As Julian Savea is discovering, not all overseas contracts work out well for New Zealand’s players.
CLUBS AROUND THE WORLD ARE WILLING TO PAY EXTRAORDINARY SUMS FOR NEW ZEALAND’S BEST PLAYERS AND YET SO FEW HAVE EVER EXCELLED OFFSHORE AND IN FACT, QUITE OFTEN, THINGS GO HORRIBLY WRONG.
THEY DO LET YOU KNOW SOMETIMES IF YOU’RE NOT PERFORMING TO THE LEVEL THEY EXPECT OF YOU.’ AARON CRUDEN
the sales brochure always makes a compelling case. Foreign rugby clubs certainly know how to sell themselves to New Zealanders.
They grab the attention with the salary, which is usually astronomical and then they sell this vision of them being a caring club with family values and state of the art training facilities.
In many cases the sales pitch is mostly an accurate reflection of what the new Kiwi signing will encounter when he arrives.
or at least it is mostly an accurate reflection of what the club believes the new Kiwi signing will encounter when he arrives.
But the vision and the reality often veer off course once the player is settled at his new club and the overseas experience doesn’t always turn out to be all it is cracked up to be for New Zealand’s leading players.
And likewise, as a result, New Zealand’s leading players don’t often turn out to be all they are cracked up to be when they arrive at their new club.
There’s no doubt that some New Zealanders have thrived offshore in a way they didn’t when they were based in New Zealand.
Nick Evans, who was an All Blacks understudy to Daniel Carter between 2004 and 2007, took his game to a higher level when he joined Harlequins in 2008.
He’d be considered, and not just by fans of the Quins, to be one of the best Kiwi imports of the professional age.
The Irish would say Isa Nacewa, who was at Leinster between 2008 and 2013 and then again between 2015 and 2018 when he came out of retirement, is the most influential New Zealand signing ever made in European rugby.
Daniel Carter had a big impact on Racing 92 when he was there between 2015 and 2018 – guiding them to their first championship in 26 years and Edinburgh Rugby say Todd Blackadder was the man who fixed their culture of accepting underperformance.
But the success stories are heavily outweighed by negative experiences: of players failing to deliver what they were paid to and ultimately hating their time offshore.
It is more common to hear of high profile New Zealanders struggling offshore or, to not hear anything about them at all as they trundle through games without any kind of impact.
It is strange that New Zealanders remain in such high demand around the world when so few have actually proven to be value for money.
And equally, as more Kiwis fail to settle or thrive overseas, it has no discernible impact on the number who continue to sign offshore contracts.
This inability of star imports to settle seems to increasingly be the case. In 2017 Aaron Cruden left for ambitious French club Montpellier after accepting an offer that was reportedly worth close to $1.5m a season.
He was 28 and a 50-test All Black with a World Cup winner’s medal and arrived with a big reputation and high expectations.
He also arrived straight after a Super Rugby campaign and series against the Lions and he struggled to assimilate to the point when sometimes his own fans turned hostile.
“They do let you know sometimes if you’re not performing to the level they expect of you,” Cruden confessed earlier this year.
“I was pretty hard on myself last year, especially when I first got here if I didn’t think I played very well. I set high expectations of myself, so I expected better. I think the club, the fans, the players did as well and rightly so.
“Coming off the back of a Super Rugby season and the British and Irish Lions series, I probably didn’t realise maybe how fatigued I was, not only physically but mentally. I tried to rip into things here straight away.
“Looking back at it now, the bigger picture was allowing myself time to get the flow of how rugby is over here.”
His former sparring partner for the All Blacks No 10 shirt, Lima Sopoaga, was enduring something similar across the Channel at Wasps.
Like Cruden, Sopoaga had decided, having seen the brilliance of Beauden Barrett and the emerging potential of Richie Mo’unga and Damian McKenzie, that he would be better off taking the huge money deal the Coventry-based club had offered him in early 2018.
He was honest enough to admit that the move was driven by money and his need to fund his extended family and equally honest to admit a few months after he arrived, that he was failing to live up to expectations.
“You’ve just got to realise the way you play in New Zealand isn’t necessarily the best way over here. There’s not a right or wrong way, it’s just different.
“For eight to nine years I was at the Highlanders and I learned a way of thinking I thought was best for me. Here it’s not what they do.
