The days when international audiences used to gasp at the precision of New Zealand’s skillset execution, and gawp at the innovation and audacity of the players wearing black, are long gone.
Instead, now it is South Africa who lead the world in almost every facet, and it is the Springboks who wow their international audiences.
New Zealand needs a massive high-performance reset, some of which has already begun with a restructure that has seen a few long-servers leave and Don Tricker appointed in a new role that will sit above the All Blacks.
But change needs to be more significant than a bit of personnel-shuffling. The relationship between New Zealand Rugby (NZR) and schools needs to be reimagined.
The development pathways from school to the professional ranks need to be simplified and clarified, with responsibilities between provincial unions and Super Rugby Pacific clubs clearly defined.
The Super clubs need to be set free – encouraged to hire overseas coaches, recruit foreign players and lose this idea that there needs to be strategic conformity that aligns with the needs of the national team.
Vern Cotter came to the Blues in 2024 from Fiji via French club Montpellier and won a title with a bruising, physical style that seemingly put him offside with the officer class in the NZR high-performance ranks, who thought it stunted the skill development of certain players.
It may or may not be a coincidence that the All Blacks 23-man squad that was named to play England in November 2025 featured just one Blues player, Beauden Barrett.
Above all else, the question needs to be asked whether success for Super Rugby coaches is deemed to be winning titles – or developing players that fit the playing brief and vision of the All Blacks.
2.) Who’s watching?
Cultivate a competitive domestic broadcast market
The big hope when Silver Lake became an equity party in 2022 was that it would bring the expertise to drive a hike in both domestic and international broadcast income.
There has been some success on the international front, albeit from a low base. From having virtually zero offshore broadcast income 2021-2025, NZR will be banking between $20-$30 million annually (not all agreements have been finalised) in offshore rights between 2026-2031.
But domestic broadcast income will drop from around $100m a year to about $85m a year. This steep decline is primarily due to the lack of competition in the market.
In 2019, when the 2021-2025 deal was agreed, Spark Sport was a genuine player and actively hunting for sports rights.
Its presence drove Sky TV to offer $111m a year to secure the contract (it was later lowered to $100m because of the impact of Covid).
But Spark Sport collapsed in 2022 and with no viable competitor, Sky resecured the rights for 2026-2031 with a reduced (circa $80m) offer.
Without competition, NZR seems destined to be low-balled (according to the national body) by Sky. The equation then is simple: NZR has to build a new broadcast strategy where it cultivates relationships with offshore streaming platforms such as the British-owned DAZN, which bought Fox Sports.
Sky needs to believe that come the time to renegotiate, NZR has a genuine, viable, alternative broadcast option.
This plan needs to include a means to support TVNZ, as now that it has introduced a paywall, it could become a competitive force for acquiring higher-value sports rights.
And a decision needs to be made about whether NZR’s content hub – NZR+ – could operate as a subscription-based live broadcaster.
3.) The Silver Lake question
What is long-term play with Silver Lake?
Currently, Silver Lake’s $262m investment in NZR operates as a loan. But probably in 2027, or 2028, the US fund manager will invoke its right to convert that money into a 7.58% equity stake in NZR’s commercial assets.
At which point, NZR will have effectively sold a part of its income in perpetuity and be liable to pay out the owner of this equity stake distributions that, based on current revenue, will be around $18m-$22m annually.
Question number one therefore is whether NZR should take some kind of action to stop Silver Lake converting, and assuming it decides that it can’t or shouldn’t, the next question will become: what is Silver Lake’s likely timeframe to want to exit and sell its share?
Silver Lake has extended its horizon on its NZR investment beyond its typical seven-year commitment, but it won’t keep its money in the All Blacks forever.
The likelihood of it wanting to sell in the early 2030s is high and NZR needs a clear plan about what that process will look like and the preferred outcomes.
Would, for instance, Silver Lake’s exit provide an opportunity to have a second, better-managed attempt to sell equity to major local institutions that ultimately have an access point for mum-and-dad investors?
4.) Show me the money!
Find the right All Blacks partners
By the end of 2026, NZR is aiming to have locked in its most valuable sponsorships, which will have long-term naming rights to various parts of the All Blacks kit.
Currently, the three sponsors are Altrad (front of jersey), Gallagher (back of shorts) and Toyota (training kit), paying an estimated $70m a year collectively.
All three agreements expire at the end of 2027 and NZR is hoping that the next cycle – it will likely be looking to sign six-year contracts that will run from 2028-2033 – will bring a significant financial uplift.
But the art of these deals is not just about negotiating a better price – there is a need to align with partners who understand the world of rugby, the working mechanics of the All Blacks and who have business interests in the same geographical territories (Japan, USA, UK and Western Europe) that NZR is targeting to win new fans.
