The New Zealand All Blacks are arguably the most successful team in international sports history. Winners of the last two Rugby World Cups and owners of the global No. 1 team ranking for more than 85 percent of the time since the leaderboard was introduced in 2003, the All Blacks are as much an iconic sports brand as they are the national team of a country with a population of just 4.7 million.
New Zealand Rugby Union CEO Steve Tew appeared on a panel at the Leaders Sport Business Summit in New York last week and then spoke exclusively with SportTechie in advance of the All Blacks’ starring role in Amazon Prime Video’s All or Nothing sports documentary series, which debuts on Friday, June 1.
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On stage, Tew discussed the “unique responsibility” his organization has in governing not only the All Blacks and the women’s national team (the Black Ferns) but also the youth and community games of all ages in the country. Additionally, the All Blacks’ rampant success has made the team “an ambassador” for the sport at large.
As such, Tew described the need to help grow the sport and his team’s popularity through international sponsorships, such as the one they have with AIG. That led to an AIG ad shot in Japan, “Tackle the Risk,” which Tew said accrued some 195 million views across all platforms and the VR-filmed, 360-degree immersive experience of the haka.
Tew himself said New Zealand’s biggest issue is that the country is “very isolated,” but the Amazon docuseries ought to attract a wide audience. As the narrator intones in the teaser, “For the first time, this notoriously secretive team is pulling back the black curtain.”
(Note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
SportTechie: How did the Amazon docuseries come together and what do you hope to get out of it?
Tew: What we’ve done with Amazon is provide them with a one-off opportunity that hasn’t been done before to live, for a pretty long period of time, inside the All Black environment. Virtually unrestricted access, but obviously there’s always a line that you draw. Their cameras and microphones were very close to the team for much of last year, and that produced [six] in-depth episodes of what it takes to be sustaining a winning team like the All Blacks . . . which we didn’t win as much as we would liked to have.
We probably get asked to do something like that every week, but we chose this one because Amazon’s got real scale and reach, they put a high-cost production behind it and we came to a commercial arrangement as well. The most important thing is that we are going to see people who would not normally be exposed to rugby or certainly the All Blacks who will have an opportunity on their platforms to see something pretty special.
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SportTechie: How important are these projects for a country that’s a long flight away to grow its reach through such tech platforms?
Tew: We live in a very connected world, don’t we? Everyone talks about the well of live sport as content and how you get connected with live sports is a very important part of that. But you can only play so many games. It’s not like baseball where you can play 162 games in a year, so we’ve got to find other ways of doing it.
I think opportunities like the one Amazon presented is important, but we have our own platforms — our All Blacks platform, we put new content up on that all the time. We aim to connect with people all around the world. There are a lot of New Zealanders who no longer live at home, and we have a lot of fans that are not New Zealanders.
We’re a little different from a lot of the clubs and franchises here because it’s easy for me, as a Kiwi, to support a club with the Premiership or a club in the NRL or the NFL because they’re not competing with me. It’s much harder to convince an American that the All-Blacks should be their team when they’ve got the Eagles [the U.S. men’s national team]. Where I draw our ambition off-shore is that we want people to see the All-Blacks as their second-favorite team.
We’ve got a World Cup in Japan next year. We want the Japanese fans to support Japan, but if Japan aren’t playing and we are, then we want them to support the All Blacks. We’ve come to the U.S. a couple times already and played at Soldiers Field. That’s been part of our strategy.
SportTechie: Rugby, like a lot of sports, is embracing sport science, and the All Blacks seem to have embraced wearable technology for injury prevention. On stage, you were asked about finding the best players, could putting wearables on younger player help identify skills that might project to an elite level?
Tew: Yeah, there’s a happy medium to be found. Some of things that technology is allowing us to measure and monitor, from a injury point of view and from a performance point of view, is seriously better than it was five or 10 years ago. But you still need the human intuition to interpret the data, right? A couple speakers today have talked about how data is good, but it’s only noise and it’s not helpful if you don’t have people skilled to pull the right data out and be able to draw conclusions from that data. That’s why we invest heavily in the people who use the technology. The technology is clearly important. We have good relationships with a number of platforms.
SportTechie: Has there been one technology in particular that’s made a big difference in the way that you’ve played?
Tew: I’m not sure I’d identify anything in particular. From a physical point of view, the GPS and monitoring the workload is obviously something that’s got a pretty prominent place with us. The way we follow nutrition and monitor skin folds — there are all sorts of things I won’t know about. All I see is an expense on the budget line, and there’s plenty of those.
SportTechie: On the tactical side, I know assistant coach Wayne Smith retired. I read about his video analysis work and that he was known as “Techno”? And there’s also senior scientist Ken Quarrie, right?
Tew: Wayne was called “the Professor.” Ken’s our scientist inside the organization. Ken is one of the most intellectual people I’ve ever met. He’s a good man, Ken. He’s done some analytical work that feeds into some of the work that our coaches with the All Blacks and Wayne in particular was good at using. It was probably a bit unheralded in terms of his contributions to the game.
Ken is also very busy in our injury prevention [program]. He’s controlling for a lot of historical information to get a better handle on our concussion issue. That’s a big one.
Smitty is a big loss. I’ve worked with Wayne since 1996 or 1997, and he’s always been very innovative. One of those areas of innovation was around video analysis, and that has grown enormously in the time the game has been professional. I’m not sure everyone would argue that it’s been a great asset to the game because what’s happened is that teams that are good at analysis just get better at defense. What we’ve strived to do is use the information we get from analysis to be good at attack and defense because otherwise we’ll end up with games that aren’t so good to watch.
SportTechie: I was interested to see that Wayne was a big fan of the book, Moneyball. Nowadays, everyone says there’s a “Moneyball of this” or a “Moneyball of that.” Does rugby have a similar data future?
Tew: It’s got a data present. Our guys are using a lot of statistical information. I think an area of the game that Wayne helped grow was that all of our trainings are captured. The coaches and players spend an enormous amount of time reviewing how they did things at training because if you practice poorly, you play poorly. There’s some obvious stuff you pick up [on site], but when you get back and analyze off a drone camera or — we cart tons and tons of gear wherever we go because we’re filming everywhere and reshowing it. Data, whether it be statistics in a table or live visual feedback data, it’s all very important to the picture. You’re painting a picture that you’re trying to improve.
SportTechie: Drone use for sports seems to be growing in popularity.
Tew: We used to carry around a big telescope. Now it’s just a drone for the last two or three years now. Soon there’ll be drones.