Inside the All Blacks: Ardie Savea's near-exit and the culture crisis under Scott Robertson
Chelsea Daniels interviews NZ Herald rugby analyst Gregor Paul about Ardie Savea's contract standoff and the broader dysfunction inside the All Blacks.
Summary
Chelsea Daniels speaks with Gregor Paul, rugby analyst for the New Zealand Herald, about the circumstances that led Ardie Savea to tell All Blacks leadership he wanted to walk away from the final two years of his contract. Paul explains that Savea's situation was the product of an exhausting schedule — including two stints in Japan — combined with prolonged separation from his family in Wellington. Beyond Savea's personal crisis, Paul details widespread player discontent during Scott Robertson's tenure as head coach, including inconsistent disciplinary standards, open dissent among players during the November Grand Slam tour, and a breakdown of the All Blacks' traditional self-policing culture. Robertson was ultimately removed from his role. Paul argues that New Zealand Rugby was complicit in allowing Savea's burnout to develop, and that the organisation now needs a far more carefully managed approach to sabbatical arrangements.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Ardie Savea's decision to walk away
Chelsea Daniels: It's been revealed that Ardie Savea's future with the All Blacks once hung in the balance. His push to quit was amid whispers of player discontent and coaching fractures, exposing deep cracks in the team's foundations. Players apparently openly questioned coaching, discipline, and the team's overall direction. Today on The Front Page, NZ Herald rugby analyst Gregor Paul joins us to break down the inside story and the deeper turmoil inside the All Blacks.
So Gregor, what convinced you that Ardie Savea was genuinely ready to walk away from his — what — million-dollar-plus contract?
Gregor Paul: Well, I think the fact that he said that he was — without giving you a facetious answer. I don't think there's any ambiguity in terms of the consistency of what I discovered. It's there all the way through. Everyone that he spoke to is really clear about what he said, which is that he felt that he didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't continue — or he didn't want to continue — with the final two years of his contract.
The reasons for him wanting to do that were clear. Through the choices that he'd made — and it must be said, the career choices that he'd made following the 2023 World Cup — they'd taken him away from his home for too long. He hadn't been living in the family home for various reasons because he'd been in Japan. Then he moved up to Auckland. His kids were at an age where, I think, one of them had just started school, maybe two of them, which was why they chose for the family not to go with him. So his wife and three children stayed in Wellington while he was earning money as a rugby player. That kind of nomadic lifestyle, playing for so long without a break, his age — I think everyone gets to a certain age in rugby where their body starts to not recover the way they want it to. All of these things happened. And in November, on that end-of-year tour with the All Blacks, he was really clear — first with chairman David Kirk, then coach Scott Robertson, and CEO Mark Robinson — that he wanted to talk to them about not fulfilling the final two years of his contract.
The sabbatical system and how it contributed to burnout
Chelsea Daniels: Do you reckon there's a wider discussion here about players — or homegrown players — going across to the likes of Japan, or some going to Paris and places like that for the money? About choosing that over a long career with the All Blacks?
Gregor Paul: I think the idea here is that there is what we call a sabbatical clause that gets offered to players once they've reached or won 70 test caps and they re-sign a long-term contract with New Zealand — by long-term, we mean three years plus. Then they have the right to negotiate a period — I think it's up to about six months — where they can either not play, which is what current captain Scott Barrett has chosen to do. He is not playing in Super Rugby, or he'll return late for the last few games of Super Rugby. So effectively he'll be having six months off. He's negotiated the right to do that. Or they have the right to use those sabbatical periods to go and play elsewhere. Typically it's in Japan because it aligns with the New Zealand season, so they can go off to Japan, earn incredible amounts of money, come back, and still be eligible to carry on playing for the All Blacks. Jordie Barrett chose to go to Ireland last year, so the option to go and do that in Europe also exists.
Now, where the problem might lie is this: the idea is that these guys can have a short period of time offshore, get a different playing experience, get a different lifestyle experience, and continue to be All Blacks. But I think the Ardie example shows the danger that if you allow them to go and you don't manage that process particularly well — because he went to play in Japan in 2024 and he's there again this year — it has made his life very difficult. Too much rugby, too much time away from home. And I think what New Zealand Rugby certainly needs to look at is whether they can endorse that in the future, and whether they need to be careful about how much time they give these guys to go and meander and sow their wild oats, for want of a better term, somewhere else. They probably need to control that, and they didn't do it very well with Ardie.
Chelsea Daniels: Where's he at now?
