Rugby’s oldest complaint ‘destroyed’ and the threat to Springboks and All Blacks
Richie Mo'unga has completed his three-year stint at Toshiba Brave Lupus Tokyo.
Following on from Tuesday’s piece, we’ve widened our remit to look at every senior squad in the Prem, the Top 14, URC, Super Rugby Pacific, Japan’s League One and Major League Rugby. Put them into one pile and you get 3,427 professionals. It shows us that fewer than a third of them, around 30 per cent, are playing in a country other than the one they were born in, yet seven in every ten are in their home league.
For a sport that spends half its year arguing about mercenaries and bought leagues, those figures show an industry that remains stubbornly domestic. The image of rugby as a great churning transfer market, players for sale and guns for hire, is mostly a function of which players we notice, rather than what the data says.
Tuesday’s count put the northern invasion to bed inside three leagues, and we find that if we take the global figures, they say pretty much the same thing, but louder; rugby, taken whole, is played overwhelmingly by men in their own back yard.
The real question is not how many leave their own shores, because relatively few do; it is where the ones who go actually end up, because that is where the real shape of the modern game shows itself, and it is nowhere near where common wisdom and fan discussion thinks – with a rugby revolution taking place in a corner least expected.
Every exodus has an address
Migration in rugby does not happen by scattergun. It has themes, trends and well-worn roads, each nation tending to funnel its travellers to a particular door, a door opened by agents, old team-mates and boardroom contacts inside that destination league.
Generally speaking, we can demonstrate that Tongans gather in Japan, Georgians gather in France, Fijians split themselves between the two, France for the salary and Japan for the same reason. Australians, true to national character that embraces travel and overseas working, are simply everywhere, taking experience back to their own Test arena and improving their structure.
The more concerning trend, for the All Blacks and Super Rugby Pacific, is the New Zealander. 86 of them now earn a living in Japan’s League One, more than every other Kiwi, born or eligible, outside Super Rugby put together (which comes to 74). The country that exports more rugby know-how than anyone has quietly decided by its own volition that its players belong in Tokyo and Osaka rather than London or Toulon. The All Black diaspora is now pointed firmly east, as New Zealand (and South Africa) continue to bolster the Japanese club system.
The URC is one of the most domestic leagues there is
That said, the URC runs at about 18 per cent foreign-born. Super Rugby, the southern hemisphere’s own shop window, runs at 15 per cent.
The gap between the leagues is only about three percentage points. The reason is the same one we found on Tuesday, that the four South African franchises field South Africans in South African cities, which drags the URC’s foreign share down rather than up.
A competition gets criticised or misperceived mainly because of the visibility of the star players, rather than because of what the proportions actually are. However, the truth is duller and more useful; put simply, the URC is a largely domestic league with an unusually long commute for one of its quarters, and if you set it beside Super Rugby, it is barely an outlier at all. The next time someone tells you the Boks have bought the URC, the honest reply is that it is, by the only measure that counts heads, one of the least foreign leagues in the professional game; the URC is blameless, and the South African presence is the very thing keeping it that way.
Imports do not hold the locals back
The oldest complaint in the domestic game, in every country, is that the foreigner takes the local boy’s place and stunts him, yet the numbers from the two biggest leagues on earth destroy this argument.
France and England field two of the largest professional player pools in the sport, and both import enthusiastically. They are also, not by coincidence, the most productive going: France has the deepest league ever assembled, whilst England, even through financial contraction and shedding three clubs through financial issues, continues to produce internationals by the yard.
If imports throttled local development you would see it most where imports are thickest, in the Top 14 and the Prem, yet data tells us you see the opposite. A big, rich, open league turns out to be a good place to raise a player rather than a bad one, because the youngsters train against some of the best around; it may be a Fijian flyer or a Georgian scrummager, experiencing excellence every week instead of being protected from it.
Coaches will tell you that closed shops do not produce hard players; rather, they produce comfortable ones. There is a lesson there for any union tempted to pull up the drawbridge in the name of the local lad, and it runs precisely opposite to instinct: protection does not harden players, exposure does.
Land of the Rising Rugby
Remarkably, Japan now sustains a bigger home-born professional base than either of the southern giants. The Japan Rugby League One fields 413 home-born players, against the 215 New Zealand and the 228 South Africa field at home, close to double the domestic base of either. The game is booming in the Land of the Rising Sun and the budgets are there to attract the best talent, in a welcoming and wonderfully run rugby environment.
The two unions that have shared most of the last two decades’ World Cups, that produce the players everyone else wants, are being out-scaled at home by a league in a country that has never reached a semi-final. Japan does not poach in the way the northern leagues are accused of poaching; it simply pays, quietly and enormously, and the best of the southern hemisphere now spend their prime years there, Kiwis by the dozen with the Springboks not far behind. The threat to South African and New Zealand rugby is an entire professional economy assembling itself in Tokyo and Osaka, bigger by headcount than the systems that feed it, and with the corporate backing and salary power to keep growing.
Super Rugby Pacific tells the same story from the other end. It is the least foreign of the six leagues counted, at 15 per cent, but that figure is the mark of a feeder rather than a fortress. Australia now fields more sons abroad than at home, 127 against 124, and New Zealand exports 180 players against the 215 it keeps. The southern game is not being invaded; it is being drained, and the drain runs east.
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Japan’s League One is rugby with the handbrake off: quick, expansive, high-scoring, and closer in spirit to sevens than to a wet Friday night in the URC. The collisions are real enough, yet there is, anecdotally from coaches, more space, more running, and far fewer of the attritional set-piece wars that wear a body down across a European winter.
With deep-pocketed corporate owners, the money in Japanese rugby is enormous, the equal of France and well beyond what British rugby can offer, yet the schedule is kinder, fewer matches and a cap on foreign players on the pitch that hands the older imports proper rest. Crucially, the season barely clashes with the Test calendar, and South Africa, unlike New Zealand, picks its men wherever they earn, so a Springbok can bank a fortune in Tokyo and still pull on green and gold when Test series arrive. For a 30-something forward with a World Cup behind him, it extends a career rather than shortening it, but gives enough sharpness to maintain an edge for Tests. Rassie Erasmus himself, speaking on the eve of the League One season, said that “going to Japan is definitely less tiring on their bodies, the point being that the league’s cap on foreign players on the pitch means the older Boks actually get more rest, which helps us considerably.” Call it soft at your peril, though. The quality has climbed, the coaching is world class, and as Patrick Tuipulotu put it, it is only less physical if you are not working hard enough.
The old powers have spent years aiming their complaints about player migration at the wrong targets. The players are not being pulled north, into rugby that is fiercely hard, demanding and physically attritional. Increasingly, they are being pulled east; into a league with money, corporate backing, a kinder calendar and enough quality to keep them sharp. Look east, not north, because that is the migration that will shape the next ten years, in a league still defiantly under-covered by the rest of rugby media, yet one thriving because of the economic structure around it.
Figures cover senior squads in the Premiership, Top 14, URC, Super Rugby Pacific, Japan League One and Major League Rugby, counted by country of birth. A player is foreign if he turns out for a club outside the country he was born in; Moana Pasifika, representing the Pacific Islands, is treated as a home side for Pacific and Australian players. With thanks to Stu MacArthur for the data.