Netball New Zealand has held talks with at least one private investor about setting up a new franchise league in 2028, a move that would hand the running of the country’s top domestic competition to outside owners for the first time.
RNZ reported this week that a source with knowledge of the discussions described the interested party as a high net worth family with existing links to sport, and that the family has talked to Netball New Zealand about taking over the licence to run the league. Former Silver Ferns Adine Wilson and Anna Stanley are believed to have brought the investor to the table.
Netball New Zealand board chair Alastair Carruthers did not confirm the identity of anyone involved, but he has not shut the door on the idea either. Speaking about the future of the domestic game last month, Carruthers said private investment was “an area the board is very interested in”. He added that “it’s not an obvious possibility for 2027, but I think all forms of investment into our league has to be looked at”.
The reason the governing body is prepared to look at an outside owner is straightforward enough. Netball New Zealand is facing losses of up to $6 million for the financial year, and about $3.7 million of that comes from the cost of running the ANZ Premiership in 2026. Those losses are being covered by drawing down the organisation’s cash reserves, which is not a trick that can be repeated many more times.
Carruthers put it plainly in July, telling 1News that “it is difficult to sustain these types of losses, so it does need a rethink”. He also acknowledged that “we actually don’t have a clear solution at the moment for the future of the domestic league”.
What makes the numbers so awkward is that the on court and on screen side of the competition has just had one of its better years. The 2026 season was the first time the ANZ Premiership screened on free to air television, with TVNZ taking over the rights that Sky had held since 2017. More than 1 million viewers watched on TVNZ 2, another 169,500 accounts picked it up on TVNZ+, and the streaming platform recorded 868,700 streams across the season. The audience turned up. The money did not follow in the same proportion.
The TVNZ arrangement was a one year deal, and no broadcast agreement is in place for 2027. Without one, Netball New Zealand has not been able to commit to running a competition next season at all. The options that have been openly canvassed include pausing the ANZ Premiership for a year or reverting it to an amateur competition, with 2027 treated as a bridging year while a new model is built for 2028. Players in the current competition have already taken a 20 percent pay cut, and the collective bargaining process has been running without the certainty that normally underpins it.
The players’ association has not dismissed the idea of private money coming in. New Zealand Netball Players Association chief executive Pippa Moore said the athlete body would look at anything credible, telling RNZ that “we are open to considering all credible options, including private investment, that can better unlock netball’s commercial value”.
All of this is happening while the best New Zealand players quietly sort out their own futures. Nine players with Silver Ferns caps are now contracted to Australia’s Suncorp Super Netball, and in July the Netball New Zealand board changed its eligibility rules so that a player who signs an overseas contract stays available for Silver Ferns selection, including across a multi year deal. That removed the last real penalty for leaving. It also removed one of the few levers the domestic league had to hold onto its best names ahead of the 2027 Netball World Cup.
The clubs are hedging as well. The Northern Mystics, who beat the Southern Steel 56 to 46 in Auckland to win the 2026 ANZ Premiership, confirmed they lodged a bid in February to become one of two Super Netball expansion sides in 2028. Netball Australia had originally sought expressions of interest for two new teams in 2027 before pushing the timeline back at least a year while it finished its own television negotiations. It has since signed a five year free to air deal with Nine running through to the end of 2031. The Mystics are still waiting to hear back.
So 2028 has become the year everything points at. It is the year a private consortium might take over a rebuilt New Zealand league. It is also the year an Auckland franchise might cross the Tasman instead. Those two futures are not obviously compatible, and nobody has yet had to choose between them.
For a sport that has more registered participants than almost any other women’s code in the country, and which has produced world champions on a shoestring for decades, the position is uncomfortable. Netball has the crowds, the television audience and the players. What it has not had is a business model that pays for a professional domestic league without the national body underwriting the shortfall out of its own savings.
A private owner would change who carries that risk. Whether it changes the underlying maths is the question Netball New Zealand has not yet answered, and the players contracted for a season that may or may not exist are the ones waiting on the answer.
What do you think? Should private investors be allowed to run New Zealand’s top netball league, or does the game belong under the national body? 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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