In 2021, NZR signed the most lucrative deals in rugby history when Altrad agreed to pay what is believed to be €25m ($49m) a year, and Ineos to pay US$12m a year ($20m) for naming rights to the shorts and training kit.
However, while these agreements brought large cash sums, they came with problems. Altrad’s owner Mohed Altrad had been arrested in 2020 and was then found guilty of corruption and bribery charges in late 2022.
Ineos, a petro-chemical company owned by British billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, had been branded by Greenpeace as the worst polluter of Scotland and then earlier this year, it unilaterally terminated the agreement with the All Blacks three years early.
Not only was there (brand) reputational damage inflicted by the associations, but as both companies operate business-to-business, their sponsorships came with high maintenance and relatively expensive activation costs around match days.
Better sponsors make better All Blacks.
5.) The women’s game
Build a financially viable professional season for women
Women’s rugby is growing in every conceivable way. Every metric – participation, sponsorship, fan engagement, broadcast exposure, the credibility and range of competitions, and the number and quality of international fixtures and tournaments – is up on what it was a decade ago.
But while the landscape for female community and elite players is vastly improved, there is still a significant fix-it list – top of which sits a viable expansion of Super Rugby Aupiki.
The elite professional competition has provided opportunity and payment for ambitious and emerging talent, but it hasn’t been able to expand beyond its initial four teams or link up with Australia.
And what that’s done has trapped a number of players in no (wo)man’s land, where they don’t quite earn enough to exist as fulltime professionals and many are looking to subsidise their income by playing in the NRLW.
Some of the thinking about how to grow women’s professional rugby needs to be radically reshaped – specifically, the default desire for so much to replicate the men’s game, as typified by the recent announcement that the Black Ferns will play South Africa as a curtain-raiser to the third Greatest Rivalry test between the All Blacks and the Springboks.
The concept was sold to deepen the rivalry between the two nations, but the Ferns have no significant history against their Springboks counterparts; the two sides have only met twice before.
To ram a fixture in feels like tokenism and an attempt to force a rivalry that does not exist.
Why not build a tour itinerary for the Black Ferns against England – with whom there is meaningful history – and a genuine chance of commercialising the concept and engaging enough fans for the tour to be financially viable.
6.) What about the Rugby Championship?
Find a pathway for the Southern Hemisphere’s premier international competition
The international landscape over the next five years is going to look a lot different to the previous five years.
This year, the All Blacks will play the first round of Nations Championship games in July, then head to South Africa for an eight-game tour dubbed The Greatest Rivalry.
They will play the second round of Nations Championship games in November, with a final in London, and this new tournament will become a regular biannual feature.
The British and Irish Lions will come to New Zealand in 2029 and South Africa will follow them in 2030 to reciprocate the Greatest Rivalry.
The upshot of this is that the Rugby Championship won’t be played in 2026 and 2030 and will likely be truncated in 2031 to accommodate the World Cup.
It’s a compelling content slate but is it sustainable? What does the next five years after that – 2032-2037 – look like for the All Blacks?
Can the Rugby Championship survive being put on hold every fourth year for New Zealand and South Africa to do their own thing?
Or could we have ad hoc scheduling where the All Blacks build a bespoke five-year itinerary, depending on fan trends and commercial goals?
And what about the wider Pacific region? Now Japan and Fiji are in the Nations Championship, should they be invited into the Rugby Championship from 2032 and New Zealand commit to building that into a competition with the same prestige and value as the Six Nations?
7.) Brand All Blacks
Are there too many All Blacks teams?
In 2009, NZR made the decision to extend the All Blacks name to every national team. The rationale was to give the brand greater exposure and create more inventory for potential global sponsors to stick their names on.
But 16 years on and there are negative ramifications of that decision being felt – not every team in black can deliver the same calibre of results and live the brand values of the All Blacks.
New Zealand’s men’s sevens team, for example, are regularly defeated at world tournaments and the headlines go around the world about the All Blacks losing.
The question is whether the time has come for a rethink and a rebranding exercise to separate the All Blacks from other teams in black?
“I’m not going to say that we shouldn’t have that,” NZR chair David Kirk told the Herald about the 2009 decision to expand the brand.
“Work hasn’t been done on determining whether that makes sense, but things like that are always on the radar.
“I understand that criticism. I don’t know if I agree with it or not – it’s just more work that we’ve got to do to understand.
“We’re always reviewing these things. It’s just part of the business and part of what we do. There’s nothing in place at the moment to say that we’re reviewing it with a view to removing it. We just haven’t done anything on that.
“We’re always reviewing things, and that will be part of whatever reviews we’re doing across the brands.”
8.) Give me hope, Moana
Pacific neighbours need opportunities to flourish on the international stage
Samoa, having made the quarter-finals of the 1991 and 1995 World Cups, took the last qualifying spot for the expanded 2027 tournament, following a draw with Belgium.
