Euro rugby goal a nice try but can’t convert to reality
A group of prominent Kiwi rugby figures were sold a dream to be part of the next big thing in Romanian rugby. They ended up out of money, and struggling to buy food. David Long reports.
Cooper Vuna, an Auckland-born former Wallaby, jumped at the chance to play rugby in Eastern Europe. An investor wanted to turn a small Romanian seaside club into the next big thing, and it seemed like a great opportunity.
Instead, Vuna and a number of other New Zealand rugby figures, including Kiwi halfback Paul Griffen, former Counties-Manukau player Troy Nathan, and former Hurricanes and Blues midfielder Cardiff Vaega, ended up facing financial hardship after going two months without pay.
They blame Romanian businessman Ionel Rusen, and former Ma¯ ori All Black John Akurangi, who was the club’s director of rugby.
‘‘The guy we’re talking about [Akurangi] has gone up and out of it and left us in the dust, to worry about everything else,’’ Vuna said.
‘‘This is a person who’s left a lot of dirt behind and hasn’t replied or talked to us since.’’
Akurangi, meanwhile, told the Sunday StarTimes he was a victim himself. Rusen acknowledged the players had gone months without pay, but added that the club was now ‘‘broke’’, partly due to Covid-19.
Rugby in Romania is a moderately popular sport, with its own domestic competition called SuperLiga, and the national team is one of the strongest in Europe outside the Six Nations.
Rusen and Akurangi had a dream of turning the seaside club of ACS Tomitanii Constanta into the next powerhouse of European rugby.
Mid-2021, players, coaches and officials were signed up to initially play out the final eight weeks of the season from August to October for up to €15,000 each (NZ$25,500), and then to be part of a three-to-five-year project to make the club one of the best in Europe.
‘‘This first started up in Italy,’’ Nathan told the Star-Times.
‘‘The investor and this guy we were talking to back in New Zealand, linked up with myself and Paul and wanted to get a group of rugby players who could come in at the last minute.
‘‘These guys were up and out in two weeks, so some of them left current deals, to take on this eight-week contract. But theoretically some of these contracts were signed for two or three years.’’
Akurangi brought in Nathan, who had played around Europe in Ireland, Scotland and Italy before going into coaching after leaving Counties. Nathan is currently a business owner based in Ireland.
‘‘He [Akurangi] got me involved to use the contacts I had with players,’’ Nathan said. ‘‘I had a couple of agents involved as well, and we managed to get 17 foreign boys who flew over to Romania.’’
Griffen, who was born in Dunedin and grew up in Christchurch, has lived in Italy for 22 years. He played 42 tests for the Italian national team between 2004 and 2009, and has coached with the Italian Rugby Union for the past seven years.
‘‘We’d been friends for about 10 years,’’ Griffen said, describing his relationship with Akurangi.
They later met with the investor for dinner one evening in Milan, and everything ‘‘seemed very kosher’’.
The squad was assembled and Griffen managed to bring in Vuna, who had played for various UK teams since leaving Australia and moving to Europe in 2015.
Vuna said the players were put up in a ‘‘beautiful area’’ when they arrived in the coastal city of Constanta, but the training facilities, and Romanian rugby in general, ‘‘wasn’t the best’’. ‘‘It was close to the wild west. I could go to Fiji or Tonga and their facilities would be twice as good.’’
Griffen went in as assistant coach, but quickly found himself managing because the manager ‘‘couldn’t find his way out of a cardboard box’’.
‘‘On the organisational side of it, it was really poor. There was no one around, no one did anything, no one organising doctors, or communicating with players on when training times were.’’
Griffen did his best, but ‘‘it was tough’’. ‘‘There was no support and my only Romanian was through Google Translate.’’
Despite the challenges, Griffen said the players built up a ‘‘really strong’’ culture. ‘‘The boys were hooked, line and sinker on that dream of being a powerhouse of Romanian rugby and trying to rule European rugby too.’’
But there was a bigger problem than the lack of facilities and organisation. Getting paid. Those joining the club from overseas were promised their first payment as soon as they arrived in the country. That didn’t happen. Days, and then weeks ticked by.
‘‘We were asking where the boys’ money was,’’
Nathan said. ‘‘Fair play to the boys, they knew they were there for one job, which was to play rugby, so they didn’t put too much pressure on. But after a couple of weeks they were questioning, ‘where’s the money?’’’
Nathan said there were ‘‘accumulating excuses’’.
‘‘One was the visa, that we had to drive out of the country so we could get a stamp on our passports, and they could sign contracts. It was all s…, but we believed it, because we wanted to get paid.’’
As the weeks dragged on, some players had to call home to New Zealand, so they could afford groceries.
‘‘The young guys would ring up their mums and dads to get money,’’ Nathan said.
‘‘We did put pressure on the club to feed the boys, and they did supply some food. But towards the end of it the boys were struggling.’’
Nathan said it reached a point where the players were ‘‘drained out’’, as tensions rose over getting paid. Almost half of them didn’t want to keep playing.
‘‘By the end of the eight weeks everyone was fed up and keen to get home. There was no talk about the future of the club, only about getting the boys paid what they were owed.’’
Months later, the players are still trying to find out what happened to their wages.
Griffen said he and Nathan had caught up with Rusen a few times at his local office while playing in Romania, but ‘‘everything he said fell through’’.
‘‘Over the last four months we’ve been trying to get clarity from him over what’s going on. We’re just after an honest answer. If he said to us there’s nothing, we would have been p…ed off, but at least we would have had an honest answer.’’
As for Akurangi, Griffen said he just disappeared.
‘‘When we got back from our last game on the Saturday evening, he basically abandoned
‘‘By the end of the eight weeks everyone was fed up and keen to get home. There was no talk about the future of the club, only about getting the boys paid what they were owed.’’ Troy Nathan
everyone. He packed his bags and left us,’’ Griffen said.
