All Blacks Baltimore test: Is NZ Rugby’s money chase hurting results? – Gregor Paul

THE FACTS

In November last year, former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw spoke publicly, lamenting somewhat that he suspects the current cohort of professional players has a “me-first” attitude.

The man who most New Zealanders consider the greatest All Black in history – a position he achieved through his astonishing application, selflessness and commitment to the collective cause – believes the typical modern player has a different attitude to their predecessor.

“I get a sense it starts to become more about what I can get rather than what I can give,” McCaw said.

“One of the things in the All Blacks was always about when you come in there, it’s what you give to the team, and you’ll get rewards out of that – but it’s about putting ‘we’ in front of ‘me’.”

There are countless reasons why this mindset has prevailed, not the least of which is that everyone under the age of 35 these days seems to refer to themselves as an influencer, and think that if they flick their hair and pout their lips in a social-media post, they will change the course of history.

But so too might it be true that the players are a product of their employment environment and that they have been influenced by New Zealand Rugby’s similarly determined attitude to think primarily – possibly exclusively – about potential financial returns before it commits to anything?

Nowhere is this approach more evident than in the national body’s decision-making about the All Blacks’ test match programme, which has become so heavily weighted towards making money as to raise legitimate concerns that the team are being set up to inevitably suffer a drop in success.

It has reached the point where it seems NZR believes that making money is the sole reason the All Blacks bother playing anyone – illustrated perfectly by the announcement that the fourth test of the Greatest Rivalry series will be in Baltimore.

This seems to me to be the most egregious money-grab in rugby’s history: a decision that sells the genuine rugby fan short, compromises the physical well-being of the players and disrupts the nostalgic narrative of this being a traditional tour.

If the fourth game against the Springboks had been allocated to Twickenham as originally intended, it could have made sense: a (potential) decider in front of the significant, respective expat populations of both nations in London, which is one direct 12-hour flight away from South Africa.

Instead, the day after playing the third of three brutal tests in consecutive weekends, both teams will endure an 18-hour journey to a city on the United States eastern seaboard that has zero affinity with rugby and no historic or cultural links to either South Africa or New Zealand.

The marketing story is that it’s taking the game’s greatest rivalry to an emerging rugby market and driving interest ahead of the 2031 World Cup in the USA, but the real, unspun reason both teams are washing up in Baltimore is the 71,000 seats at the home of the city’s NFL team, the Ravens.

NZR enjoyed its single largest match-day payday ever when it banked close to $6 million from the match against Ireland in November last year at the 61,000-seat Soldier Field in Chicago.

With a bigger marketing budget, better dynamic pricing initiatives and 10,000 more tickets to sell, the game at Baltimore’s M&T Bank Stadium could net the national body $7m-plus.

Chasing returns of this stature could be framed as astute and focused financial management by NZR, driven by a belief that the $32m it made in 2024 from match-day revenue was not a fair reflection of the All Blacks’ brand power.

They played eight tests in 2024 in which they were able to profit from gate revenue and corporate hospitality, making an average of $4m per game.

This compares with Ireland, who are estimated to make about $12m whenever Dublin’s Aviva Stadium sells out, and the $22m that England make when Twickenham is full.

New Zealand doesn’t have the stadium size or population base to drive the sort of match-day payouts NZR is hoping for, which is why it’s increasingly looking to schedule revenue-generating fixtures in larger, offshore venues.

In the past four years, the All Blacks have played in the USA, Japan twice, and London three times for the money those bigger venues generate.

That NZR wants to squeeze more ticket and hospitality revenue out of the All Blacks is understandable. But the question now is whether it is pursuing money at the expense of all other considerations such as home fan expectations, high-performance needs, and global obligations to grow the sport through scheduling fixtures with Tier Two nations. Crucially, is the pursuit of money affecting the ability of the team to win?

It’s certainly fair to ask whether the All Blacks’ schedule in the past two years was a hidden factor in the demise of recently departed head coach Scott Robertson?

The All Blacks played 16 of their 27 tests on his watch away from home (60%) – a figure that would have risen to 63% by the end of his contracted four-year tenure.

By comparison, in Graham Henry’s first four years (2004-2007) as head coach, the All Blacks played 47% of their tests away from home.

In Steve Hansen’s first four years as head coach (2012-2015), the All Blacks played 54% of their tests away from home. If Covid-19 hadn’t hit, Ian Foster’s All Blacks would have played 58% of their tests away from home (but the Rugby Championship in 2020 and 2021 was played entirely in Australia).

There has been an incremental creep in how often the All Blacks play away, and with it comes unappreciated challenges around player recovery, accelerated on-set fatigue, diminished training opportunities and of course, the heightened challenge of winning in hostile environments.

But NZR has not only been putting the All Blacks in bigger, offshore venues, it has also doubled down on the sales pitch by pitting them against higher-calibre opposition.

During Robertson’s tenure the All Blacks played four tests each against the teams currently ranked one (South Africa), three (England), five (France), six (Argentina), and seven (Australia), two against the fourth-ranked Ireland, and one each against the teams currently ranked eight-12 (Fiji, Scotland, Italy, Wales and Japan).

Foster’s All Blacks had two tests against Fiji, and one each against Tonga, USA and Japan; Hansen’s tenure saw two games against Japan, two against Samoa, and one against the USA, while Henry’s team played Fiji twice, Samoa, Canada and Argentina when they were not the team they are now.

The stats clearly show that the commercial plan of maximising game-day returns is making coaching the team tougher. NZR needs to be wary that when it inevitably announces in April this year that it enjoyed record revenue in 2025, it also saw the All Blacks endure a record defeat to the Springboks in the same period.

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.