In their first season of Super Rugby, Moana Pasifika finished last. In their second season of Super Rugby, Moana Pasifika finished last. In their third season of Super Rugby, Moana Pasifika finished second to last. In their fourth season, they’ll have Ardie Savea.
If you’re not a rugby fan, a rugby team signing a rugby player may not seem like a story of great moment. But this, as people keep pointing out, is one of the most significant transfers in the history of Super Rugby.
Last year's World Rugby Player of the Year has signed to a team that didn’t even appear to have a home ground in 2024.
Why did Savea do that?
The answer came at a media conference yesterday afternoon.
It was in Auckland's Mt Wellington. I couldn’t find it at first – because I wasn’t invited. And that, in itself, tells part of this story.
The only reporters there were from Pasifika media outlets and programmes, along with some Pasifika journalism students. It may be tempting to read this as a rejection of something. But it wasn’t. It was a reminder of what Moana Pasifika stands for, and why Savea has signed for them – amplifying Pasifika identity in a sport that has so often been made better by Pacific players, and less often returned the compliment.
I snuck in with cameraman Phil Melville. We stood at the back and we listened as three of the finest players to ever wear an All Blacks jersey talked about what it will mean for Pasifika players – including many New Zealanders – that Savea is moving from the Hurricanes to a team formed (as World Rugby’s chairman, Bill Beaumont, said in 2021) to give Pasifika players in (or near) New Zealand, "the choice for the first time to be part of a local professional team at the top level of elite club rugby".
The three men on the stage were La'auli Sir Michael Jones, Ardie Savea, and Fa’alogo Tana Umaga. Between them, they’ve played for the All Blacks more than 200 times. At their best, they made the game seem almost limitless. Now, they’re united by a desire to lift Moana Pasifika from a team that not only houses Pasifika players to a team that also makes the dream of really competing come true.
Umaga, the team’s coach, told me the story of first realising that Savea might – an outlandish, preposterous "might" – be available. He was chatting to him after a game at the Rugby World Cup, last year, and Savea asked him how Moana Pasifika were going.
"Oh, it's alright," Umaga answered. "We’re just getting started."
"Don’t forget about me," Savea replied.
Umaga did the kind of delighted double-take you do when you win a raffle you weren’t even sure you’d bought a ticket for, and a respectful approach began.
He called Savea's decision "a really courageous move from himself and his lovely wife, Saskia" – by which he probably meant the bigger money was elsewhere.
"But something was burning inside him, which he talks about, to represent his parents and his heritage."
And that sense of honouring his heritage is crucial.
"It’s a special moment for me and my family; my grandparents and my parents," Savea told me. And his brother Julian Savea, of course, who’s already in the team – the famous "bus".
But this decision has been driven by a wider sense of family, too – the idea that by joining Moana Pasifika, Savea can elevate the franchise beyond its half-reputation as a team that players go to when they can’t go somewhere else, or when somewhere else is done with them, into a first choice team. A team you dream of playing for.
"It has the capacity to be transformative in a generational sense," I suggest to him.
"Yeah, my humility side says that it’s just another decision," Savea replies. "But I know people are saying this is massive. Yeah, I just want to use the sport, rugby, and myself as a vessel.
"For Moana to be a Super Rugby team, that was an awesome first step. I’m joining a legacy. I can’t wait to add, serve.”
By which he perhaps means – but was too modest to say – he can’t wait to help Moana Pasifika fulfil the promise it needed players like him to help them fulfil. The word "serve" is apt, but this is about leadership, too.
Sir Michael, Moana Pasifika’s chairman who has been gently but tenaciously advocating for better treatment for Pacific rugby for decades now, summed it up.
"We always talk about the wave rising in Moana Pasifika, and I suppose it’s become a lot more of a tidal wave, a tsunami.
"We’re really looking forward to a lot more of that transformation, empowerment. More opportunity. And more hope.”
Hope can be a cruel thing when you don’t have quite enough to build it upon.
Just before the end of the 2023 season, when they’d played 13 matches and lost 13, I wrote about why the game needed Moana Pasifika to win, and to survive. The idea that what Moana Pasifika represents makes it a team that everyone who loves rugby ought to support.
But wow, the odds have been against them.
This season, they appeared to not have a home ground. And if you don’t have a home ground, how can you have home fans? And if you don’t have home fans, then revenue becomes a kind of fancy. A taunt.
Next season, they’ll play at North Harbour Stadium. They have a new sponsor, the Pacific Medical Association. And they’ll have Ardie Savea.
The wave becoming a tsunami.
"It’s like, I’m at peace," Savea says.
Rugby players – the top men, anyway – don’t often talk like that. The men’s game so often seems nervous about having a larger purpose.
And here he is. The best player in the world last year having signed to a team that is winning by even existing, and now hopes to do so much better than that.
"Yeah," he says, "I'm really happy."
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