Inside story of the All Blacks’ financial u-turn

• Published date: 06 November 2021

What it did in the minds of the players and coaching staff was confirm that they are part of a big business enterprise.

Hosting the Lions in 2017 netted New Zealand Rugby a $45 million profit, but that tour was the fiscal finger in the dyke. The real picture was bleak and parlous: in 2016 NZR lost $7.5m and between 2018 and 2019, another $9.2m and the professional game had a significant and seemingly unfixable problem that it was consistently spending more than it earned and had only one profitable entity, which was the All Blacks.

Because the national body had spent most of the proceeds of the Lions tour in advance of earning them, 2017 ushered in a new era of heightened pressure to find alternative revenue streams and squeeze more out of existing ones.

It was the All Blacks who felt NZR’s commercial arm wrap around them and steadily tighten its grip, making, according to those inside the team, increased and often poorly considered requests to service relationships with sponsors and stakeholders.

The team were also told they would be working with a film crew from Amazon Prime to make a behind the scenes documentary called All or Nothing — a project that particularly troubled head coach Steve Hansen who was not supportive of cameras poking into parts of All Blacks life that he, the players and his fellow coaches wanted to keep secret.

The All Blacks had long accepted their commercial obligations and their role in facilitating the money flow. For the last decade there had been a mostly high-trust relationship between the All Blacks and NZR’s commercial team.

But by 2017, that trust started to erode. Although they were mutually dependent on one another, they were pulling in opposite directions.

Hansen says he found himself pushing back against last minute requests for players to do more for sponsors. The bigger concern, however, was how much access to intellectual property some partners were given.

This first surfaced in 2014, when the All Blacks held a training session in Johannesburg in full view of former England defence coach John Mitchell who was a guest for the day of lead sponsor, AIG.

There was an uneasiness, too, that clients of All Blacks Tours were given access to training sessions and while there were strict rules about not filming these sessions, the Weekend Herald is aware of several occasions when this was not enforced.

And in 2019, the commercial team sold a leadership programme to executives of Mitsubishi, which Hansen felt revealed too much about the inner workings of his team.

Hansen’s fears that this rapid and aggressive commercialisation of the All Blacks hurt performance are not unfounded.

Between 2012 and 2016, the All Blacks lost just four tests and drew twice, while between 2017 and 2019 they lost six and drew...