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Please stop throwing good money at the Rebels
By Hamish Bidwell
I doubt many people would lament the passing of the Melbourne Rebels.
Certainly not anyone who regards professional sport as the survival of the fittest.
Be it on the park or off, sports teams need to pull their weight. If it proves the Rebels can’t be financially sustained beyond 2024, then so be it.
Rugby has been a hard sell in Melbourne.
I keep hearing it’s one of the great sports cities of the world and Victorians would turn up in their droves to watch a game of marbles or two flies crawl up the wall.
The success, or otherwise, of Super Rugby Pacific’s annual Super Round at AAMI Park would probably give lie to that theory.
Australia has too many Super Rugby franchises, from a high-performance perspective.
Yes, having a team in Melbourne, along with the Perth-based Western Force, broadens rugby’s footprint in the country and exposes more players to professional footy.
But, as I’ve argued before, fans don’t want to watch development competitions. They want to see the best of the best, not youngsters on the way up with a few stars reluctantly having a game between rest weeks and sabbaticals.
Super Rugby enthusiasts yearn for the competition of yesteryear, when Australia had just the Brumbies, Waratahs and Reds and regularly contested the playoff places.
Three franchises didn’t hurt the Wallabies, either. Far from it in fact.
That model built elite teams and combinations that proved similarly effective on the international stage.
I’m not sure five similarly inept Australian franchises has done much to help or enthuse anyone.
The Melbourne Storm rugby league franchise worked in that city because they’re winners.
Yes, it was the beneficiary of a merger between the old Australian Rugby League competition and Super League, which meant players from suddenly-defunct clubs were going spare back in 1998, but it was titles that earned the Storm a fanbase.
The Storm won the NRL competition in just its second season and have been consistently excellent for much of the time since, notwithstanding salary cap indiscretions.
The team isn’t wildly popular - Melbourne being an AFL town and all - but fans know the Storm’s best players will take the park most weeks and the team contest the playoffs every year.
The Rebels, in comparison, have lacked an identity, stars or success and fans have voted accordingly.
At some point you have to stop throwing money at a concept that isn’t working.
The loss of a team probably wouldn’t augur well for Super Rugby Pacific as a whole. But, then again, the model’s not really working anyway.
If 2024 does mark the end of the Rebels, I hope that provides the impetus for administrators to make some hard decisions about the future of the competition.
Will guys simply become full-time All Blacks or Wallabies one day? Should Super Rugby be a semi-professional development tool to replace our outdated and unloved NPC?
Do we adopt a model where international rugby is the vehicle for the professional game and players play tests across the globe for 10 months of the year?
Maybe our franchises become based in Europe and play in their league and cup competitions, if tests aren’t deemed the way forward?
Everything has to be looked at, as we face the inconvenient truth that Super Rugby Pacific cannot pay its way.
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