SA Rugby president Mark Alexander has walked back remarks suggesting the union could exit the Investec Champions Cup, now framing his earlier comments as speculation and describing July's review as "a negotiated balance" between competing calendar demands rather than a forum for radical change.
Speaking after last week's annual meeting, Alexander had said SA Rugby "will have to decide which competitions will be retained and which ones we can drop", comments widely interpreted as placing the Champions Cup under threat. The reaction from franchise ownership was immediate. Sharks owner Marco Masotti warned he would withdraw funding should SA Rugby pull the franchises from the competition. "Let me be clear — I will no longer fund the losses (and all of the owners will feel the same way) if we pull out of the Champions Cup," Masotti told KickOff Rugby.
Alexander subsequently sought to defuse the situation, telling News24 that the underlying issue remains the sheer volume of rugby South African players are required to play. "We play for 11 months in a year and nowhere else do they do that," he said. "We have our international calendar and our URC and EPCR calendar. It creates a bottleneck for our player downtime, and that means our players are not available for either the franchises or South Africa at some point in time."
His preferred solution remains a global calendar that would see the Rugby Championship run concurrently with the Six Nations, freeing up space in the southern hemisphere schedule. New Zealand Rugby continues to oppose the move, citing the knock-on effect on Super Rugby Pacific, which currently runs February to June and would need to be restructured under any such realignment. World Rugby has been discussing a global calendar for 14 years without resolution.
"That's where the problem starts, but it's unique to South Africa because we play in the south and the north," Alexander said.