“It’s not that I don’t love this but there are things that do get you down. It’s not all glitz and glamour. A lot of the time people just see the 80 minutes, they don’t see what goes on behind closed doors and how winning and losing can affect players.”
But neither Cruden nor Sopoaga had to endure the onslaught that came Julian Savea’s way at Toulon.
The former All Black superstar signed with the French club in June 2018 on a deal reportedly worth around one million Euros a season.
Toulon’s owner, Mourad Boudjellal, had seen the destructive power of Savea first hand when the All Blacks wing destroyed France at the 2015 World Cup.
It was a Lomu-esque performance from Savea and it seduced Boudjellal, who didn’t seem to track the big wing in the following three years.
Savea, as everyone in New Zealand knows, struggled with his conditioning and form in 2016 and never got close to being the player he was in the earlier part of his career.
He lost his confidence and some of his pace and the try-scoring dried up in 2017 and 2018 to the point where he not only stopped being picked by the All Blacks, he also spent long periods on the bench for the Hurricanes.
Savea left New Zealand not as a superstar All Black but as a former superstar All Black who still had something to offer, just not as much as he once had.
Obviously Boudjellal was expecting more. After a loss to Agen which saw Toulon slip to 11th, he erupted.
“I’m going to ask for a DNA test,” he said of Savea. “They must have swapped him on the plane [when he joined from the Hurricanes last year]. If I were him I would apologise and go back to my home country.
“I’ve told him that he was free to go and wasn’t welcome at Toulon any more. I find his behaviour unacceptable. I went through the quarter-finals of the 2015 France-New Zealand World Cup and I always wonder if it’s the same player, the same man.
“He has been very demanding and since he has been here, he is no longer. I can not think it’s normal for a player paid more than 1 million euros per year to go on holiday to Fiji for a month in December... he just had to attend his brother’s wedding, not take long leave.
“He has a little more than a year of contract, it will be very long for him. Beyond what he thinks. I will not complain. You think he gave a little of his salary to the young Simon Moretti, who is 18, touches 500 euros a month and defended the club while he returned quietly vacation? No.”
No one enjoyed seeing Savea humiliated like that but it did at least serve a strategic purpose for New Zealand Rugby. More than ever the national body feels under siege from foreign predators and the media narrative has blown things out of proportion – suggesting that players are leaving in unprecedented numbers, chasing the overseas dream.
Savea’s situation, and to a lesser extent the predicament of both Cruden and Sopoaga, highlighted the truth that the overseas dream can easily turn into a nightmare.
It was great PR – a way to sell New Zealand to its own playing base and strike a cautionary note to those considering a shift overseas.
New Zealand can’t match the money available abroad so it tends to compete on the quality of its professional set up.
Player welfare is taken seriously and individuals know they won’t be over trained or over played and they also know they won’t be tugged one way by their club then another by their country.
Most, if not all Super Rugby clubs, have collaborative environments where players are able to have input into gameplans rather than dictatorial regimes where coaches say exclusively what they want.
And thanks to the collective agreement there are clear rules about rest, recovery, holiday and assembly periods.
The situation offshore is variable. There are plenty of supremely driven and well managed clubs which have excellent high performance structures.
But there are also some clubs where the situation is volatile and Rob Nichol, who is in charge of the New Zealand Rugby Players’ Association has encountered numerous scenarios.
“The first one is in certain markets it is not that unusual for players to not be paid,” he says.
“There is normally a reason for that and you have to remember that in many places the clubs are owned by a private individual or a business and unlike a national union, they don’t have cash reserves set aside if things go wrong.
“The biggest issue though is that in New Zealand the culture in most or nearly all teams is all about empowerment and development. The coaches encourage players to be all they can be and keep growing as players and people. It is an inspirational and aspirational culture.
“But often in overseas clubs they can be a lot more individualistic. There can be players who are there for the pay cheque and they don’t like outsiders coming in trying to change things.
“They think things work just fine, they don’t want to do any more than they do and they have a plan to have a 10-14 year career. They don’t like the apple cart being upset and we have had a few players who have gone into clubs and encountered this attitude which has made life hard for them.”
And it is not just obstinate, stuck-in-their-ways teammates that Kiwi imports can encounter.
Just as bad are the so-called ‘career coaches’ whose number one priority is self-preservation. There are plenty of them around – experienced professionals who want to be coaching for life.
