In days of old, there were only four ‘professions’ – law, medicine. the priesthood, and the military profession of arms. While over time the professions have expanded to include a range of different occupations including engineering, architecture, accounting and teaching, these days the term professional is used to describe just about anything that earns you a wage.
Rugby league went professional in 1907 and rugby union in 1995, even though in its truest sense neither are ‘professions’. In fact, quite the opposite, both are actually trades, and their players are tradespeople.
Rugby league have known this for well over a hundred years. The reason you can tell is not given away in their sneering distaste for tweed jackets, leather elbow patches, the old school tie and a good Bordeaux, but rather in their pathways programs. League pathways don’t look like white-collar talent management programs, they look like proper blue-collar apprenticeships.
If you look at the league pathways you will see that long before you get to play NRL first-grade, and certainly long before you get to be an NRL superstar, you have to serve your apprenticeship. That apprenticeship starts at 14 or 15, sees you move (and prove yourself) in dedicated junior competitions like the Harold Matthews Cup (Under-17s), SG Ball (Under-19s), Jersey Flegg (Under-21s) and then NSW or QLD Cup. Like any good apprentice scheme, you aren’t getting paid much as you work your way through the system, but you are getting two important things: skill development and job opportunity.
Generational ‘talent’ will always be the exception that proves the rule, and will jump over the crowd to the top faster. But for every Joseph-Aukuso Sua’ali’i, there are another ten members of the squad that no one but ardent club fans would recognise, but without whom the club would fold.
Joseph Suaalii of the Sydney Roosters is tackled. (Photo by Brendon Thorne/Getty Images)
While we always focus on the superstar talents, what league has built is a solid, deep and reliable ‘workforce’ of sporting tradies that support the talent at the top and the broader structure as a sport in this country. When we talk of a professional sport’s ‘depth’ this is what we are actually describing, not the number of teams they can support or even the number of players so much, but rather the resilience and reliability of the workforce. The Kiwis have always understood this too – rugby in NZ has always been an ‘everyman’ sport – even when it was amateur – supported by strong structure and junior-club, provincial-professional apprenticeship-like pathways.
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And so now to Australian rugby. There’s been a significant amount of discussion of late about what the structure of the Australian rugby competition should look like. Should we stay in Super Rugby? Do we need a dedicated third tier, or a national club competition? However, much of this discussion is inconsequential if you aren’t able to design and implement systems to attract, recruit and retain a reliable and resilient workforce, both in terms of quality and quantity. To severely misuse Kevin Costner’s words in that epic movie of the 90s, Field of Dreams, just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come.
When rugby became a wage-earning occupation everything changed, except our understanding, and our middle-class biases. Gone are the amateur days of lawyers stopping by for rugby training prior to golf, or surgeons having a run around the park having performed their third breast augmentation for the day. Rugby now, as a job, is fundamentally a blue-collar occupation, we just largely refuse to acknowledge it.
Roger Tuivasa-Sheck is tackled by Japan’s defence while representing the All Blacks. (Photo by Koki Nagahama/Getty Images)
Rugby in Australia keeps trying to apply white-collar methodologies to a blue-collar problem. It tries to ‘poach talent’ from other sports, like competing consultancies do for rising stars and C-suite executives. What rugby should be doing instead is offering apprenticeships – and lots of them – to kids to build up the workforce in this country. Offer kids jobs instead of trying to poach other people’s well-developed talent.
Give young people a shot at making rugby an honest livelihood and you will slowly but surely build up the type of resilience and true depth that make national club competitions and NRC-like tiers entirely sustainable and commercially viable, and tribally engaging.
The reason league gets so vociferous about rugby’s attempt to poach its players is not just about the public school vs private school thing, it’s because they have worked so hard over generations to build their workforce, develop their kids, invest in their livelihoods, and provide them a solid trade, and then along comes the ‘corporate types’ who want something for nothing. I’d be angry too.
For every kid who gets picked for an SG Ball or Jersey Flegg club team, there are another ten or fifteen who just miss out on realistically making rugby league a wage-earning job; but only just. These are the kids that rugby must be targeting. Don’t spend a million dollars on one generational talent, when the same amount will buy you 30 still very talented apprentices who will start to build you the type of depth you need. Offer these kids a job! Rugby has got to stop working from the top (the Wallabies) down. Even the much-touted ‘grassroots’ theory of future success is built off outdated amateur notions of old-school-tie clubs rather than proper employment opportunity.
My son is a mechanic apprentice and earns about $39,000 a year doing it. With a bit of overtime and some government incentives (of which there are many) he is pulling about $650 a week in cash after tax. He’s 19, living at home, and doing something he loves – working on cars and getting paid to boot! Most of his mates who took the university option are also working at Maccas and have few immediate employment prospects with their Arts and Politics degrees. There are thousands of very capable, strong, fit and dare I say talented kids across the country who would gladly take a $40,000 a year wage to make rugby their job if given the opportunity.
And with the right environment, skills development, strength and conditioning training, some tough love, good coaching and some community obligation, some of them could become homegrown superstars. Hopefully, humble superstars too, who started out as kids and have grown into men and women over their apprenticeships, and who have probably painted a few lines, swept a lot of change rooms, and mowed Field No.3 more times than they could count.
It would be quite likely that a properly implemented rugby apprenticeship scheme would also attract significant government incentives.
We wring our hands about rugby’s poor ‘participation numbers’ in this country, but we aren’t in need of participation, we are in need of workers. And until we move our white-collar mindset of trying to make profit from nothing and instead focus on building a workforce of hard-working and resilient rugby tradespeople then we aren’t going anywhere with the sport in this country.
As the old adage goes, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. It’s time Rugby Australia stopped trying to pinch everyone else’s hard-earned lunch money and made their own sandwiches.
