Moana Pasifika will play no part in Super Rugby Pacific from 2027 after New Zealand Rugby rejected every bid put forward to keep the Pacific franchise alive, ending a four year experiment that was meant to give Samoan, Tongan and wider Pacific players a home team in the southern hemisphere’s premier club competition.
New Zealand Rugby owns the Moana Pasifika licence and made the final call. The governing body said it had received four serious rescue bids after the club was forced into liquidation, but none of them met the twin tests of committed capital and a workable business plan inside the short window available. The competition will now shrink to a ten team format next year.
The club’s troubles began in April when its owner, the Pasifika Medical Association, announced it could no longer fund the side beyond the current season. That left Moana Pasifika facing the prospect of folding altogether, and a scramble began to find new backers willing to take on both the running costs and the debt the club had built up.
According to RNZ, the central problem was money that could be seen and counted rather than money that was merely promised. New Zealand Rugby chief financial officer Chris Kinraid said the deciding factor came down to capital that was actually committed and a realistic timeframe to get a team on the field.
“It really came down to a key criteria of committed capital and a timeframe to establish that capital to stand up a team for next year,” Kinraid said.
He was blunt about why the bids fell short. “We’ve not seen that capital,” he said, pointing out that backers would have needed to lock in funding within roughly a two month window to field a side in time. “The time constraints meant the ability to stand up a team in less than a two-month window, with established capital, a viable commercial plan and sponsors, made it very difficult to grant a licence to a bid that didn’t have that capital in place.”
Kinraid also made clear that New Zealand Rugby was not in a position to simply write a cheque to cover the shortfall. “We don’t have an empty chequebook. We have provincial unions, community rugby and the wider game to support,” he said.
The scale of the financial hole helps explain the caution. Moana Pasifika is reported to owe in the region of $8.2 million to creditors, a figure that includes a $2.75 million loan from Sport NZ. Any group taking on the licence would have had to deal with that liability on top of the annual cost of running a professional rugby team, which the various rescue plans put somewhere between $10 million and $12 million a year.
One of the most prominent bids came from the Kanaloa Consortium, which was reported to have financial backing close to $100 million. Even so, New Zealand Rugby concluded that none of the bidders could satisfy both the capital and the business plan requirements at the same time. Kanaloa chief executive Tracy Atiga accepted the outcome despite the disappointment.
“Although we are disappointed for our Moana Pasifika aiga and the impact that this situation has had on the community, we are fully supportive of NZR’s decision not to transfer the licence to any new party for the 2027 season,” Atiga said.
Other efforts to save the club drew in higher levels of government. The proposal coordinated by Moana’s former chief executive Pelenato Sakalia had the support of the New Zealand Rugby Players Association, and a separate strand of talks reportedly involved the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Pacific governments, with Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters among those involved. None of those conversations produced the confirmed funding that New Zealand Rugby said it needed.
For the players and staff caught in the middle, the practical fallout is already under way. New Zealand Rugby has committed to honouring contracts and supporting players and staff to the end of July. Many of the squad have moved quickly to secure their futures, signing with overseas clubs or committing to New Zealand provincial sides for the National Provincial Championship.
The decision lands hard for a project that carried meaning well beyond results on the scoreboard. Moana Pasifika was created to give Pacific players a top tier team of their own rather than seeing the region’s best talent scattered across other franchises, and the side built a loyal following in South Auckland and across the Pacific during its time in the competition. RNZ reported the club had become a point of pride for the communities it represented.
New Zealand Rugby was at pains to stress that the door has not been shut permanently. Kinraid said the governing body remained open to a Pacific team returning in the future. “We remain completely open to potential or future bids related to a Pasifika team going forward beyond 2027,” he said, adding that “we had every intention to try and stand this team up for the long term.”
The organisation says it still believes a sustainable team can be based in the Pacific Islands and that a fresh solution could emerge for 2028 or later, when there would be more time to assemble the funding and structure that this round of bids could not deliver. For now, though, the immediate reality is a smaller competition and the loss of the only side that flew the Pacific flag at the top of the southern hemisphere club game.
The NZ Herald reported that New Zealand Rugby described the call as harsh but unavoidable once the numbers were laid out. Whether a Pacific franchise can find its way back into Super Rugby Pacific now rests on someone showing up with the committed capital that this round of bidders could not.
What do you make of the decision to cut Moana Pasifika from Super Rugby Pacific? Should New Zealand Rugby have done more to keep a Pacific team in the competition? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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