IT’S becoming an all too familiar story at this time of year as teams approach the first weekend of the northern autumn Tests in the West.
Last year it was about the Fijians before their Twickenham Test against England and this time it’s the Samoans – and not for the first time for the latter, whose Test also against England in 2014 was almost aborted due to a player revolt.
No grumblings have been heard from Fiji and Tonga so far this year but the Samoans may not succeed with their full request for the England Rugby Football Union to agree to a goodwill payment because their national union is in financial trouble and may have to file for bankruptcy.
The RFU gets about 10 million pounds for a home Test attracting a crowd of about 82,000, with each England player receiving about 22,000 pounds each. This time the players’ match fee may rise to 30,000 pounds.
England of course can afford to pay this amount to its national players because it is the richest national union in the world. For comparison, Scotland is paying only 5,000 pounds each.
World Rugby, the sport’s global governing body, doesn’t require the home team to share match receipts with the visiting team. Each Samoan player is to get only 650 pounds!
The Samoans play Scotland this weekend before meeting Romania and then play England on November 25.
This no obligation to share the receipts is the crux of the matter and remains a point of contention 22 years after the union game turned fully professional.
There are those who say that the arrangement is the same if a team like England goes to play in Suva or Apia. No one can argue with that but the last time England went to play in Fiji was in 1991.
Against the Samoans England has played seven times, including at three World Cups, but never in Apia.
Even if a leading team agrees to play in any of the three main Pacific Island rugby nations, the crowd support isn’t huge because the population is small. The stadium in Suva can accommodate about 15,000 people, including on the concrete and grass embankments. In Apia the capacity is 12,000 if there are no modifications of the kind made for the All Blacks game in July 15 due to safety concerns.
Additionally, ticket prices are nowhere near rates charged in the leading countries, which all add up to a lose-lose situation for the islanders. Hence the need for World Rugby to rethink its policy.
In the meantime England prop Mako Vunipola, a Tongan born in New Zealand, and centre Manu Tuilagi, a Samoan, have asked the England players to contribute 1,000 pounds each to the Samoans but at the time of writing, there has been no other word on this.
So bad is the financial situation that the team was said to have borrowed training gear from the Harlequins club in London before heading to Scotland. Last year the Fijians trained in France at a ground which was free. The Pacific Islanders also often do not carry sufficient team gear with them due to the cost of excess luggage for flights.
The Fiji RU did receive a five-year sponsorship deal in 2014 worth about US$40 million and while this helps, it doesn’t go far when you take in participation in the World 7s series, the World Cup qualifiers and the northern autumn tour.
Problems voiced out by Samoa’s players are nothing new.
After the 2011 World Cup team captain Mahonri Schwalger wrote a damning letter to his country’s prime minister Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi about the team management, only for the player to be dropped from the team and blacklisted with a team-mate who strongly supported Schwalger. Incidentally Malielegaoi was and is the chairman of the Samoa RU.
The crux of the issue in Samoa seems to be mismanagement and once an audit showed that about one million pounds of the funding from World Rugby could not be traced.
Obviously there are issues and while some can be fixed with the intervention of World Rugby, those at home in the Pacific too need to show better governance.