Why Lions series could save rugby union in Australia

First Test: Australia v British and Irish Lions

Date: Saturday 19 July Kick-off: 11:00 BST Venue: Suncorp Stadium, Brisbane

Last Friday, the day before the Lions’ final pre-Test warm-up, Peter V’landys headed out of Australia.

It was unlikely he would have been tuning in anyway.

V’landys, the chair of the Australian Rugby League Commission, has been a consistent and caustic critic of the 15-man game.

According to him, rugby union in Australia is an “attention-seeking” liability that leaves its players “terribly bored”.

V’landys flight was bound for the US, where he is reportedly pitching to steaming superpowers such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon.

His product is the NRL. And, for those in Australian rugby union, the numbers involved are chastening.

The NRL’s current TV deal is worth A$2bn (£973m) over five years. V’landys hopes the next deal, which kicks in after 2027, will be worth A$3bn (£1.5bn).

The NRL is expanding on other fronts.

The addition of the Perth Bears and a Papua New Guinea franchise will take the league up to 19 teams by the end of the decade.

Last year the league staged two matches in Las Vegas, a jaunt that is now an annual tradition.

Rugby Australia, by contrast, is on the defensive.

It signed its own TV rights deal in April. Despite being an increase on their previous, Covid-dented agreement, it clocked in at A$240m (£117m) – about an eighth of the NRL’s present deal.

Rugby Australia is losing out on the balance sheet as well, leaking A$36.8m (£17.9m) in its latest accounts.

With Aussie Rules also well ahead of union in terms of finances and coverage, some fear the sport is in terminal decline in Australia.

“Rugby sits a fair way down the ladder in our sporting ecosystem at the moment,” said James Horwill, who captained Australia during the 2013 Lions tour and now sits on the board of Queensland Rugby Union.

“We’ve got three full-time sporting codes that are all competing for the same athletes, the same fans, the same sponsorship dollars and ultimately the same TV slots. It’s a very congested marketplace for a country that has 25 million people.”

Union wasn’t always so squeezed.

In 2003 the World Cup was held in Australia.

A team of Wallaby greats, defending the title they had won four years earlier, went all the way to the final.

Stephen Larkham pulled strings at fly-half, George Smith menaced the breakdown and George Gregan crowed over the beaten All Blacks.

The World Cup pulled more people through the turnstiles and more profit into the tills than any tournament in history.

Union was front and centre. However, its subsequent attempts to tap into new territories, launching the Western Force in Perth and the Rebels in Melbourne, did not strike gold.

While the NRL and the Australian Football League (AFL) moved nimbly to accelerate their game and improve the spectacle, union lagged behind.

Talented players were picked off.

The raiders come from overseas as well. Top 14 clubs especially have come calling for teenage talent, taking them out of school and halfway round the world to play in France.

And all the time, the Wallabies have stalled. The two-time champions have reached the World Cup final once since 2003.

The nadir came in 2023 when, 20 years on from their home World Cup, they were dumped out of the tournament at the pool stages for the first time.

Phil Waugh, who played in the 2003 final, is the man tasked with staging the fightback.

Appointed Rugby Australia chief executive in 2023, he is clear that the Lions are key to boosting the beleaguered finances of his organisation.

He predicts that Rugby Australia could end this year with a A$50m (£24m) surplus, with a mammoth 100,000-plus crowd for the second Test at the Melbourne Cricket Ground helping it wipe out its heavy borrowing.

“We’re still very much on track to have the option of being debt-free by the end of 2025, and then with the uplift in broadcast and continued financial discipline through the next cycle… we’ll be in a far stronger position to, sensibly and in a well-considered way, invest into the different projects or community elements of the game,” he told the Australian Financial Review this month.

The next cycle is key for union in Australia. The Lions is just the start.

It is seen as a golden decade that, taken together, underlines the strengths that union has over its rivals – a global depth and intrigue that Aussie Rules or rugby league can’t match.

Suaalii has already seen it. When he made his Test debut at Twickenham last November, the scale of the occasion, in front of 82,000 people, caught him unawares.

Speaking to the media this week, he counted the number of microphones and Dictaphones in front of him as an indicator of the interest a Lions tour generates.

“My old man has always said to me ‘it’s a big world out there’ and rugby brings that,” Suaalii said.

“This is one of the great parts of our game and we should be celebrating it,” said Horwill.

“It is so unique, really to any other sport in the world – four nations coming together with so much tradition, history and so much support, and come out on tour.

“In Australia, where you’re competing every weekend for talent, for sponsors, for fans, for kids playing the game, this means a lot.

“Kids will watch this and want be part of it one day. You can’t overestimate the impact it has.”

Justin Harrison agrees. “It’s a real shot in the arm,” the former Wallabies second row said.

“People will be able to see rugby played on the screens when they’re walking past pubs. They’re going to see a ground swell of people moving towards an event; they’re going to hear singing and jocularity and friendly rivalry.

“Sport is wonderful, but rugby in particular brings the world right into the palm of your hand and we have to make the most of that.”

Horwill and Harrison know, however, that the surest route back to into the limelight is also the simplest: via the pitch.

“We haven’t been able to perform at the level we’ve wanted to over the last little bit. So ultimately we want some good performances to engage the fickle or casual rugby fan,” said Horwill.

Stephen Moore, a former team-mate of both, believes the ultimate injection of momentum may be at hand.

“Without wanting to put too much pressure on the current players it is there for them to take,” he told the BBC’s Rugby Union Weekly.

“If we can keep our best players on the field, it is a very winnable series for us.”