First Person: John Daniell

In Fair Game, the new podcast series from Bird of Paradise, RNZ and Pacific Media Network, James Nokise and John Daniell look at the factors that hold Pacific rugby back from reaching its potential.

Vaovasamanaia Seilala Mapasua, head coach of Manu Samoa, is no ranter.

James and I had just watched him running the team's final training session at Nadi's Prince Charles Park in July 2022 before the final match of the Pacific Nations Cup.  Even when balls were going down and patterns were botched he never raised his voice above his usual soft-spoken tone.

Afterwards, at the team hotel, he'd been equally measured outlining the various logistical challenges facing an international squad where the players have to pay their own fares to come into camp.

Still, by the end of the interview, James's face was wet with tears of anger and frustration at the story he'd heard:

"It's one thing to read numbers. But it's another thing to sit in front of a man who tells you that he's almost powerless to change anything… if that's as good as a country like Samoa can expect, what are we doing?"

I'd had my own WTF moment with Pacific Rugby ten years earlier.

Having played professionally in New Zealand and France, I retired in 2006 and started working as a journalist. One story put a hook in me that I haven't been able to get out.

In 2012 I was given a lead about three Fijian players from one of my old clubs, Racing, having been put off from playing in the 2011 Rugby World Cup in order to represent the Paris-based team during the French championship.

They'd been given a terrible choice between money - the ability to feed their family or their village, or just put something by for themselves because pro rugby doesn't last forever - and the pride they took in representing their country in the international game's biggest competition.

The club had this kind of leverage because of a deeply uneven playing field that for years has put Pasifika at a disadvantage.

Neither World Rugby nor the French union, both of whom had jurisdiction in the case, would take official action after the story was published, despite the fact that it breached their regulations and despite repeated follow ups from the Fijian union.

Talking to former teammates, it became clear that the practice of rich clubs coercing Pasifika players into not appearing for their poor countries had become so widespread as to be virtually normalised.

During this series, several former players - including Seilala Mapasua ("It was a tough pill to swallow") - told us about how it had happened to them in Japan and the UK during their careers.

Fair Game tells a story that implicitly asks a challenging question: are we, the rugby watching public, comfortable with what is happening with rugby in the Pacific Islands?

When the 2023 edition of the Rugby World Cup rolls round in September, hopes and expectations around the Samoan team will once again be high - particularly after Toa Samoa, against the odds, reached the final of the 2022 Rugby League World Cup.

But for Samoa to reach the quarterfinals of Rugby Union's showcase event would be bordering on a miracle.

Since the Rugby World Cup in 2019, Samoa, currently ranked 11th in the world, have played just one game against Tier One opposition. The Tier One nations are rugby's big boys, those who compete in the Six Nations and the Rugby Championship. Samoa's game was against Italy, currently ranked 12th.

Either by accident or design, the ten best teams in the world have been able to hone their game playing against each other while Samoa have been shut out from top level competition.

"I don't know if there'll be any significant shift until everyone really understands." says Mapasua.

"PNC (Pacific Nations Cup), whilst it's great, we're sick of beating each other up - Tonga and Fiji - and again, if we're only playing each other, it's pretty hard to prepare ourselves to play against the Wallabies or England, or the All Blacks. I'd like to see a little bit more done there. And just more games will go a long way."

"The players will always play valiantly, and win the hearts of people at a World Cup… and then it's like, turn off the app, turn off the TV, and then [four years later] come back and 'Oh, what are they up to now? Oh, they do so well for what they get and what they have.'

And so it's about trying to change the narrative on that."

There has been progress: Mapasua cites the arrival of Moana Pasifika - alongside the Fijian Drua, the first fully-fledged professional team run by and for Pasifika - in the Super Rugby competition as "massive."

"Now we have a real, clear pathway for players. They don't have to wait till they don't make the All Blacks, or they don't make the Wallabies to then choose Manu Samoa, they can choose Manu Samoa now at 19, 20 knowing that they've got a professional contract where they can look after their families.

"They don't have to move overseas, and they can still play international rugby."

Before that, he says, "We were fifteen metres behind the start line - now it's more like five."

But many issues remain and these are what what Fair Game hopes to tackle.

