By Sam Ryan

A few years back, SANZAR and the ARU were looking for a way to generate more revenue ahead of their upcoming broadcast negotiations. To increase revenue, they needed more TV content, so they added more teams to the Super Rugby competition, then more again, then more again.

After years of planning, we ended up with an 18 team, four-conference tournament that few understood and even less enjoyed.

Yes, there were more matches than ever before, but many of them felt meaningless, others occurred in the middle of the night and some of them were barely contests at all.

By the end of the 2016 season, even the most passionate Australian rugby supporters were struggling to get excited about Super Rugby. The poor performances of the Australian sides played a part in that, but it seemed the competition had lost most of us.

This can be easily fixed by reducing the size of the competition.

Australia cannot support five competitive teams, nor South Africa six and although Japan and Argentina will get better, I’m still not sold on their involvement either. As many have said recently, it is the job of World Rugby to grow the game globally, not SANZAR and I think that has been confused of late.

Mr Pulver said recently that Australian rugby “can’t shrink its way to greatness” and to an extent, I agree. The majority of the revenue that funds our game comes from the broadcast agreement and shrinking the Super Rugby competition will mean fewer matches and less TV dollars and while that’s a problem, maybe it’s not as big a problem as the ARU thinks.

Instead of creating more content, why don’t we create more meaningful content? Matches that matter and that fans want to watch.

To replace the content lost from reducing the size of the Super Rugby competition, the ARU and NZRU could create an FA Cup style tournament, similar to the FFA Cup now run by Football Australia and broadcast by Fox Sports.

This may sounds crazy, but bare with me for a moment. Here’s how it could work.

16 Australian club teams and 16 New Zealand club teams would be split into geographical conferences. Teams would qualify based on the results from their previous respective club seasons.

For example, the top four Sydney and Brisbane sides, the top two Canberra sides and the top Melbourne and Perth teams would automatically qualify. The final four spots would be allocated as wildcards. New Zealand would follow a similar structure and all teams would be ranked within their conference to form a 32-team knockout bracket

The opening round would be held on a bye weekend, with one Australian and one New Zealand match played back-to-back over two nights during the week. This would give the broadcasters up to eight hours of prime time content each round.

The round of 16, quarter finals and semi finals would also be played midweek with each round held over two nights during the June Test window, allowing non-international Super Rugby players to return to play for their clubs. The final would be played and broadcast as a curtain raiser to a Bledisloe Cup match.

Both the ARU and the NZRU would allocate prize money, which would help fund the clubs overall operations and ideally flow down to the grassroots level of the sport. Yes, the tournament would cost money, but it would be far cheaper then funding one or two extra Super Rugby franchises and could quickly become just as lucrative from a broadcast perspective, if the tournament took off.

In the US, the college basketball National Championship is one of the most watched sporting events each year. The 68-team knockout tournament is essential viewing, not because the players are better than their professional counterparts, but because every must-win match matters. Even if your club isn’t playing, fans quickly get behind a team, often the underdog, and it makes for enthralling TV. The FFA Cup is proof of that.

Instead of trying to create a supporter base, why not use what we’ve already got. Australian rugby fans are extremely passionate about club rugby and the huge crowds at the Sydney and Brisbane club finals showed exactly that. Throw in the “knockout factor” and maybe, just maybe, it could work.

The competition would also give young players big match experience and teach our future Wallabies how to compete and hopefully beat the Kiwis at an early age.

Maybe it’s just too hard but at the moment, things aren’t going great and Australian rugby needs to think outside of the box to win back over the fans. A tournament like this would help grow the game from the bottom up and reduce the ever increasing gap between the grassroots and professional arms of the game.

But just as importantly, it would be great to watch.