“If you look at how things are in New Zealand we have coaches such as Aaron Mauger, Scott Robertson, Leon McDonald, Tana Umaga who have been around New Zealand rugby for... well... for ever.
“These guys really care about their players and when the going gets tough they get tight as a group and work through what they need to with the players. When they win they are respectful and humble.
“But a lot of the time coaches overseas will throw their players to the slaughter when things aren’t going well. The players will get the blame because the coach wants to preserve his reputation above all and that is one of the reasons why we have been so cautious about recruiting overseas coaches to come to work in New Zealand.”
There are other hidden traps that can blight an offshore contract. Now that Savea has endured what he has, more players will be wary of committing to a club which has a volatile owner.
There have also been stories in the past about star imports being given free accommodation by the club, only to find that the locks have been changed after they return home from a loss.
Some players, says Nichol, haven’t been able to get their previous club to sign release papers to allow them to take another contract and perhaps specific to France, there have been claims made about coaching staff indulging in extreme acts of violence.
Scotland coach Gregor Townsend spent a few seasons at Brive where he says the entire forward pack was ordered to run over the top of him in the changing room before the game because the coach didn’t feel he was enthusiastic enough about the physical elements.
He also claims the same coach, Laurent Seigne, once head-butted one of his own players before a game.
Former All Blacks assistant coach Wayne Smith came up with the phrase ‘Hollow Men’. It’s what he would call those former All Blacks who had made the decision to head overseas and obviously privately regretted it. The All Blacks would be in London,
Paris, Dublin or wherever and always, a few former players who had recently left New Zealand would show up at the team hotel looking to catch-up with old team-mates.
Smith would say that he could see their pain – that it was obvious they had lost something by no longer having the All Blacks to aspire to or the steadiness and certainty of the New Zealand coaching environment to keep them on an even keel.
And that is the hidden danger of leaving New Zealand – it leaves players with money as their driver.
They lose the connection with why they are playing and often, they become pay cheque players in it just to fill the bank account.
There is no hunger, no passion, no desire to be better each week. The intrinsic motivation tends to die and many former All Blacks will know they have headed offshore and done only enough to get by.
They know they are not working as hard as they were in New Zealand are not as
passionate about the club for which they have signed and they know that they can probably hide that truth from the public but not themselves.
Smith wasn’t alone in seeing these Hollow Men. Former All Blacks captain Richie McCaw was aware of how his team-mates changed when they left New Zealand and it hammered home to him how much he didn’t want to become a similarly lost soul.
“I really had no desire to [ play overseas],” he said. “I always said that if I felt like I could play professional rugby then I wanted to play it here because I loved playing here.
“Everyone is motivated a little bit differently, but to go and play rugby just because you want to earn a fat check, it really didn’t spin my wheels.
“I would have hated to go over there and thought ‘what have I done’, so that’s the main reason and if I want to go over to the south of France I’ll find another reason to.
“Of course you hear about big contracts thrown around and you do think ‘oh, I wonder what [I would get]’, but I didn’t even want to go down that path and be influenced for the wrong reasons.
“The reasons I play the game wasn’t because of that.”
Media typically hype the value of the contract and equate huge payments with a good deal and can never quite understand that there is more to high performance than money.
This simplistic representation fails to understand that it can be a joyless and soulless experience playing overseas and that’s why former players, coaches, executives and agents usually urge individuals to not be in any rush to leave New Zealand.
The likes of Carter, Ma’a Nonu and Conrad Smith have shown it’s possible to have a long and successful career in New Zealand and then enjoy a few, highly lucrative and rewarding years offshore.
They left New Zealand with nothing to prove and in the full knowledge they were disconnecting.
But they had the maturity to understand what they were getting into and the security of knowing they had given all they could to New Zealand and the All Blacks.
Those younger players who hear the sales pitch and can’t wait to sign the offshore contract need to be wary and realise that the vision doesn’t always or even often match the reality.
I REALLY HAD NO DESIRE TO [PLAY OVERSEAS], “I ALWAYS SAID THAT IF I FELT LIKE I COULD PLAY PROFESSIONAL RUGBY THEN I WANTED TO PLAY IT HERE BECAUSE I LOVED PLAYING HERE.’ RICHIE MCCAW