Time for Australian rugby to swing for the fences and follow baseball’s lead

Australian rugby too often looks at itself through the eyes of the AFL or NRL.

For the past two years, the Geelong-Korea team has played in the Australian Baseball League.

Australian rugby too often looks at itself through the eyes of the AFL or NRL or, for that matter, through the eyes of the cashed-up northern hemisphere clubs, seeing only its limitations. Yet imagine being an emerging sport in this country and looking with envy at rugby’s opportunities.

Take baseball for example.

Cam Vale is the chief executive officer of Baseball Australia. Not the biggest sport in Australia but not the smallest either. Not surprisingly he hates the term “second tier”. He has basically been in sports administration all his working life, from finance officer at St Kilda football club to CFO of the Melbourne Storm, Chief Operating Officer and interim CEO at North Melbourne Football Club, CEO of Hockey Australia and now he is boss of Baseball Australia.

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Rugby is one of the few sports in which he hasn’t worked but he admits that, like just about every other sporting administrator, he has watched rugby’s journey in recent years with fascination. The phase “watching a train wreck in slow motion” comes to mind but that’s not how Vale sees it.

He looks at Andrew Forrest’s push into Asia with his Global Rapid Rugby with admiration, sensing the enormous opportunities there, but more recently he has been taken by Rugby Australia’s flirtation with the Sunwolves.

In particular, Australia is looking to bring the Sunwolves into the Super Rugby AU competition as a sixth team. Lately, as the global pandemic makes international sport more and more problematic, the conversation has turned to whether the Sunwolves should relocate to Australia in 2021.

“As I’m watching the rugby journey, really back three years, from the Force issue, to all the challenges they’ve had of late, to the broadcast deal, and I’m seeing this Sunwolves one and it’s staring me in the face,” said Vale. “You would absolutely base that team in Australia”.

But first, a little background in Australian baseball. For the past two years, the Geelong-Korea team has played in the Australian Baseball League. It is an all-Korean side made up of a mix of players from the Korean professional league (KBO), with five of the 10 clubs sending out players to Australia.

All Geelong-Korea games are broadcast on Korean free-to-air television which, as anyone who has been to Korea would know, swallows baseball whole, playing it virtually 24/7.

Geelong’s Korean owners, Happy Rising, pay for all the television production costs of their games and then sell them to their own domestic consumers, while giving Baseball Australia content for its partnership with Kayo. And there are other benefits.

Geelong-Korea has been the driver for three KBO teams to visit Australia for their three-to-four week spring training camps. Australia, as well, has begun infiltrating its own juniors into the GK ranks, with the eventual aim that they will fill about 10 spots in the 25-man playing roster.

So successful has this model been that Vale is now looking seriously at replicating the GK experience with the two other major Asian markets, Japan and Taiwan, bringing teams from those two countries into the Australian baseball fold.

True, when Vale credits GK with saving Baseball Australia, he is talking no more than $350,000 in direct benefits and maybe another $150,000 in indirect spin-offs. But everything is relative and now Baseball Australia has direct access to Korea — where interest is year-round with the population of over 50 million even if the country is blanketed in snow. And soon, if all goes well, its reach will extend to Japan (population 126 million) and Taiwan (27 million).

Back now to Vale’s thoughts on the Sunwolves.

“Putting the Japanese team into the Australian part of Super Rugby is a no-brainer,” he said. “Base the Sunwolves in a major regional hub like Wollongong or in a city like Adelaide that probably won’t have a Super Rugby team of its own. And I imagine direct international TV rights revenue from Japan might be helpful to RA at the moment.”

Like everything to do with Asia, patience is required. It may be hard for Australian rugby to play the long game at present, when it is barely keeping the wolf from the door, but Vale believes by planning astutely now, Australia can be well placed for the years to come.