Gregor Paul: He's in Japan. He's feeling better about life, clearly. He's currently negotiating with New Zealand Rugby a playing schedule that they will agree with him for once he comes back from Japan, which will be sort of late May, early June. They're talking to him about saying, look, we can't give you another sabbatical period — you've exhausted all those. So he's looking at a number of options around physically taking some time off. One option is that he will not be available regularly for the July test matches when he comes home — that he just won't play in those. He'll take time out, he'll be at home, he'll recuperate, because he probably needs a bit of a break physically as much as he needs to spend some time at home. The idea there would be that if they give him some time off when he comes home to recuperate and rev him up, the big thing in the All Blacks calendar this year is an eight-week tour of South Africa, and they want Ardie Savea at his best for that.
That's one option — it hasn't been agreed. Maybe he'll take time off at the end of the year and not go to Europe when the All Blacks go over there, but I don't think that's the preferred option for either him or the new coaching group. In terms of where he's at, he's looking at a managed schedule that will take him through to the World Cup. He's given assurance to New Zealand Rugby that he will see out his contract. And I think he's probably in a much better headspace. I wouldn't say that the fact that the head coach has changed has been the reason — definitely not the reason — why he came back and negotiated from having said he didn't want to be here. But I certainly think he'll be looking at that opportunity as a chance to rebuild, restart, and be rejuvenated by a new coaching group coming in.
Chelsea Daniels: I suppose if we were to think of it like us common people, it would be like using your annual leave because you need a break, but then working for another company during your annual leave, coming back to your regular job, and being like, "I'm a bit tired."
Gregor Paul: Yeah, exactly right. At least for sabbatical options — they came into play, and I'm old enough to remember — I broke the initial story back in 2008. It was Daniel Carter. He was the first guy, because he was going to go offshore for three years. He said rugby went cheaper. New Zealand Rugby said, we don't want to lose you, you're in your mid-20s. So they said, how about we let you go offshore for six months and you still remain contracted to us? So it wasn't a panic move, but it kind of was. It created a precedent from there on, saying you're now allowed to do this — senior players can now do this to elongate their careers.
And yeah, these guys get paid an extraordinary amount of money to go and play in Japan, which is what Ardie has done — probably up to about $2 million for the biggest names. But the kicker here, Chelsea, is that they still get paid by New Zealand Rugby on top of that. So while they don't get paid their Super Rugby component of their salary — which is $195,000 that they miss out on — these guys are getting paid a million dollars by New Zealand Rugby. So they still get paid about $800,000 or $900,000 from their employer, and they're allowed to go and earn money with a separate employer. These guys can bank up to about $3 million in a calendar year by being allowed to do that, which is incredibly generous. And in Ardie's case, he's done all that and then come back and said, yeah, but I'm really tired.
I know, reading the comments attached to my story, there are some people that don't have any sympathy for that. But look, he landed in a space where he was allowed to do this. He didn't go rogue and just go off to Japan. But it is an interesting point now where New Zealand's best player has hit a wall, and New Zealand Rugby have been complicit to some extent in allowing that to happen. So they are now having to say, okay, all parties are at fault here. You wanted to do this, you've overreached to some extent, we've allowed you to do it, we probably shouldn't have. So they're retrospectively trying to manage back from there and say, what can we do to make this work? Because he's the best player in the country and they do not want to lose him 18 months out from a World Cup.
Chelsea Daniels: Well, essentially our best player's got burnout. Do you reckon what is the likelihood of them looking at changing those plans or that workaround?
Gregor Paul: Beauden Barrett has actually done something reasonably similar to Ardie. He went to Japan in 2021 and then went back again — I think he was there in 2024. There's a slightly bigger gap between his stints. He's been fine, he's been okay, he hasn't hit a wall. But he plays in a different position and he's a different type of athlete to Ardie. Ardie is a collision athlete.
Even Richie McCaw, who's the greatest All Blacks of all time, had to take six months off playing rugby to get him through to being able to continue playing until I think he was about 34 or 35 in the World Cup final. And he was still at his best by the time he reached 35 because he had taken a six-month period where he just didn't play. He went off and travelled, had a genuine sabbatical, got away from the country, and mentally recharged himself.
So look, these are a good mechanism. They have been a good mechanism in the past to recharge players, to keep them in the country, and give them long careers. Ardie's maybe the first guy where the sabbatical period — given to him to extend his career — has ironically been the thing that might have shortened his career. So I don't think it's about putting a blanket ban on them or ripping it all up. I think it's about saying New Zealand Rugby needs to have a really careful, more detailed, nuanced management approach around its players. Yes, these conditions can be put into a player's contract, but New Zealand Rugby needs to be very careful about allowing guys to go and play twice in these foreign competitions. They should be saying, look, we think you need to take time off — you can play in one sabbatical period, you can go away and play, but if we give you another one, you're not playing in that one, you're taking the time off.