They include multi-million dollar payments handed out to some teams and not others and a lopsided voting structure at World Rugby.

There's also concern about how to ensure young Pacific players sent to European clubs aren't exploited.

Add to that a lack of Pacific representation in rugby's corridors of power and claims of structural racism and it all feeds into one question - is it a fair game ?

When we put this most basic of questions to the head of World Rugby, Tootootumua Sir Bill Beaumont, his response felt like a tacit admission: "Is it a fair game? Good question… because the game is professional, then you obviously you need economies to support that.

"And, you know, you're always going to get the bigger countries who've got deeper pockets than so they can put it into their infrastructure in their own countries, that will then generate more players for them.

Beaumont says World Rugby must put measures in place to help other countries succeed.

However the reality is that, while elements of World Rugby have the best interests of both the Pacific Islands and the global game at heart, the system itself skews naturally towards good outcomes for those who wield power in the boardroom and have the financial muscle to back it up.

When professionalism arrived in the mid-1990's, rugby - the last major sport to turn pro - moved to a market economy driven by sponsorship deals and broadcasting rights.

What goes on behind closed doors in rugby has traditionally been left there.

Here in New Zealand we have often satisfied ourselves with on-field performances that put us at - or near - the top of the table, punching above our weight and so on. But these days, if you want to really understand what happens on the field, you need to understand what happens off it.

After a few games for Wellington at NPC level in the mid-90s I took up a contract in France in 1997.  The rugby landscape looks different up there, particularly because of the enormous influence of club sponsors, ultra-wealthy businessmen used to getting their own way.

The way that influence runs through the game at a global level was underlined for New Zealand fans when Mohed Altrad, the owner of one of my old clubs, Montpellier, also became the All Blacks' major sponsor in 2022.

The deal - for a reported $120M over six years - is now up in the air following Altrad's conviction for corruption alongside Bernard Laporte, who resigned from his role as French rugby boss in January 2023 and is currently "self-suspended" from his position as vice-chair of World Rugby. Both he and Altrad are appealing their convictions, although they don't deny money changed hands.

The idea of shared values gets routinely wheeled out when rugby looks to market itself: on signing the deal with Altrad, in a press release issued by NZR, Chief Executive, Mark Robinson said that "In creating this partnership, we have recognised Altrad's founding principles of courage, respect, solidarity, conviviality and humility as truly relevant to our game."

"Our game" has always prided itself on being the kind of place where, when you shake someone's hand, it means something.  The flipside of that clubby atmosphere is key relationships that reward insiders while penalizing the less powerful, and anyone navigating it needs to be alert to the pitfalls or risk being accused of wilful blindness.

Treating Pacific rugby fairly isn't just morally right - it also makes commercial sense in a competition like the RWC where big margins are an audience turn-off.

As Seilala Mapasua says "at the end of the day, it's a game we love but it's also a business.

And I think if we can get this team and the other Pacific teams up into the same start line, I think it can become quite a scary place to be for everyone. And we've got to be brave."

Available from February 9th on Apple podcasts, iHeart, Spotify, PMN and at RNZ.co.nz.

Fair Game: Pacific Rugby Against the World is made with the support of New Zealand on Air.

Written and produced by James Nokise, Talei Anderson and John Daniell for Bird of Paradise Productions, Radio New Zealand and Pacific Media Network

Language programme director - Matt Tufuga

Executive producers for RNZ - Justin Gregory, Katy Gosset and Tim Watkin

Sound engineers - Rangi Powick, Alex Harmer and Jeremy Ansell for RNZ, Harrison Edwards at PMN

Music and sound design - Anonymouz (Faiumu Matthew Salapu)

Visuals: Manatoa Productions, Anonymouz and Krista Barnaby (RNZ)

Additional reporting by Lice Movono

Additional sound recorded by Rudy Bartley at WT Media in Samoa

Special thanks to Don Mann, Lui Vilisoni, Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, Jodhi Hoani, Josie Campbell,

Elijah Fa'afiu and Inangaro Vakaafi

RNZ Commissioning - Jodhi Hoani, Tim Burnell

RNZ Acting Head of Content - Veronica Schmidt

RNZ Interim Chief Content Officer - Megan Whelan