Netball New Zealand has agreed to hand the running of the country’s top domestic competition to Anna Mowbray and Ali Williams, signing a non-binding term sheet on Tuesday that would put the league in private hands from 2027.
The governing body announced the agreement on 1 September, ending a year of uncertainty about whether there would be an elite league for New Zealand players to come home to. Under the deal still to be written up in full, the licence for the competition and for the teams in it would be held by the investors, with Netball New Zealand taking a governance seat on the board that runs the new league.
Chief executive Jennah Wootten, who has been in the job three weeks, said the board had looked at everything else first. “After a great deal of careful consideration, including exploring every option available to us, the Board has reached the view that private investment is the right path forward,” she said. “This has been done in consultation with the New Zealand Netball Players’ Association, and the Zones.”
Wootten said the point was not simply to stop the bleeding. “Private investment brings capital, commercial capability and partners committed to growing this competition and the sport around it,” she said. “Netball has an incredibly passionate and loyal supporter base, with strong match attendances and growing participation. This is about giving that game the backing it deserves.”
The financial case is not subtle. RNZ reported that Netball New Zealand is facing losses of up to $6 million for the financial year, about $3.7 million of which comes from running the ANZ Premiership. Running a six-team professional league in a country of five million has never paid for itself, and the organisation could not guarantee there would be a competition at all next season.
That gap is what brought Williams and Mowbray in. Williams played 77 tests for the All Blacks and, with Mowbray, holds a stake in A-League club Auckland FC. Mowbray told RNZ the idea came from her husband first. “Ali came to me pretty early on and said ‘we need to do something about netball’,” she said. “He’s an incredibly passionate sports person and he has been so heavily involved in everything that we’ve done with AFC, and when he came to me, we sort of sat down and started chatting through it.”
Mowbray said she needed little persuading, having grown up on the same courts her own children now play on. “When I saw that the sport was struggling, it actually broke a piece of me because we cannot take away that aspiration from our young girls,” she said. “We can’t just love the game, we need to invest in it. We can’t let our highest participation women’s sport go without a pathway to the top and without aspirational players showing that pathway.”
Her stated ambition goes well past survival. “Our goal is to provide the backing to make New Zealand the undisputed home of world netball, where the Silver Ferns command the same reverence as the All Blacks, and every girl who picks up a ball believes she can get there,” she said in the announcement.
What that looks like in practice is mostly still blank. Netball New Zealand and the investors have agreed on a minimum of five teams for 2027, which leaves open the possibility that one of the six current franchises does not make the cut. The Mystics, Pulse and Steel are run by the three zones, Netball Northern, Netball Central and Netball South. The Stars, Tactix and Magic sit with management committees and the national body. Beyond the team count, the competition format, the season window and the broadcast arrangements would all be decided by the new owners. Player terms would still be settled by collective bargaining with the players’ association.
The three zones welcomed the decision in a joint statement. “Building on the strong netball legacy our Zones have, Netball South, Netball Central and Netball Northern (Steel, Pulse and Mystics respectively) are looking forward to working together with the investors to ensure that the new privatised league in 2027 and beyond is successful,” they said.
New Zealand Netball Players’ Association general manager Pippa Moore called it “a bold but necessary step for the future of netball in New Zealand”, saying the time was right for an approach that could bring more investment and energy into the game. She said the value of the deal was that it “offers a credible pathway towards a meaningful professional competition at home”.
The hardest part may be who is left to play in it. While the future of the league was unresolved, Netball New Zealand rolled back the eligibility rule that required Silver Ferns to be based here. RNZ reported that 13 players have since signed in Australia’s Suncorp Super Netball, including 10 of the 12 who won Commonwealth Games gold in Glasgow in August, with another five heading to the United Kingdom. Grace Nweke has gone to the Sydney Sirens, Kate Heffernan to the Adelaide Thunderbirds and Georgia Heffernan to the Sunshine Coast Lightning, several on multi-year deals.
Mowbray did not pretend that was anything other than a loss. “It’s devastating any time we see our extraordinary and best players leaving the country, but that’s where our work starts,” she said. “It means that it’s our job to build something that is good enough for them to come back.” Asked whether the league would turn a profit, she was blunt. “I think that’s going to be a long path.”
Wootten had a similar message for the players already gone. “What I want them to know is that work is now commencing on ensuring that the domestic competition that is up and running for 2027 is something enormously attractive that will bring them back to New Zealand in the not too distant future,” she said.
The clock is short. RNZ understands the investors have about three weeks to assemble the deals and the money needed to get a league off the ground for next year. Netball New Zealand keeps the Silver Ferns, national selection, the elite pathway and community netball, and says its role as guardian of the sport is unchanged. It remains the most played sport for women and girls in the country, with roughly 150,000 registered members across 83 centres, and the Silver Ferns go to the Netball World Cup in Sydney in 2027 as Commonwealth champions.
What do you make of a private owner running New Zealand’s top netball league? Leave a comment 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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