Player discontent and the breakdown of All Blacks culture
Chelsea Daniels: Culture is an interesting word in a sporting sense. It's not tangible. Nobody could necessarily describe exactly what that means, but I guess like in any workplace, it's putting people first and valuing people, creating an environment where you get the best out of people. Sometimes that's the stick and sometimes that's the carrot — it's how you don't shy away from hard conversations, how you cultivate purpose and meaning, particularly within a rugby sense, how you get everyone on the same page from a strategy point of view, the leadership of the team, the people that you surround yourself with. And we know there was player discontent obviously before Scott Robertson's departure. Do we know everything that was happening behind the scenes?
Gregor Paul: Not everything, I wouldn't have thought. We know quite a lot. It's been detailed in that piece about Ardie. There were a lot of things that were unravelling in that team. I wouldn't put the blame on one person or say it's all the head coach's fault. I think there are multiple people complicit in why a team was unravelling to the extent that it was. And when I say unravelling — it's clear that there were players in virtual open dissent towards the end of that Grand Slam tour in November last year, talking openly in public spaces about their unhappiness. It's very un-All Blacks. All Blacks don't do that. They might have a few guys up in a room whining and moaning about a coaching decision or not being in the team, and that's always been the case. But it's never been open dissent, because senior players, if they hear that, usually come along and say, you need to be quiet now, that's not how we do it. And guys would be disciplined by their peers. That's what worried New Zealand Rugby — that kind of self-policing mechanism falling apart inside the team.
There was widespread concern about the state of the players and their ability to play for the coaching group. David Kirk, the chair, had been in Edinburgh, London, and Chicago, seen firsthand, talking to players about what was going on. So what happened was they built quite a detailed dossier of intelligence about what was going on, and they certainly got the impression that there were so many red flags that they needed to investigate further. And to answer your question — do we know everything? No. But we know what the end of the story was: the head coach was removed from his role. That gives you a pretty clear indication that those who investigated what was going on were distressed enough by what they found to say this is bad enough that we have to remove the head coach from his job.
Chelsea Daniels: And you mentioned that it's not very All Blacks-like. Do you think that the prestige of being an All Blacks, even from within and behind the curtain, has diminished in some way?
Gregor Paul: I don't think the prestige of being an All Blacks has diminished. But I think some of the senior All Blacks players — a lot of the All Blacks players — let themselves down quite badly in the final period of Scott Robertson's tenure, because a coach shouldn't be blindsided like that about the level of unhappiness and discontent. The whole self-policing mechanism of the All Blacks, the whole idea that they're there for the team and what's right for the team — well, what's right for the team is that these guys needed to be talking to the coach. They needed to be saying, this isn't right, we don't think this is going to work. Push back. That's how these environments work. It might not be necessarily comfortable, but it's what you need to get the best out of people, to get the best out of your environment. In previous regimes that I've covered, a guy like McCaw had a senior group around him. They spoke up and they spoke out, and they had a collaborative agreement with the coaches about what they could put into the team.
Inconsistent discipline and the Robertson era
Chelsea Daniels: One thing I thought was really quite interesting about your article — and why I call upon the prestige of the All Blacks — is that the ramifications for wrongdoing apparently have lightened. Do you think that's got anything to do with the discontent?
Gregor Paul: I think it had a huge part to do with the discontent. I wouldn't say this is necessarily going to be how life will be under the next coaching regime or how it's been under previous ones. But under Scott Robertson's coaching regime, there was certainly a sense — detailed in the Damian McKenzie episode — where he missed the bus taking the team from San Diego back to Los Angeles, and his punishment was to apologise to the team. Well, in previous All Blacks regimes, I can absolutely guarantee he would not have been playing the next week. And maybe even beyond that — it might have been a two-week suspension — because the players would have said, that is a massive indiscretion, that is not reaching the standards that we expect.
In previous regimes, if you were late for just a meeting about something not that important — late by a minute — you'd be fined or disciplined. So to miss a bus taking you back to an airport was a major indiscretion that really didn't get dealt with particularly well. And it set the tone inside the team under the Robertson era, because he was the culture coach, and that kind of stuff, if you don't deal with it, becomes a massive problem. The All Blacks have an expectation that you turn up on time, you're wearing the right kit — it's really clearly laid out to you what you need to do, when you need to do it, how you need to behave. So if you fail, you're put in front of your peer group usually, and they give you a pretty tough time about how you've let the team down.
