If France fielded a B team in their first Test against New Zealand, the one selected by Fabien Galthie for the second match of the three-Test series had a C string feel to it.
Gone was the outstanding back-row of Alexandre Fischer, Mickaël Guillard and Killian Tixeront, three of seven players axed from the pack that performed so manfully in the 31-27 defeat. The backline from Dunedin was rejigged with last week’s captain Gael Fickou left out and his centre partner, Émilien Gailleton, shunted to the wing. Théo Attissogbe, so impressive in the first Test at full-back, was also moved out wide.
It’s fair to say Galthie isn’t making many friends in New Zealand. He recognises the fact but counters that he’s playing the hand he’s been dealt by the FFR and the LNR, the governing body of the Top 14. In September 2024 they agreed a player welfare agreement, “with an approach focused on managing the players most in demand and gradually building up the squad”.
Galthie sees this as a tour of construction ahead of the 2027 World Cup. The first Test taught him Attissogbe, Fischer, Tixeront and Guillard have the qualities to be members of that squad. On the other hand, on the evidence of the 43-17 drubbing in Wellington, most of the starting pack do not. The bulk won’t be seen again in a Bleu shirt after this tour.
Even if Galthie reverts to his strongest possible XV for Saturday’s final Test – and France are once more fiercely competitive – this series will leave a bad taste in the mouth of many New Zealanders.
“It’s ridiculous that they’re able to bring this, an average of nine caps, it’s disrespectful,” said former All Black full-back Mils Muliaina last week, adding that the All Blacks always tour Europe with the strongest squad possible. “Can you imagine us taking an understrength team, imagine the outcry that would cause.”
It’s a fair point, but would it cause much of an outcry in France? Most Top 14 clubs and their supporters resent the November internationals, in the same way Premier League football fans find their international breaks a pain in the backside.
There is the risk of injury to key players and also the possibility their club’s momentum is broken. Last season, for example, Racing 92 went into the November break on a roll, victorious in four of their five most recent fixtures. When the Top 14 restarted three weeks later their form had gone AWOL, and the Parisians didn’t win again until the end of February.
France likes its international rugby. The Six Nations always arouses interest, particularly ‘Le Crunch’ against perfidious Albion, and the World Cup is a big event. But the November and summer Test matches are only really followed by aficionados. Most of the country is holidaying this month, uninterested in any sport except the Tour de France.
But France loves its club rugby. More than five million viewers watched Toulouse beat Bordeaux in last month’s Top 14 final, a 28.5% share of the total television audience. Not bad for a Saturday evening when competition on other channels is fierce.
It’s illustrative of a championship on the rise. A record three million spectators attended regular season matches in the 2024-25 Top 14, an average of 16,114 spectators per match and a 6% increase on the previous season. Bordeaux had an average crowd of 30,000 per home game, followed by Toulouse (21,000), Toulon (18,400) and Lyon (17,900).
The ProD2 also enjoyed a record season in 2024-25, pulling in 1.4 million spectators, at an average of 5,959 fans each match.
Contrast those figures with some of the crowd numbers in Super Rugby this season. “You could throw a wheelbarrow load of waterbombs towards the rows of empty seats in New Zealand and Australia and not risk drenching a spectator,” remarked New Zealand’s Stuff Media in March this year.
It noted some of the crowd figures for recent games: 11,700 for the Crusaders vs the Reds in Christchurch, 6,000 for the Hurricanes against Moana Pasifika in Albany, and 5,000 for the Highlanders vs Moana Pasifika.
It’s the same dismal story in Australia: 5,165 for the Force v the Waratahs and 9,000 for the Brumbies against the Waratahs. Suncorp Stadium can boast better figures – 18,000 fans watched the Reds vs the Hurricanes, for example, but that still leaves 34,000 vacant seats.
Why is Super Rugby struggling to put bums on seats, even in New Zealand? Because a growing number of All Blacks prefer to take sabbaticals. Among those who have agreed sabbaticals with New Zealand Rugby in recent seasons are Rieko Ioane, Jordie Barrett, Sam Cane, Damian McKenzie, Beauden Barrett, Ardie Savea and Mark Tele’a. Most take their sabbatical in Japan which, with the greatest of respect, is not the most demanding competition in world rugby.
When it was announced last month Savea will be in Japan next year rather than representing Moana Pasifika in Super Rugby, head coach Fa’alogo Tana Umaga said: “These sabbaticals are part of the modern game and we have been preparing for this for some time.”
Sabbaticals aren’t part of the modern game in France. The equivalent is what the FFR calls, “managing the players”, which in other words means allowing a few players to take July off to rest their battered bodies. They need it. Otherwise more players will be joining the casualty list. In the last eighteen months Antoine Dupont, Charles Ollivon, Anthony Jelonch, Romain Ntamack, Cyril Baille and Peato Mauvaka have all ruptured their knee or ankle ligaments. Two other seasoned internationals, Bernard Le Roux and Paul Willemse, have been forced into premature retirement by concussion.
The Top 14 is the most relentlessly physical competition in world rugby. It is also the most lucrative. Club owners pay big bucks to their big names and they want some bang for that buck. Likewise, the fans click through the turnstiles to see the top players. The sparse attendances in Super Rugby shows what happens when teams – to paraphrase Muliaina– “disrespect” the public.
The unions of New Zealand and South Africa do everything in their power to make their national teams as competitive as possible in every match because the All Blacks and the Springboks are more than just rugby teams: they put their countries on the map.
The All Blacks Experience, a partnership between New Zealand Rugby and Ng?i Tahu Tourism, says in its mission statement: “Rugby is woven into the fabric of New Zealand. It’s not only the national sport, it’s part of the national identity.”
