SARU Tackling Loss

South African rugby’s continued investment into membership of northern hemisphere rugby competitions led to a R93m group loss in 2024, but the organisation had already wiped out that deficit with a strong start to 2025, the annual meeting of the South African Rugby Union (SARU) was told in Cape Town on Thursday.

SARU was set to buck the global trend and report a profit of more than R100m for 2025, clearing 2024’s losses and ensuring the 15 member unions would receive their full funding while support of the Springboks and all national teams would continue unchecked.

In the last reporting cycle other international federations had lost as much as R913m with five other Tier One nations reporting losses of between R588m and R181m. The next ‘best’ performance after South Africa’s was a loss of R126m, members were told.

Rian Oberholzer, CEO of SA Rugby, said that the investment in participation in the Vodacom United Rugby Championship (URC) and European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) had come at a net cost of R124m in 2024.

“We have been investing in the long-term future of South African rugby to become full members of the URC for the best part of eight years,” said Oberholzer. “It has come at a significant cost to the sport but there is no doubt that it has been the right thing to do.

“Once we fulfill certain membership obligations this year, we will begin to reap the on and off field rewards of such investment.

“If we had not undertaken this journey, we would have been reduced to playing only domestic competitions, which would have had catastrophic high performance as well as financial ramifications for rugby in South Africa.

“It has been a tough financial road, but we have annually outperformed our global peers since the pandemic, while taking on the unusual cost of our investment into URC and EPCR.”

Oberholzer said the turnaround in 2025 was being achieved by a reformatting of SA Rugby’s offering to partners, featuring enhanced rights at enhanced values, as well as the creation of a new commercial delivery model.

Overall, in 2024, Group commercial revenues exceeded R1,5bn for the first time (R1,552bn), up from R1,440bn in 2023. Total income with the addition of grants (principally from World Rugby of R186m) took total income to R1,76bn. Revenues for 2025 are forecast to exceed R2bn.

The 7,8% increase in revenues was attributable to increased broadcast revenues in a non-Rugby World Cup year, competition sponsorships and a strong performance in merchandising receipts which more than doubled from R30m to R62m.

Expenses increased from R1,816bn to R1,871bn. The 2,9% increase was put down to investment in hosting three World Rugby tournaments (R133m), a R24m increase in player image rights (to R148m), and the costs associated with the mooted private equity transaction (R13m).

Total expenditure attributable to the northern hemisphere international franchise competition was R446m while SA Rugby was still able to make a full distribution to member unions. Spending on the world ranked number 1 team, the Springboks, and other national teams, was R433m, a reduction of R27m on the Rugby World Cup winning year of 2023 (R460m).

“Reporting a loss can never be desirable but the irony is that we are more than satisfied with our position,” said Oberholzer.

“We had budgeted for a loss in 2024 in the expectation that the members would approve the private equity transaction that they had sought, releasing funds to cover the deficit.

“When that did not happen, we continued with our planned commercial reset, and other revenue generation plans, which have borne fruit. We are in the very rare position among our international peers of continuing to be debt-free and confident of posting a surplus in 2025.”

Oberholzer said the financial outlook beyond next year was equally healthy with strong revenues forecast for 2026 with new competition formats in the pipeline.

“The income that SA Rugby generates all goes back into supporting the growth and promotion of rugby in the country,” he said.

“It allows us to fund Springbok campaigns, expand women’s rugby programmes and fuel our other national teams. It pays for our members’ activities in their communities as well as their professional teams. It underwrites our rugby safety programme BokSmart; supports referee and coaching development and our age group competitions as well as development programmes and allows us turn on sell-out Test match entertainment and our domestic competitions.

“Ultimately, every rand that we earn goes into powering the game in some shape or form and after a challenging 2024 we have a good news story to tell our South African rugby community as we look ahead.”