‘‘He came back on the Monday through to Tuesday and apart from that I’ve sent one message to him.
‘‘I haven’t talked to him, and I’ll be honest, if I never talk to him again it won’t bother me.’’
Vuna said Akurangi’s departure left some players ‘‘running out of days with their visas, and they became overstayers’’.
‘‘We tried to help get these boys out of Romania. We tried to find answers through John [Akurangi], through Ionel [Rusen], and we were getting nothing, zero communication.’’
Akurangi disputed that he was to blame. He said he was just as much a victim as the players, and hadn’t ‘‘received a cent’’ for his time with the team. He said he did his research before getting involved with the Romanian project, and had known Rusen for 10 years.
‘‘We were asked to be co-owners of the club with Ionel,’’ Akurangi said.
‘‘We said we were interested but didn’t want to put any money into it, he said we don’t have to, so we said we’d bring our experience and contacts into it.
‘‘We then made contact with a number of players and brought them over.’’
Akurangi didn’t arrive in Romania until a week after the players did, because of a mix-up over plane tickets.
‘‘When I got there, I’d expected to see everything was OK. But I found that the first payment for the players hadn’t been made,’’ he said.
‘‘I had meetings with Ionel to ask what was going on, and he said he had problems, because none of the players had a visa to be in Romania, so none of them were able to receive payments, and they’d have to work on getting visas.’’
It was suggested that the players should leave Romania to get visas after their first match.
‘‘We lost that game, then Ionel started complaining about not paying them, because we lost,’’ Akurangi recalled.
‘‘I said ‘it doesn’t work like that’. Then every day for the next three weeks I had arguments with him about paying the team. They were heavy arguments, and it was putting a lot of stress on me.’’
Akurangi described how he had broken down in front of the players at one point, and said he was ‘‘sorry for the situation’’.
As for saying he left the team in the lurch after the last game, Akurangi said he had been told he was getting kicked out of his apartment.
‘‘We lost our last game, we came back and the s… hit the fan,’’ he said.
‘‘When I woke up in the morning in the hotel, I got a call saying I had to leave the apartment immediately.’’
Akurangi said once he had transferred to another hotel, he went back to join the players.
‘‘The boys were leaving over the next few days. Some of the boys didn’t want to go, because they thought if they left, they weren’t going to get paid.’’
A small amount of money was eventually forthcoming in December, but it was nowhere near what the players were expecting.
Akurangi said he had also suffered, and hadn’t ‘‘received a cent’’ for his time in Romania.
‘‘I had no money, so I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t able to drink anything,’’ he said.
‘‘I refused to ask my wife for money because she was in New Zealand in a rental, with no money coming in for work.’’
Akurangi said he was ‘‘100 per cent a victim like the other guys’’.
‘‘But I do take responsibility, because I asked them to be involved in it. We did check it out first, and I thought it was a great thing to try to create. But the problem being that Ionel didn’t pay.’’
Akurangi is now back in New Zealand, still without any regular income. He said if he could pay the players what they were owed, he would.
‘‘If I can, then I feel as though I should pay the boys privately. I’m not saying I can, because I can’t, I don’t have that money. But I’d like to find that for them.
‘‘I always have it in the back of my mind that I need to sort out the boys. Whether I can or can’t, I don’t know, but I’m trying to find the solution.’’
In the meantime, Akurangi said the experience had left him struggling financially, and acknowledged it had left a ‘‘bad mark’’ on his reputation.
‘‘I am where I am now, and I’m struggling because of that situation.’’
When the Star-Times spoke to Rusen in Romania, he had a different take on how things had played out. He said the players had all been paid what they were owed, albeit not until December, and the majority of the money they think they didn’t get was win bonuses. (The team lost all four of their games.)
‘‘These players, they were paid for their contracts, they didn’t receive their bonus,’’ Rusen said.
Rusen acknowledged that some staff members such as Akurangi were yet to be paid, but said they would receive funds ‘‘maybe in one month’’.
‘‘At the moment, the team has finance problems because of the coronavirus. The municipality hasn’t paid the club. It’s not a private club, it’s a club from the city.’’
He said he believed the players understood that a large part of their wages was from win bonuses.
‘‘We have the contracts and the bonus in these contracts. They received €2400 [NZ$4065], with expenses, apartment, transfers, cars and everything.’’
But Vuna said didn’t know anything about the win bonuses.
‘‘For a player and someone of my calibre, I look into those sorts of details in contracts and dive deeper than what it is,’’ he said.
‘‘If I would have seen it, I would have reacted differently, I wouldn’t have turned up to the airport if it relied on win bonuses.
‘‘We were told that as soon as we arrived, we’d get a second contract. We’d sign it and that’s obviously the bonus for what the rest of the pay was going to be, but we didn’t get it.’’
Rusen insisted there was only one contract, but said he sympathised with the players and staff.
‘‘I’m really sorry about this situation, because I’m friends with Cooper and the other guys, and I’m an ex-player,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s not my fault, I’ve done my best to pay them in the past, and we delayed for two months, but paid the contracts.
‘‘We’ve tried to help these people, but at the moment the city isn’t sending any money to the club, and I think the club will disappear.’’
Vuna, Nathan and Griffen said they didn’t believe they or anyone else would ever receive any more money.
Despite what they described as a terrible experience, the players said there were some silver linings. They agreed to play their last game in Romania for each other, even though they hadn’t been paid.
‘‘We wanted to do it purely for the love of the game,’’ Vuna said. ‘‘We got upset and we questioned ourselves on the way to the field whether we made the right decision, but we said ‘let’s do it, let’s play this game’.
‘‘That’s the message we want to share with everyone ... that there is love in this game.’’