Sevens: New league to cash in from Games

 A NEW sevens competition starting in England this year is likely to open up income opportunities for New Zealand stars as the sport starts to build on its inclusion in the 2016 Olympics.

The UK National Sevens series will feature 10 British teams, with each allowed to recruit half its squad from overseas. The league, sanctioned by the International Rugby Board, will run through June and July and will dovetail with the end of the IRB sevens world series, which concludes in Scotland at the end of May.

It's the first formal sevens league to be set up in Britain and, outside the IRB's series, it's likely to be the biggest sevens series anywhere in the world. Even here, for all its popularity, domestic sevens is restricted to just this weekend's annual tournament in Queenstown.

Tim Lacey, the head of Ultimate Rugby Sevens, which promotes the UK league, believes sevens will evolve rapidly over the next six years ahead of its debut at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and that it has "considerable" untapped commercial potential, particularly in the United States.

Lacey's UK league has already been described as rugby's version of the Indian Premier League, which has turned Twenty20 cricket into a cash bonanza.

Tim Crow, chief executive of Synergy, a sports sponsorship consultancy, told the Sunday Times: "Anyone who has been to Hong Kong knows how powerful rugby sevens can be.

"If someone can galvanise it and put some structure behind it, it could be very powerful."

Lacey, speaking to the Sunday Star-Times from Sydney, where he was on holiday, was confident his new league would be picked up by international broadcasters and hoped to start up other leagues around the world, especially in the United States. "I think we'll see sevens take off in the US in the next four or five years. It's perfect for their consumer; it's short, high-scoring, simple," Lacey said.

"Come the 2016 Olympics I think we'll see a US sevens side good enough to compete for an Olympic medal and then the mass market will really get behind it in the US.

"And I do see leagues such as this [UK one] forming in other regions. Outside the IRB world series, there isn't a huge amount of structure to the sevens game and at a club level there is little structure and little opportunity for the specialist sevens player to ply his trade on a regular basis.

"I think that's another trend: we'll see more specialist sevens players as the two games increasingly diverge, with different skill sets for each."

Lacey, a former Gloucester player who has an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School, was coy on how much sevens players could expect to earn in his new league, but predicted a bright future for a group of players who have so far struggled to earn as much as their colleagues in 15-a-side rugby.

"I can't say much on the financials at the moment; a lot of that will evolve over the next two to three months as there's still work to do with the broadcaster and sponsors.

"Big salaries will come, but how quickly it will happen remains to be seen. The sport has considerable potential commercially and I think we'll see it develop in the next few years."

Rob Nichol of the New Zealand Rugby Players' Association said New Zealand's contracted sevens players were well paid by world standards, earning retainers of between $15,000 and $45,000 depending on their experience, and $2000 a tournament.

"They don't do as well as Super 14 players but compared to other sevens players worldwide they're right up there."

Nichol said Lacey's UK league "sounds similar to what's happening in cricket, and you know it was only going to be a matter time before someone tried something like this".

Meanwhile, Nichol said women's sevens was close to being introduced into the American NCAA university system, which, he said, would make the American women hot favourites to win Olympic gold.

- © Fairfax NZ News