That was quite a corrosive element inside that particular team, because they then had another incident where Ethan de Groot — we don't actually know what his misdemeanour was, but we believe it was that he missed a curfew — and he was stood down for a game. Now, that's the right call in some senses, but it then pushed back against what had happened to Damian McKenzie. So it felt like there's a sort of two-tier system where it depends who you might be and what position you play, and that might have an impact on your punishment.
And if you go back to the World Cup, Mark Tele'a — who was the first-choice wing of the All Blacks at that time, a really important player to them — he missed a curfew during the World Cup, and he then missed the World Cup quarterfinal. He didn't get to play in it. Now, he was a hugely important player, but they were adamant: you haven't met standards, so you're not playing. That was really clear to the players in the previous regime. And in the Robertson one, there were all these contradictions — indiscretions that got punished and some that didn't. So that became a real issue inside the team.
What to expect from the new coaching group
Chelsea Daniels: Right, Gregor. So what next? What do you expect from this coaching team? Are they going to be carrot or stick?
Gregor Paul: There'll be a combination of the two, as there needs to be. I don't think they'll set out with a particular view on one or the other. It'll be an environment with really clear expectations for the players about how the team wants to play and expectations around behaviour. These are always pretty obvious anyway when you're an All Blacks — by the time you've got there, you have a pretty good understanding about how you're meant to behave, what being an All Blacks looks like. But the new coaching group will reinforce that. I think it'll be an empowering environment. I think they'll be more collaborative with the players. The players will have greater input, both to strategy and off the field. I think they'll be given a bit of leeway to behave like adults, and if they don't, there'll be punishment for that. They'll have a clearly defined set of standards, and I'm sure that the new head coach will be really consistent with how he treats the players. If they behave or don't behave, all of that will be really clear to them about what happens.
Chelsea Daniels: Do you think there's any more to come out?
Gregor Paul: I'd be very surprised if there's any more to come out. I think that's probably it. I don't really know if anyone will — certainly I won't be looking any harder or any further, because I feel like that's a fairly exhaustive search that's already been carried out. And secondly, the value around doing that now journalistically has probably gone, because the change has been made. We all know there was a problem, and the problem is undeniable because they moved the coach off — they terminated his job. So no, I think we've probably brought that story to an end.
The verification process behind the story
Chelsea Daniels: And just because I'm interested — when you get a whispering of, say, an Ardie Savea looking to renegotiate his contract, or wanting to walk away, or these kinds of murmurings of discontent among the crew, as a journalist, what do you have to do to try and see whether that's actually the case? How many people do you go through?
Gregor Paul: In the case of this piece, I counted it up the other day and I think it was about 29, if not 30, people with direct connections to the information that you're trying to find out. You can't take anything on face value. There's a lot of rumour, there's a lot of speculation, there's a lot of people that think they know about what was happening in and around the team because players talk. Players talk to an agent. An agent might then talk to an administrator. An administrator talks to someone else. And you can be four steps removed, and that story you're hearing can be completely changed from what was actually happening. With Ardie Savea, there were a lot of rumours — apparently he was about to sign a contract with an Irish club, or he was about to go and do this. There's no evidence for that, though.
When you actually get to the people that you need to speak to and find out what happened, you've got to actually talk to the people that were talking to Ardie. I tried very hard to get Ardie himself to talk, but he didn't want to. He may in time deal with his situation — he may say something, he may not. But you've got to ask, you've got to be 100% certain. You've got to be talking to the right people, people that can tell you with some certainty because they're directly connected to that information. When I wrote that Ardie was very clear about his intentions, you've got to be talking to people that know what was said in that room, or be confident that they know what was said in that room. So that takes time to put all that together.
And in the end, people might not like it — I know there's been a bit of pushback from people connected to the story who feel it's going over old ground or dragging poor old Scott Robertson's regime through the mud one more time. But no one disputes the accuracy of it. That's the important thing. The narrative is correct, as far as I can tell. The timelines are all correct, the story's all correct, and the public can make their minds up about the value of that. What the Herald is building its premium reputation on is being correct, being accurate, and telling stories to that kind of depth. They give people an insight into what was really going on in the All Blacks, and whether it's valuable or not, our audience will judge the value depending on how many people read it and how many people pay for it.
Chelsea Daniels: Well, and it's important for the history books as well, surely, to know what different eras of the All Blacks looked like — which is a team that is not just a sports team in this country. They're held to such high regard, put on the highest pedestal. So of course it's important. Thank you so much for joining us, Gregor.
Gregor Paul: My pleasure. Thank you.