Circle the wagons
What works for league doesn’t necessarily work for football or rugby.
The expat scenario is well established in football, to the point of being pretty much the norm for leading players from Latin American countries whose clubs cannot compete financially with the European powerhouses.
Given this trend, it’s interesting to look at the recent World Cup records of Latin American giants Argentina and Brazil. From 1978 to 1990, Argentina made three of the four World Cup finals, winning two. Since then they’ve made one final, losing to Germany in 2014.
From 1994 to 2002, Brazil made three successive finals, winning two. They haven’t made a final since. As tournament hosts in 2014, they suffered the scalding embarrassment of losing 7-1 to Germany in the semi-finals.
Three of the past four finals have been all-European affairs, Argentina in 2014 being the only non-European finalist. A tentative conclusion would be that having the best players from around the world in your domestic competition lifts standards, which benefits your national team and brings more money into the game. And vice versa: when your best players ply their trade offshore, standards at home decline as does, over time, corporate support for the game.
It’s a cautionary tale that would seem to vindicate New Zealand Rugby’s strategy of making overseasbased players ineligible for the All Blacks while moving heaven and
Earth to keep our biggest stars here. It’s also a reminder that, in professional sport, past achievements and historical pre-eminence don’t guarantee a permanent place at the top table.