That is not the case in France. In the northern half of the country there is general indifference to rugby. There is fervour in the southern half, all right, but it is tribal, what is known as l’esprit de clocher – ‘the spirit of the bell tower’.
Rugby forges the identity of villages and towns, creating a passion on and off the pitch. The same applies to the professional teams. It’s why French clubs regard the Top 14 as more prestigious than the Champions Cup.
Canal Plus, the Top 14 broadcaster in France, recently aired a documentary to mark thirty years of professional club rugby. One of the talking heads was the All Blacks top points scorer Dan Carter, who won the Top 14 title with Racing 92 in 2016. “French rugby and its players thrive on emotion,” he reflected. “That’s what I love about supporters: they were born supporting their club. They love, they protect, they cherish rugby.”
Kiwis, on the other hand, come into this world supporting the All Blacks, and that is the essential difference between these two great rugby nations. Test rugby is the be all and end all for New Zealand rugby fans. In France it’s the B movie to the main event that is the Top 14.
Im a kiwi from a small town and don't agree .
Our local club is very important. The npc is the heart of nz rugby. The all blacks are a celebration of this tribal rivalry. The npc has been downgraded in favor of super rugby to many fans discontent
A lot of salt coming from NZ this days… Saying that French people don’t like international rugby 🙃
Summer tour are less important in France BECAUSE key players must regenerate and are left at home, and not the opposite.
But 6N and November games are always expected and watched.
Rugby's not always clean but one thing it does well is that it's evolving toward the protection of players. And you can't seriously ask a man who played around 20 games in the top 14 and around 8 games in a european competition and around 7 games with his nation to come and destroy himself on a summer tour, then going immedialty back to club rugby. Club employ the players, not federations. Blaming the players for wanting to regenerate is particularly hypocritical considering all the NZ players going on sabaticals and playing no more than ten high intensity game in a season (for those who play in Japan or with Leinster).
Super Rugby Pacific, just like URC, is softer in terms of physicality and shorter, but it helped southern nations (AB and SA) to dominate World cups.
Different cultures. I'm fine with mine as a Frenchman getting to see every Week end great oppositions and players, it seems some kiwis are not fine with theirs.
This author is not from New Zealand.
Not a bad post otherwise. Except you don’t see great players every week, your players only play 50% of games. If that’s fine with you OK, its going to be less so that they can tour next year, as the new competition starts for France. They will need to play even less domestic games, but you should be OK with that.
The statistics about crowd attendance are misleading. New Zealand crowd attendances, on average, are pretty close to the average for Top 14. But our SR teams share stadiums with capacity for All Blacks’ games.
World rugby does not allow a nation, or a club to field a sevens team if they do not field a fifteens team. The reason behind this is that Word Rugby does not want the fast food money making sevens to be a total alternative to the roots of rugby essential game. There is going to come a time when World Rugby will have to make a call on whether the club game takes precedent over the ultimate intention of world wide rugby, which is international competition. Otherwise why have a world wide regulatory body? The French Controlling body of Rugby Union requires every rugby player to be registered to a club. The players themselves if they were given a choice would choose to play for France against the All Blacks for the chance to do what only South Africa and Ireland have done and that is to beat New Zealand in a rugby test series in New Zealand. What is lacking in this equation is French Rugby balls (and World Rugby balls). If World Rugby is to continue to exist as a concept played with the same rules and ethos worldwide, it must bring the French clubs into line or cut them out, which I think is the preferred outcome both for World Rugby and the French Clubs.
Some very selective crowd figures to make a point, however it failed to point out the following..
Waratahs v Brumbies 20,572
Red v Waratahs 20,072
In fact there were 10 games in Australia with an attendance of over 12,000
Blues v Chiefs 20,200
Highlanders v Blues 14,207
Crusaders v Chiefs sell out of 17,000
I could go on but it just poor manipulation of statistics to make a point. I think the difference is the SRP plays in larger stadiums and can sometimes look or feel empty.
I see it all differently now post-tour. The All Blacks blooded new players, were well tested, had to dig themselves out of a hole, and most importantly, got a 3-0 result.
The games were entertaining.
NZ got a lot more out of this than France did.
It is what it is. Would have rather seen their top team but nevermind.
How did you see it before?
Great analysis, thank you. I’d add a couple of things. First, NZ rugby is based around provinces, not clubs. Yes, the 5 Super teams are sort-of clubs, but in NZ it is an entirely different culture - it is about being selected to represent your province rather than being bought by a club. Europeans may not fully understand this. The Brits do, but long ago lost the battle to clubs - money rules. English football has always been based around clubs rather than representation and look at the result: English football has the best league but an under-performing national team.
Second, rugby people in NZ do not necessarily want to watch huge men beat each other up every weekend. We like to see more open running and passing, and less stoppages/searches for rules breaches after every try. So, Super (pro) Rugby can be a bit of a bore. Pro rugby in Europe even more so. Although league is even more brutal than rugby, there are only 26 players on the field, so it is more open. World rugby needs to decide what kind of game it wants, but continuing with the present rules will result in rugby’s decline in the smaller nations.
In short then. They treat it like football where only the big tournaments like the euros and world cups are taken seriously and the rest are seen as only friendlies
From down South in Africa , I just need to remind the writer that France has a population 13 times bigger than NZ. Disparity in crowds are no surprise.
Do you know how many fans watch rugby in the stands in China ? Rugby union is the 10th sport in France….
Great Britain have about the same population than France, where are fans if they are not in the stands ? GB have far more football fans than France. It has nothing to do with country size…
What ugly face app does RP use for their images?
Galthie looking more Yosemite Sam than ever.
New Zealand definitely does nog understand… they care about winning RWC.
Sounds to me like an excuse.