketeers in the team and the stunts had everybody talking about us. We made the 1987 final and it drew a huge TV audience – all down to the back story around us.”
Gosper tells the tale because we are talking rugby and what the sport today can do to raise its profile, grab a bigger share of the global sporting audience and secure its future as a professional entity.
The new season kicked off last weekend in England with Bath and Northampton meeting in a repeat of last season’s Premiership Final. The country’s two best teams, strong back story, perfect way to start.
Only, neither club bought into the ‘rematch’ billing in the run-up and with top tickets priced at more than £100, the ground was not full.
About now Premiership Rugby had hoped to be trumpeting a second series of its behind-the-scenes documentary, Mud, Sweat and Tears, only Amazon Prime Video pulled the plug after the pilot failed to get enough viewers.
Saracens are instead producing their own series, The Saracens People Don’t See, seven episodes on its own YouTube and Facebook channels.
Some will smile at that title, given the limited access many clubs give media to tell their stories and, by extension, promote their assets and the league itself.
This week, for example, seven of the 10 clubs stage their once-a-week media session on just two afternoons – three clash one day, four the next. That is not a sport putting its best foot forward.
It brings to mind an interview given last year to podcast The Good, The Bad & The Rugby by boxing promoter Eddie Hearn.
“The reality is the viewing figures are horrendous and the reason the viewing figures are horrendous is you don’t have any stars,” he said. “In rugby now I couldn’t name you half a dozen players.”
Harsh, some will say. But only some. Proponents of the sport point to the three-year contract extension Premiership Rugby has agreed with Gallagher, complete with sizeable uplift.
They say the cumulative round one TV audience is the highest since 2018. They also reference the fledgling partnership between the Six Nations and TikTok, which has already attracted 608,000 followers.
The flip side is that England could not attract a broadcaster to screen their summer international with Japan and the Rugby Football Union recently announced another round of job cuts, having made more than 100 redundant in 2020.
Last weekend, after watching his side grind out an ugly win over Harlequins, Sale boss Alex Sanderson admitted the sport needed to improve as a spectacle. Soon after, the Telegraph revealed a spate of postponements in the grass-roots game due to a lack of playing numbers.
The contrast is stark with American football, where Gosper now works, with the National Football League posting record-breaking viewing figures for the opening weekend.
There was an average viewership of 21 million per game across the 32-team league, a 12 per cent increase on a year ago when, according to Forbes, the NFL accounted for 93 of the 100 highest rated TV shows on US television.
So what can rugby learn?
Gosper does not presume to have the answers but having cut his teeth playing for publicity-hungry Racing and spent eight years between 2012-20 as chief executive of World Rugby, he is uniquely placed to offer a perspective.
The 65-year old Australian hones in on two key areas: the way rugby is marketed and its unequal distribution of revenue across the international game.
“I’ve got to be careful,” Gosper says. “It’s hard to compare a sport [rugby] with a league [NFL], where there’s incredible alignment and equity of outcomes in a way that perhaps in rugby there isn’t.
“But if there’s a learning point it is the fan obsession in the NFL: the growth of the fan base, understanding your fan base and marketing towards that fan base.
Gosper advice
“Your fan base is ageing unless you address the early fan base of about 14-25 [years old] and make that your obsession. I think rugby tends to subconsciously market itself to a much older audience.
“It talks to itself quite a lot. Whereas I feel the NFL goes out of its way actually to dominate each demographic in the United States. I think that’s something rugby is not as ruthless or aggressive in – in a good way – as we are.”
Gosper says that even in his time at World Rugby the “obsession” within unions was with participation, whereas what the NFL see as critical is people loving and engaging with the sport, regardless of whether they ever play it.
“I’d say the NFL is at the intersection of sport and entertainment, probably more so than any other,” he adds. “It is a spectacular show when you go to a three-hour game in a stadium.
“Some of the club rugby games you see put on at Twickenham do push the boat out a bit more in that entertainment side. But, generally speaking, there are some lessons in the entertainment sphere and staging in sports presentation in the NFL that would help rugby.”
Gosper acknowledges the NFL is in a very different position being a “hermetically sealed ecosystem that’s highly successful because it aligns on virtually every subject and shares 85 per cent of it’s wealth equally amongst its teams”.
The closest thing to that in rugby, he says, is the Six Nations Championship, a “closed shop in the sense there is a pretty equalised shared earnings and other nations can’t enter that arena”.
But Gosper argues that that, in many ways, is “to the detriment” of the sport’s growth internationally.
“It prevents some of the bigger economies, where there is more economic potential that could be fed back into the game from places like Japan and the USA and other markets, from entering that economic sphere.”
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Gosper acknowledges the landscape is more difficult for rugby than the sport in which he operates as while the NFL does vote on the way forward, the ownership are shareholders in one entity; equal shareholders with a unified approach, unified interest and shared spoils.
“Whereas in rugby the hemispheres are different, there are competing leagues, competing regions,” he says. “Certainly, in a world order, I think a more equal sharing of the spoils would be a very big step forward because the health of both the South and North is so important.
“The South don’t get the broadcast income the North get when each travel to the other side. And the Six Nations is obviously a much bigger bread winner than the Rugby Championship.
“But if you pool all of that and make everyone healthy you’ll have a better competition which, in the end, will sell for a higher amount.
“There’ll be a few lean years for people not used to dealing with a drop in their revenues but it will re-accumulate at some point.
“That to me is probably the most drastic, but biggest, step towards improving the health of the sport in the two hemispheres.
“Without that rebalance, it’s going to be hard for the sport to move forward. You can’t just have two or three teams that are performing well because they’ve got money.”
World Rugby hopes an all-new Nations Championship earmarked for 2026 will address much of this, aligning the hemispheres in one competition. A number of rugby’s broadcast contracts come up that year so the potential to reorganise the sport does exist.
But rugby has to get there first. And two years is a long time in the cash-strapped world of union.
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