BlitzBoks losing players to fifteens.

In 2023 alone, the BlitzBoks have lost five players, including Muller du Plessis, JC Pretorius, Qamani Kota, Sako Makata and Lubabalo Dobela, to fifteens by teams such as Sharks, Lions, Griquas and Pumas. The question now is, why are they losing so many players to fifteens?

Rugby in South Africa is huge, and there are currently eleven provincial teams, the Springboks men and women, Springbok Sevens men and women, SA Schools and Junior Springboks. All of these teams are under the SA Rugby umbrella, indicating all the revenue earned from the teams will go directly to SA Rugby, and they will fund all the teams separately. This leads to the official Springboks earning a lot of money as well as the bigger provincial teams, such as Sharks and Lions, but this also means that smaller teams, such as the BlitzBoks (men’s sevens), do not earn the same amount as fifteens.

According to Marius Schoeman (2023), high-performance manager for South Africa’s Sevens, this problem can be solved by making the men’s sevens its own entity, which suggests all the revenue generated by the men’s sevens goes into men’s sevens. As I explained, SA Rugby receives all the revenue from men’s sevens and only pays the BlitzBoks the standard funds for salaries, flight tickets, kits and more, meaning they have a limited budget and cannot match what fifteens pay their players.

Many players would rather play sevens, but they decide to leave because the pay is better at fifteens. Making the BlitzBoks its own entity would mean they would earn much more money, could organise their own tournaments, be more involved in the Cape Town Sevens, and definitely, the most important part, keep top players such as Kurt-Lee Arendse and JC Pretorius in sevens longer (Schoeman, 2023).

References:

SA Rugby Magazine. 2023. “Schoeman: SA Sevens must go it alone”. SA Rugby Magazine. https://www.sarugbymag.co.za/schoeman-sa-sevens-must-go-alone/