The numbers don’t lie – why Super Rugby is the best club comp in the world

The Super Rugby Pacific commission has pumped up a heap of statistics to show that the competition is heading in the right direction, pointing to better TV numbers and crowd figures in Australia and New Zealand.

But the most important statistics have been produced by a rugby-loving French data scientist.

Dimitri Perrin is a professor at the Queensland University of Technology and currently embedded at the Queensland Reds. The word is that Reds recruitment supremo Sam Cordingley is tapping into Perrin’s data insights, but that hasn’t been Perrin’s only piece of work.

Perrin has been measuring jeopardy, or unpredictability of result, in Super Rugby Pacific compared the Top 14 in France and the United Rugby Championship in Europe.

The conclusion? This year’s Super Rugby has more of the good stuff - genuine competitiveness - than either of those competitions. Perrin’s deep dive has revealed that what had previously been the critical flaw in the comp is now its greatest asset.

“Just like everybody else I’ve been watching a lot of Super Rugby,” Perrin tells this masthead. “It has been exciting and a lot of commentary around it has focused mostly on margins being tighter.

Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii of the Waratahs.Credit: Getty Images

“It’s true, but it’s only part of the reason. If it was just that I’m not sure that it would be that noticeable or generate that much excitement.

“So, I started to think about what else could make a game exciting.”

That line of inquiry led Perrin to the number of lead changes, the number of blowout games where the winning margin is 25 points or more (28 per cent of Super games last year, and less than 10 per cent this year), the number of late lead changes and the number of games in which last year’s result has been reversed this season.

In almost every statistical category, Super Rugby Pacific is beating the Top 14 and the United Rugby Championship.

” I looked at the last three seasons and compared the results of one season with the same games in the previous season,” Perrin says.

“Typically there’s about one-third of the games that have the reversed outcome. That’s for previous Super Rugby seasons, and it’s also true for the URC and Top 14 in previous seasons and this season as well.

“In Super Rugby, this season it’s more than half the games. It’s somewhere between 50 per cent and 60 per cent have the reverse outcomes.”

Perrin throws some other numbers into the mix to firm up the overall picture. The number of games where one team has led all the way has fallen dramatically, from 27 per cent in 2023 and 35 per cent in 2024 to about 15 per cent this season.

The median number of lead changes is also up, to about four, and again this is superior to the figures in the Top 14 and the URC, which see about three lead changes a game.

But arguably the killer stat is the following. “In Super Rugby this season, it’s almost 20 per cent of the games have a lead change in the last five minutes, and more than 30 per cent in the last 10 minutes.”

These are the sort of ingredients that armchair tipsters hate but broadcasters love.

Perrin says: “Diehard fans, they might go whatever happens, and if they go what they care about is their team winning. They don’t care if it’s predictable or not.

“I spent many years in Dublin, and I couldn’t care less if it was expected that Leinster was going to win, I was just happy that they were winning. I wasn’t going to complain that it was predictable.

“But for casual fans who are going to a game or just switching on the TV and watching just a random game, that game being unpredictable is important for them.

“They’re more likely to watch if they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

That last point is particularly relevant this week in light of Rugby Australia’s decision to take the money instead of a guarantee to have some games on free-to-air with Nine, the owners of this masthead.

Is rugby closing its main shop window to the casual fan just when the product on display was starting to grab their attention?

Watch all the action from the 2025 Super Rugby Pacific season on Stan Sport, the only place to watch every match ad-free, live and on demand.