Advertisement
Super Rugby has been waging a war on time. Back in 2022, they declared their mission was to cut down on ‘dead’ or ‘static’ time in matches and make the games faster. They aimed to do so via referees – telling them to hurry the game along and avoid blowing their whistles. Meanwhile, TMOs were told to keep anything they saw to themselves. This, they believed, would increase entertainment.
Ever since then, the declarations of success have poured in from such independent sources as the Super Rugby official website and the All Blacks official website. Even RugbyPass (who were acquired by World Rugby from Sky New Zealand - the Super Rugby host broadcaster) got in on the act, writing that Super Rugby:
“Put fans back at the core of its thinking… high-impact, aerobic rugby that connects so well with the Southern Hemisphere psyche… show the rest of the world, but particularly administrators in the Northern Hemisphere, what rugby could look like”.
When the 2025 season came to an end, Super Rugby marked its own homework and found that it had passed with flying colours. The results were sent out to Journalists all over the world:
“Game length reduced from 1h31m7s to 1h30m11s
Static time reduced from 56m04s to 55m09s
Penalty kick time 68s to 42s
Conversions 69s to 55s
Scrums sets 45s to 29s
Forming lineouts 25s to 18s
Points per game 53.7 to 57.8
Tries per game 7.3 to 8.2”
Anyone with a mathematical brain, though, will raise an eyebrow at these figures – and rightly so. The game length reduction equates to a sub 1% change – statistically negligible. The static time reduction equates to a sub 2% change – also statistically negligible. For fans who make the trip to a stadium to watch a rugby match, how life changing in a 55 second reduction in the length of a game likely to feel?
Then there’s the other reductions they mention. To demonstrate what is wrong here, lets us imagine a game with 1 penalty kick, 1 conversion, 1 scrum and 1 lineout. According to Super Rugby, the time saved compared to the same game in 2024 would sum to:
26s (penalties) + 14s (conversions) + 16s (scrums) + 7s (line outs) = 62s saved total
AKA, 7 seconds more than they say is being saved per game now. The increase of nearly 1 try per game is probably offsetting this somewhat (adds in an extra 55s), but it’s safe to assume that there is usually more than 1 scrum or lineout per game too. For instance: if there were 10 line outs and 5 scrums in a game, that would theoretically equate to a 150s (2 and a half minutes) saving on a game with the same number of scrums and line outs last season.
Speaking of the tries per game increase, that phenomenon is occurring across the rugby world, from the URC to the Women’s Six Nations. None of those competitions have utilised such aggressive time slashing tactics as Super Rugby and thus we cannot reliably attribute more tries to their new approach to officiating.
We must also ask why Super Rugby has decided that shorter is better, anyway? In other sports, we see clubs trying to keep fans in their stadiums longer. The reason being: the longer they are in the ground, the more money they will spend there.
NFL games last over 3 hours, Premier League football clubs are building fan villages outside their grounds to attract supporters hours before kick-off and the games are lasting longer due to the change in how added time is calculated. Neither of these sports are struggling for an audience.
We must also question why, if Super Rugby believes quicker games are key to increased fan enjoyment, they have mandated extra time for regular season games that reach 80 minutes with the scores tied. By their own logic, surely fans will be outraged at being forced to sit in front of their TV for an extra 10 minutes? A whole 900% more than all their law tweaks have cut out of the game!
On the subject of TV, let’s talk viewing figures. According to SKY, the Super Rugby final drew a cumulative audience of 726,000 in New Zeland with another 40,000 watching the Maori coverage and 306,000 watching on digital platforms. This adds up to nearly 1.1 million viewers, which is well over 20% of the country’s population.
This seems unlikely, given that in another article, the NZ Herland said the SKY viewership for the entire season prior to the final was 2 million. Clearly, there are more arithmetic struggles happening here. Or, as a streaming industry expert recently put it, “Neilsen is a joke, and no-one should take their data seriously”.
Then there was the final itself. In its press release, Super Rugby said the 2025 season was more exciting because there were more tries, fewer kicks at goal and hoodoos were broken. In the final the Crusaders won their 8th title in 9 years and the Chiefs lost their 3rd final in a row – sounds like a hoodoo?.
Meanwhile, the winning side scored 1 try and took 3 kicks at goal. How was the decisive kick earned? Via a scrum penalty. By Super Rugby’s own measures, therefore, we must conclude the final was not entertaining. Alternatively, we must judge Super Rugby’s changes to be a failure because they did not manifest the desired outcomes in the most important, most watched game of the season.
The war on time is divisive, but we can all agree that these clumsy attempts to bamboozle people with numbers needs to stop. Anyone who knows that they are looking at will see right through them.