Auckland FC owner Bill Foley just bought an English rugby club - and $100m price tag shines harsh light on Super Rugby model
Sunday, 5 July 2026
ANALYSIS: Auckland FC owner Bill Foley made his latest move in his expanding sports empire this week, buying English PREM side Exeter.
That was noteworthy in itself, but the significance from a New Zealand rugby perspective was the price.
Foley paid a reported £45 million ($NZ105m) for Exeter, a successful but debt-laden club who play at the 15,000-capacity Sandy Park.
To put that into context, Hurricanes chair Malcolm Gillies paid the Wellington Rugby Football Union $1.5m for 50% of the Super Rugby champions, and The Post understands that the most recent assessment of the five New Zealand Super Rugby clubs put their combined value at about $50m, although with a wide variation at either side of that number.
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The obvious question is: how on earth are Exeter worth tens of millions of dollars more that the Crusaders, Hurricanes, Blues, Chiefs and Highlanders combined, particularly when the Super Rugby final just delivered big ratings for Sky?
The Post understands that is a question that has vexed those within the Super Rugby clubs, particularly as the All Blacks have effectively been valued at $3.5b by the Silver Lake sale.
That means the five New Zealand Super Rugby clubs are worth just 1.42% of the All Blacks, despite being the sport’s primary product from February to June.
Of course, Exeter’s position in a big market such as the UK gives them an advantage over the New Zealand clubs, but that doesn’t fully explain the discrepancy in value.
And with due respect to Exeter, if a promoter with a big bag on money wanted to set up an ‘north v south’ club clash, featuring two from each hemisphere, the Hurricanes or Crusaders would attract a bigger purse than the English side.
The real issue is likely to lie in the Super Rugby clubs’ assets - or lack of them.
Even the assets you might think they own - the players - are not theirs. Super Rugby players are employed by NZ Rugby and effectively seconded to the Super Rugby clubs.
Contrast that with England. An England international playing for the Red Roses against South Africa this weekend is not a RFU player, he’s an Exeter or Leicester player who is playing for England.
And RFU pays the PREM clubs tens of millions of dollars to get access to their players, currently set at £33m ($77m) a year.
If New Zealand’s Super Rugby clubs employed their players - “owning” them for want of a better word - it would flip the current economic model on its head.
These are some of the forces driving the privatisation push that is bubbling away under the surface in New Zealand rugby at the moment - a topic that has been addressed publicly by Gillies and Highlanders chair Peter Kean.
In some ways, the Blues would have been the obvious choice for Foley’s first investment into rugby.
But why would anyone invest into Super Rugby at the present? You get so little in return for taking on all the risk and the big decisions affecting your business are still taken by NZ Rugby.