Rugby to face football style exodus?

According to Saturday's SMH Super 14 Aussie franchises will face an exodus of players heading to Europe in the next two years.

Aussie football fans have had to deal with this for years but it will be interesting to see how it affects the Aussie Super 14 fan base if, as expected, such an exodus would leave the Aussie S14 sides even further down the table than they are this year...


With three of the four Aussie teams in the bottom four any further exodus will clearly weaken the exisiting teams.

With the Union junior base pretty low in terms of numbers, a loss of players could seriously impact on the Aussie teams, particularly as they play in an International Competition.

It's not like the NRL or AFL. Should any players leave to other codes, or to play overseas, the domestic nature of the league means the results don't really suffer only the on-field quality...but that's always hard to measure in a domestic league.

Football has always had the problem of players leaving, but the depth of the junior base, plus the ability to bring in overseas players has meant we are still able to have a strong domestic competition, the A-League.

Socceroos have always played o/s based players but Union and Wallabies "protect" the local game by only playing Aussie based players in the Wallabies.

This may all be about to change.

And it will be interesting to see how many die-hard Aussie Union players make the trip home for some meaningless "test" match against France, Italy or whoever.

Union clearly faces many challenges in coming years in Australia.

And who can forget that the World Cup will be played in New Zealand in 2011 when they could have gone to Japan. With the state of the game that is one big blooper. I thought it then, it seems even bigger today.