Unlocking SA rugby’s billion-rand potential: Sindile Vabaza - Biznews

South African rugby has untapped potential for a domestic league that could rival the world’s best. By adopting a more professional, club-based system akin to France’s Top 14 or the English Premier League, rugby in South Africa could attract substantial investment and global exposure. A tailored streaming deal, like Showmax’s with Capitec, could further unlock this potential, offering affordable access to fans and driving a possible billion-rand broadcast deal. The future of SA rugby looks promising.

Sindile Vabaza

With the French Top 14 Rugby League inking a deal earlier this year with broadcaster Canal Plus worth around an average of 139.4 million Euros per season through 2032, it is well worth asking why the most successful rugby nation on earth cannot ink a sizeable deal for its domestic competition too. 

This has been brought into sharper focus with (unsubstantiated) media reports of the United Rugby Championship (URC) becoming a British and Irish League without Italian and South African teams.

Perhaps the best illustration of what could help unlock the potential of South Africa is the deal between streaming site Showmax and Capitec Bank, which allows the banks 12 million bank-app users to pick and choose which combination of programming they want on the streaming site at reduced prices. Long gone are the days where everything was bundled into expensive packages, where many people simply had a DSTV subscription for sports but had to pay for other programming as part of the bundle. 

In this sense, why can’t a South African domestic league be a stand-alone product that can be subscribed to from whichever streaming site would win the rights to broadcast it? 

In other words, what South African domestic rugby needs is a whole rethink and professionalisation akin to what happened with the English Premier League in 1990, where a more parochial setup made way for a private league so as to maximise revenues and global exposure. In the same way, the union system seems ill-fitting and has long needed to be replaced by a club system, where moneyed investors like the Johann Ruperts and Patrice Motsepes of the world can own their own individual franchises, just as happens in France. 

In order to benchmark a possible deal, we can look at numbers from the recent Springbok test vs New Zealand which was broadcast on both Supersport and SABC. This had a combined audience of 5.6 million viewers of whom four million watched on SABC. Five million local fans subscribe to a local league that is positioned at R50 a month. This is plausible considering how many South Africans even in informal settlements are willing to pay for much more expensive DSTV packages. This league could possibly include one Argentina-based and one Namibia-based franchise which could unlock a further few million fans to subscribe. Because streaming services can be global like Netflix, there is a captive audience of South African expats all over the world too, who could be additional subscribers in the currency of their locale at a very competitive price. The League could buttress this by doing what the NFL in America does by playing a few games in Dubai (in January), London, Canada, the US and even growth markets like Kenya and Chile.

We certainly have a compelling and rich history of rugby, much as leagues like the Premier League in England have for football and the NFL and NBA in America have with a product on the field which is world class. South African rugby would be fairly easy to sell to the rest of the world, especially with superstars like Siya Kolisi and Cheslin Kolbe having connections to Jay Z’s RocNation.

With all of this in mind, why couldn’t a South African domestic league command a broadcast deal in the high R1 billion to low R2 billion mark a season?

Why couldn’t such a league command a main global sponsorship deal worth hundreds of millions of rands a season?

Why couldn’t this league, along with recognisable brands like the Stormers and Sharks, include rugby arms of Chiefs and Orlando Pirates, the only teams in the country besides the Springboks that can pack a 95 000-seater FNB stadium when they play each other? Recently Chiefs played Amazulu and they filled Moses Mabhida stadium in the middle of week in a game that started at 19h30?

I would suggest that a 12-team domestic club league would also lend itself to a Champions League format, similar to what happens in European football, where the two top teams in Australia, New Zealand, Japan and our domestic league would vie for supremacy outside the European model. I think a lot of South Africans may fancy our teams playing our old foes again, and it would constitute a real carrot in our league if they finished in the top two.

Most importantly a moneyed domestic league would help us retain our elite talent even if we don’t quite fully match salaries in France and Japan, by the mere fact that South Africa’s cost of living is much cheaper, our weather is much better and the allure of playing rugby at home close to friends and family is irresistible. It would also mean that even poorly-paid players right now who play for teams like the Griquas and the Pumas would get significant pay bumps and we might even attract elite talent from overseas too. 

Sindile Vabaza is an avid writer and an aspiring economist

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2024/10/06/sa-rugby-potential-sindile-vabaza

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.