Qatar’s trillion dollar bid to buy rugby disappointing but inevitable: Gregor Paul

OPINION

It was inevitable once rugby opened the door to private equity investors that in some shape or form, test matches would end up being played in the desert.

The unspoken rule of private
equity investment is that, ultimately, all roads lead to the Middle East, where there are enormous sovereign wealth funds looking to redirect cash from oil into more sustainable ventures.

The beauty of it flowing out of the earth’s core and into sport is that it comes with the bonus of doing a little cleansing along the way – laundering tarnished reputations for poor human rights, migrant labor abuse and persecution of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Sport, though, doesn’t seem to feel it has any role to play as a moral or ethical champion and football has opened itself up to the Middle East.

Golf has gone there, tennis is going there and now it may be that rugby is also going to end up there as Qatar has reportedly tabled a $1.6 billion, eight-year offer to host Nations Championship games when the proposed new tournament launches in 2026.

Qatar has all the necessary stadiums to host what it is reportedly calling the “Super Bowl of Rugby”, which will be the final weekend of the Nations Championship when all 12 teams will play off against one another in a 1 v 2, 3 v 4 scenario, down to 11 v 12.

This is legacy infrastructure built to host the 2022 Fifa World Cup and having made the investment, the Qataris want to keep bringing high-profile sport to their little pocket of the Arabian Peninsula.

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So too will the Qataris have sniffed rugby’s desperation for cash, given how many national unions are haemorrhaging it, and the bland non-committal uniformity of the respective statements made by Sanzaar and New Zealand Rugby in response to whether a deal is on the table all but confirm that a deal is indeed on the table.

Like everyone else, the Qataris will also have assessed the Nations Championship for being precisely what it is – a naked money grab that the major rugby countries are banking on to plug the growing holes in their accounts.

Its whole purpose of existence will be to snare previously undreamt-of broadcast dollars, and if Qatar can tip another $1.6b into the pot, rugby bosses will rationalize the offer as one that is too good to ignore and then do what they always do when they compromise the game’s values ​​- spin a narrative to justify it.

The fact that football went there to play its showpiece event will be used as an argument to say that rugby, too, should be willing to offer up a big-ticket rugby item to Qatar and follow the round ball code’s lead in arguing that being there puts global scrutiny on the regime.

Never mind that football only went to Qatar because of wide-scale corruption among the Fifa officials tasked with voting on where to host the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.

Or that there is no evidence to say that playing the World Cup there had any meaningful impact on changing attitudes or making life better for oppressed groups.

Probably, if a deal is agreed, the narrative will also be spun to suggest none of this would have been possible but for the capabilities within the two private equity investment groups that have bought into the Six Nations and New Zealand Rugby (NZR) – CVC and Silver Lake.

It will be sold as a victory for rugby’s decision to partner with firms which have global connections and the ability to open doors.

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But given the amount of money the Qataris have, and the desire they have to spend it on anything from football to tiddlywinks, their door appears open to just about anyone who knocks on it.

But you can be sure that NZR will stick to its line that Silver Lake was instrumental in getting the Qataris to the table, because if a deal is pulled off, the rudimentary maths on the indicated numbers involved suggest the US firm will pocket $10 million.

And yet, egregious sportswashing and giving away $10m for no reason – or no more than setting up a meet and greet that required only the magic of a Zoom link – are not the worst aspects of what is being proposed.

The kicker is the short-termism of it all and the certainty that the 12 nations who take part in this new championship will be saving themselves financially – until they squander all the cash in a few years – but sacrificing every other aspiring rugby nation in the process.

While they fill their pockets with Qatari cash, those nations who are not part of the windfall can forget about ever amounting to anything because the resource gap between them and the elite will be too big to bridge.

Rugby’s hopes of becoming a genuinely global sport will die with the Nations Championship.

The likes of Samoa, Tonga, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay and Chile will never be able to climb from their current positions, because they won’t ever be given the chance.

That the Nations Championship could end up being played in the desert seems entirely fitting, as the foundations of it feel like they have been built on sand.