Burning bridges to own the Wallabies

Ah, code wars. It’s been a while.

On the off chance you’ve decided to click on this article without knowing the context, allow me to fill you in. Joseph-Aukuso Sua’ali’i, one of the game’s brightest and most prodigious young talents, has spurned the NRL and rugby league to take up a lucrative deal with Rugby Australia, worth around $1.6 million a year, starting in 2025 and going through to the 2027 Rugby World Cup in Australia.

For context, this announcement is hardly anything unexpected and outlandish. Growing up in western Sydney, Sua’ali’i was poached by the famous King’s School in Parramatta, nursed in the ways of the Gilbert (do they even still use Gilberts in rugby anymore?) all through high school. He’s hardly the first NRL star stolen from under the grasp of the 15 man game as a junior either, with NSW Origin stars like Cameron Murray and Angus Crichton also forging glittering junior rugby careers before hopping across to league.

There is an inherent ridiculousness in the timing of this all, which I think should be the biggest issue and talking point.

Sua’ali’i is contracted through to the end of 2024 to the Sydney Roosters. We’re barely a month into the 2023 season. He’s not even allowed to negotiate with rival NRL clubs until he enters the final year of his contract (November 1st, 2023 for those wondering).

Yet somehow, a rival code has the inside track, getting his commitment basically two years out. You can see how that might rankle the powerbrokers at NRL HQ, and bemuse the casual punter in all of us.

The recruitment and retention timelines of the NRL have always been a hot topic of contention. The history of the league is littered with examples of loyal and committed clubmen penning for rival clubs a year out, reinforcing their dedication to their current colours.

“I’m currently on contract here, I intend to see that out, my focus is nowhere else,” says every outgoing player ever. It’s only a matter of time before the classic buzzwords emerge and an innocent and completely legal transaction is smeared across the back pages of every tabloid in the country as Player X AGITATES for a release to join their new club immediately.

Free agency and transfer windows, an amalgamation of systems used in American sports and European soccer, have been mooted more than once, but usually without any true conviction. It would take a lot for the player’s association to agree to a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that ceded their power and leverage by controlling their own destinies a year in advance.

Tangent into the weeds of NRL recruitment and retention aside, the discourse around Sua’ali’i that has predictably already started to swirl, and will no doubt inevitably persist until his last day holding a Steeden, is, for lack of a better word, tiresome.

I find myself rolling my eyes every time a new perspective or “think piece” is brandished in front of me, telling me why Sua’ali’i leaving rugby league is both the best and worst thing to happen in rugby league history.

To be honest, I mildly cared at the time of the announcement, and now I’m well and truly over it all.

The full spectrum of takes have already been cast out into the universe, from those dismissing him from the game and telling him to leave now, to the bemusing calls for him to be precluded from Origin consideration for NSW.

For reference, Wendell Sailor agreed to join rugby from the Brisbane Broncos on the 7th of February, 2001 for the 2002 season and beyond (although the actual deal wasn’t formalised until July that year). He would go on to play all three games for Queensland in the 2001 Origin series.

Is Sua’ali’i on the level that Sailor was then? No, of course not. Sailor was a nailed on Queensland and Australia representative, and a member of some of the most dominant club sides of the NRL era, including two NRL titles in 1998 and 2000, as well as the 1997 Super League title. The point is this is hardly breaking new ground where a player with a conceivable chance at representative football has announced their departure with years remaining.

There’s also a level of division around Sua’ali’i and the level of player he actually is. For anyone that maintains even a passing interest or knowledge of rugby in Australia, you’d know that the sport is not in a great way.

The Jerry Maguire strategy of throwing money at rugby league stars is hardly new (Sailor, Mat Rogers, Karmichael Hunt, Israel Folau et al), and it isn’t slowing down. The game will always be under threat of invasion, with other names like Cameron Murray (obviously) and Tolutau Koula (what?) being suggested as targets of the 15 man raid, but those players of yesteryear all joined stronger Wallabies sides and were supplements to far more successful eras.

Sua’ali’i isn’t on the calibre of those guys when they left the league yet. Could he get there? Absolutely. It would be foolish to bet against a 19 year old kid who has adapted well to first grade with his athletic gifts and experiences at the highest levels of the game. But the reality is he’s an unfinished product with positional uncertainty (is he a winger, fullback or centre?).

But whether you think Sua’ali’i is the saviour of a floundering code is neither here nor there. Rugby Australia clearly think that, they’ve paid him like that, so what’s done is done.

I get the angst around Sua’ali’i from certain corners, I really do. This is a guy that the NRL bent over backwards to accommodate, including altering their minimum age limit to allow him to debut as a 17 year old back in 2021, waiving a rule that had been in place since 2015 after warnings of excessive pressure and scrutiny on young minds and bodies, aided by the cautionary tales of players like Adam Ritson and Jordan Rankin.

But that’s not on Sua’ali’i. Blame the uncontrollable media hype machine that exists purely to fuel hysteria and hyperbole. Honestly, with the reporting going on in the months leading up to Sua’ali’i’s first grade debut you’d be forgiven for thinking Marty McFly had parked his DeLorean outside Moore Park and wooed Nick Politis with promises of Sua’ali’i’s guaranteed superstardom.

The discourse around Sua’ali’i has a very real danger of approaching vitriolic levels, none of which is his own fault. People leave jobs for more money all the time in the “real world.” 63% of respondents to a Pew Research Centre study cited low pay as reasons for leaving a job.

So why are athletes held to a different standard? Arguments like “love of the game” and already being in the top 1% of earners are bandied about, but I’d hazard a guess there are more players who treat sport as a regular job and not a passion than they’d care to admit.

In the careers of athletes, their peak earning potential is fractional compared to what is considered a regular career. I don’t begrudge any athlete securing their bag while they can, because the window of opportunity can be gone in a second. As Jalen Rose says, “keep getting dem checks.”

The game is paler when its stars leave. That much is true. It’s never a good thing to see a player with such potential and intrigue leave after mere glimmers of what is to come. Sua’ali’i’s level as a player is largely irrelevant to that point.

Joseph-Aukuso Sua’ali’i is 19 years old. By the time his rugby deal, as it currently stands, ends, he’ll be the wizened old age of 24 (which is sickening to think about for me but that’s another issue). For a talent like him, with, in my mind, a very real possibility of returning to league once his rugby sojourn ends, is it really worth all this hassle and resentment?

A code war isn’t worth a burnt bridge. Not with rugby.

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