A nation that was once competing with the top tier is now battling to make it into a 24-team World Cup.
Samoa is riddled with in-house administrative and governance issues, has virtually no money, no rugby infrastructure and continues to see its phenomenal talent base picked off by every major playing nation, but most notably by New Zealand and Australia.
The situation is not much better in Tonga, which, like Samoa, has been forced to the brink of insolvency and relevance as a result of being locked out of the global system of reciprocal financial agreements, unfair pressures from professional clubs around the world to not release players for tests, and general predatory behaviours to lure Samoan and Tongan talent out of each country.
The creation of Moana Pasifika in 2022 was supposed to be the beginning of a new future for Samoa and Tonga – a presence in the rebranded Super Rugby Pacific on which high-performance pathways could be built.
Now, Moana’s future hangs in the balance and NZR has a role to play in saving the franchise and to look at ways in which it can provide meaningful support to the respective national unions of Samoa and Tonga to recalibrate them into heavy hitters on the international stage.
NZR needs the fan base Moana brings to Super Rugby Pacific and more so, it needs greater rugby heft in the wider Pacific region to enhance and develop more commercially successful and intense international competitions.
Lancaster’s mission should be to change the global game’s (particularly Australia’s) perception of Samoa and Tonga as two nations to exploit and plunder, and instead build and sell a vision where both nations become genuine, top-tier competitors.
9.) Home ground
Lead the debate about New Zealand’s stadiums
One of New Zealand’s barriers in effectively monetising the All Blacks is the relatively small sizes of domestic stadiums that generate comparatively low yields.
Eden Park, as the largest and most lucrative home venue for the All Blacks with a capacity of around 50,000, nets NZR an estimated $4m-$5m when its sells out.
The stadium in Wellington has a capacity of 34,000, the new stadium in Christchurch is 30,000 and the stadium in Dunedin is 28,000 – and while it’s not known what monetary returns these venues deliver for the All Blacks, the range is likely between circa $2.5m (Dunedin) and circa $3.5m (Christchurch and Wellington).
In comparison, the game against Chicago at Soldier Field last year – capacity 61,000 – brought NZR an estimated $6m-$6.5m.
A sold-out Aviva Stadium in Dublin (50,000) is thought to deliver Ireland close to $10m a test, and Twickenham (82,000) returns $22m to England.
New Zealand doesn’t just have smaller venues, it has a smaller, less affluent fanbase, which means it has little leeway to hike prices – as evidenced last year when about 11,000 tickets went unsold for the two tests against Argentina (Wellington and Eden Park).
In late 2024, former chief executive Mark Robinson endorsed the Quay Park stadium proposal in Auckland on the basis it would be a state-of-the-art venue that would improve the fan experience, align with the All Blacks brand in the sense it would be iconic and innovative and, most importantly, it would likely deliver a higher match-day return than Eden Park, while coming with additional commercial opportunities, such as a themed hotel and merchandise outlets.
There was some pushback from existing board members and luminaries who felt Robinson shouldn’t have endorsed any bid and that his stance was interpreted as anti-Eden Park.
But the premise of wanting an improved, more fan-friendly, more financially lucrative domestic venue for the All Blacks – somewhere that can call itself on merit the national stadium – is entirely valid.
10.) Hearts and minds
Win the grassroots PR war
Rugby faces many challenges to retain its social licence as the country’s designated national sport, none bigger than quelling the rising fears about the potential long-term risks of playing a collision sport.
Specifically, there is now – as the limited research and screeds of anecdotal evidence suggest – widespread concern among parents with pre-teen children that playing rugby carries a high likelihood of suffering a brain injury.
In January this year, NZR commissioned research that found 55% of parents with children aged 5-13 said that the danger (risk of serious injury) was the biggest barrier to letting their children play.
NZR carried out the research to try to understand the declining trend in junior boy participation.
The figures show that in 2024 there were 21,737 boys aged 5-13 playing rugby – a number 9.5% down on the 25,944 who were playing in 2019.
In separate research, NZR says it has figures from ACC which show that someone aged 5-13 would have to play 750 games to suffer a concussion.
At junior level, head injuries are not prevalent, or remotely close to being a concern, and the statistics show that a playground is significantly more dangerous than the rugby field.
But perception is more powerful than reality when it comes to parental fears and rugby faces a tough fight to win the PR war to say that it’s a safe sport to play – or at least carries no greater risk than other recreational games.
Former chief executive Robinson said: “As parents, you think deeply about what your children are involved in, especially when they are younger so I get that will always be a consideration.
“I think rugby can put hand on heart and show that it does a huge amount of work about understanding brain and concussion research. One of the things I am proud of in New Zealand is that we have maintained, despite the challenges of resourcing, a good level of investment in player welfare and injury research.
“We have also been proactive in the law variations we have introduced at the community level and we have seen some positive progress around that with teenage level of participation especially.”
Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.