NZ Rugby sees growth in players, battles safety perceptions

The former All Blacks captain said that, in a digital world where there have never been so many competing sports for young people to choose from, rugby faces a perpetual challenge of finding ways to connect and engage with Gen Z.

“The biggest challenge for all sporting organisations is engagement and participation,” Kirk said.

“Our mission, our purpose, is to involve people in rugby. And it’s harder and harder to do that. You have got lots more options, through high school.

“There’s a whole range of activities going on, and we intend to continue those activities to get people to engage and keep loving the game.”

The numbers explained (the good)

The headline figure that 155,568 people played rugby in 2024, which is a 6% increase on 2023, is a basis from which the sport can spread an all-important story about growth.

It’s a front-line statistic that at least refutes the seemingly ingrained narrative that rugby is a sport in decline in New Zealand.

And contained within that overall number are data subsets that suggest rugby is not losing the war for the hearts and minds of the youth of today.

The sport, despite constant media commentary that it no longer has the social licence to be the game of choice and heart of communities as it once was, is continuing to win new players at historic rates.

This idea that Gen Z isn’t engaged or attracted to a full-contact, collision sport is not reflected in participation as the latest numbers show the number of teenagers playing last year was the same as it was in 2019 (the benchmark year for comparisons given the impact the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic had between 2020 and 2022).

There were 29,217 boys aged 13-18 playing last year, which is almost in line with the 29,879 who were registered in 2019 (the highest number of teenage participants in any given year since NZR began keeping detailed records).

That 29,217 figure also represents a rise in 2400 registrations of teenagers in 2024 compared with 2023 (a 5% rise), while there was also a rise in the number of players aged 5-13, jumping by 4300 registrations.

Female participation remains the single biggest success story, with 33,757 girls and women playing in 2024 – a record total number, and a 15% increase on 2023.In 2019, of the 64,446 registered players aged between 5-18, 8623 were girls. In 2024, 13,257 of the 64,211 registered junior players were girls.

That’s a 53% growth in straight participation terms, while it also means that the proportion of players aged between 5-18 identifying as female has climbed from 13% to 20%.

The total number of players aged 5-18 was 64,211 which compares with 64,446 in 2019, and while that represents a drop in real terms given the 6% population growth over the same period, it also stands as evidence that rugby was able to win back a lost cohort.

“Absolutely it holds appeal and the data bears that out,” says New Zealand Rugby general manager community rugby Steve Lancaster when asked if rugby still connects with the country’s teenagers.

Rugby still has cache, and it still appeals to pre-teens and teenagers alike.

The numbers explained (the concerns)

There are several trends emerging in the numbers, however, that illustrate rugby is failing to persuade Gen Z’s parents that the game is safe, that participation is rapidly declining in metropolitan areas and that retaining teenage boys continues to be as hard as it has been for the past two decades.

In 2024 there were 21,737 boys aged 5-13 playing rugby – a number significantly down on the 25,944 who were playing in 2019.

While the total number of junior girls playing has grown by 53% between 2019-2024, the total number of junior boys playing in that period has dropped by 9.5%.

And the biggest driver of this downward trend is that parents across the country have bought into a false perception that the sport is dangerous and has produced damning statistics around concussions and brain injuries to prove so.

Perception around injury is proving to be the biggest barrier to children choosing rugby – or having it chosen for them.

The narrative that rugby comes with unacceptably high risks is one that has run away from fact, and it is one that NZR is finding impossibly difficult to control.

In January this year, NZR commissioned research that found 55% of parents with children aged 5-13, said that the danger (risk of serious injury) was the biggest barrier to letting their children play.

Brain injuries – perception or reality?

There is an evidential basis to say that head injuries in junior rugby – games involving players aged between 5 and 13 – are virtually non-existent.

NZR says it has figures from ACC which show that someone would have to play 750 games to suffer a concussion.

At junior level, head injuries are not prevalent, or remotely close to being a concern, and the statistics show that a playground is significantly more dangerous than the rugby field.

“We commissioned some research about perceptions of the game among parents of junior-aged players,” says Lancaster.

“What we found was that the biggest factor in parents not wanting their kids to play rugby or being concerned about them playing rugby was the risk of injury or perceived risk of injury.

“It is not the kids who are making decisions about what games they are playing, it is the parents, and we know we have the challenge with the perceptions of the game often shaped by the media narrative.

“We have got statistics that show that a junior rugby player would have to play 750 games to be liable to suffer a concussion. It is impossible to play 750 games between the ages of 5-12.

“We also have been privy to ACC stats to show that a kid of primary school age is more likely to suffer a fracture on the playground than they are playing rugby.

“What you see in junior rugby is that if kids are suffering injuries, they are usually soft tissue injuries and kids that age are suffering soft tissue injuries in everything they do because they are still learning about their bodies.

“In that respect rugby is just part of life and the risks are not any greater at that age level.”

The impact of changing demographics

Last year illustrated how New Zealand’s changing demographics are impacting rugby’s ability to stay relevant and attract new players.

Of the 133,000 people who came to live in New Zealand last year, 115,000 were from the Philippines, India and China – three countries, none of which have any established or recognised relationship with rugby.

This means that if this trend continues, year-on-year there will be fewer households in New Zealand that have a natural affinity with the game, and rugby will have to sell itself to more people who are largely unfamiliar with its history, culture and social standing.

And that begs the question of whether rugby can win over communities that don’t know the game, and don’t have any family history of it to draw upon?

“We did some work engaging with the Chinese community in Auckland and one of the things that someone said to me and stuck with me, is that immigrants want to fit in,” says Lancaster.

“That is a human condition to want to fit in and people associate rugby with New Zealand. We can introduce the game and grow its participation, but we can’t do so by offering the same old thing we always have.

“The parents who have played rugby are huge advocates for the game. They get it because they have experienced it and they recognise the benefits of being in a team environment, they understand how it grows the individual and leadership skills.

“But on the flip side, the parents who have no experience in the game, they have a skewed perception and aversion to perceived risk.

“We have a great opportunity to leverage those who are in the game to really support it, but we have got a great challenge and opportunity to better promote the reality of the game and the reality around the perception of risk and the benefits who don’t have an affinity with it.”

The changing shape of the game

There seems no doubt that what’s driving the perception around head injuries in junior rugby is the media narrative about concussion that specifically relates to the professional game. Rugby at the elite, adult level has become a collision rather than contact sport and the impacts are significant, and anyone watching, reading or following the game will be conscious of how often brain injuries are mentioned and how many games see players taken off for a Head Injury Assessment.

Where NZR is struggling to be heard is in untangling the conflated narrative that many parents clearly hold, where they see what’s happening in the professional game and believe that is also playing out at the community level.

“It is understandable that people focus on the big hits and collisions, but those things are far less in the junior levels,” says Lancaster.

“The professional game has the bearings on the perception at lower levels. But the professional game is not the same game that the community is playing.

“The reality is we have different safety variations, different formats at community level and different athletes which means they are playing at a different intensity and different shape of game.”

Lancaster says that rugby has shifted away from the idea of one game suiting everyone and that by offering different versions of the sport – contact to part-contact to full-contact – it has broadened its appeal.

World Rugby recently introduced T1, a game that is effectively rugby with every aspect minus tackling.

Rugby administrators, it seems have re-evaluated to accept that the system has not failed if people enter it at five expecting to graduate to be full-contact, 15-a-side players, only to gravitate to a different, less physical or modified version of the game as they get older.

“We have to invest in non-contact formats and have on-ramps and off-ramps,” says Lancaster. “Give people plenty of on-ramps into the game so they can follow it wherever they wish, but give them off-ramps as well so that when they choose an off-ramp it doesn’t mean the end of their participation, they pick a different type of participation.”

The urban problem

Rugby remains part and parcel of life in the provinces and a sport in relatively rude health in terms of the number of juniors playing.

Heartland Rugby unions saw a 7% increase in participation in 2024, with their 28,406 registered players being the most in their combined history.

That is an ongoing trend, illustrated by the growth experienced in junior registrations, which shows that Heartland unions had a combined 7820 junior players in 2013 and 8650 in 2024.

But in the NPC unions, over the same period, the numbers have dropped from a combined 46,500 in 2013, to 42,500 in 2024.

The major metropolitan areas, particularly Auckland and to a similar extent Wellington, are where participation in rugby is proportionately at its lowest.

Some of this is due to the aforementioned changing demographics, with population diversity significantly greater in Auckland.

Some of it, Lancaster says, is due to the proliferation of sporting choice in the larger centres and the associated problems that can exist around accessing (getting to and from) clubs.

But there is evidence to suggest that in different pockets of Auckland there will be different reasons why participation is declining.

Counties Manukau has proven that to some degree with its decision last year to use some of the investment it received for voting in favour of NZR doing a private equity deal with Silver Lake, to subsidise participation fees so as it is effectively free for juniors to register and play.

Chief executive of Counties, Chad Shepherd, says the initiative led to 300 additional registrations last year.

“We looked at our community and we wanted to remove any barrier to people playing,” he says.

He says it’s too early for any data to have emerged about how many new players from last year have returned this year, but he believes that most will have had a positive experience, and that rugby remains a game that kids can readily fall in love with.

Too much focus on the elite

In 2019, NZR commissioned an independent review into secondary school rugby which found that participation was dropping at an “alarming rate”, and that a significant factor behind that was the accumulation of talent into a smaller number of schools, an over-emphasis placed on First XV ahead of participation, and an unsubstantiated desire to ask children to specialise at too early an age.

Whether this remains as true today as it did six years ago is hard to tell, as the evidence is mixed.

In Auckland, there has been an orchestrated shift among the leading rugby schools to de-glorify First XV rugby by taking it off television, limiting media exposure and bringing in tougher codes of conduct around player recruitment.

But the hard data around the numbers continues to show that there is a relatively steep drop-off when players hit their mid-teens.

“We see a consistent decline in participant numbers from intermediate school through to leaving school. One of the things that we saw in our data was that the biggest drop-off point was 15 and what happens about then is that you realise whether you are on track to make the First XV or not,” says Lancaster.

“I don’t think that was a coincidence and kids go, ‘I’m no in line, I’m not in a great team and the kids on the pathway are getting all the attention and love’.”

But Lancaster isn’t keen to lay the blame squarely on those schools who run high-profile, elite First XV programmes that end up contributing a significant number of players into professional rugby.

“[The 2019 report] said that the focus on performance programmes is contributing to a decline in social and recreational participation,” says Lancaster.

“It is true in some cases. Somewhere close to 300 secondary schools offer rugby. There are about 40 that are heavily invested in First XV programmes that are contributing notably to the professional pathway programme in terms of their graduates going into professional rugby. There is a whole heap of schools who offer rugby just as a recreational sport.

“Equally some of those 40-odd schools that are contributing to the professional game are also doing a good job in fostering participation. They are invested holistically but there are schools that are less so.”

Lancaster stresses that rugby believes in the balance is better philosophy and doesn’t encourage players to specialise until they are at least 16.

Gregor Paul is one of New Zealand’s most respected rugby writers and columnists. He has won multiple awards for journalism and written several books about sport.