Australia's professional rugby players are now working without a collective agreement, and the terms of their insurance is one of the reasons why.
The deal between RUPA, Rugby Australia and the Super Rugby clubs ran out over the weekend, the date RUPA itself had flagged earlier in the month when it publicly urged RA to bargain in earnest. The Wallabies left Sydney the same day for a month in the UK. With no replacement signed, RUPA has notified RA that it plans to start legal proceedings over how the governing body uses players' names, images and other commercial rights now that the old agreement no longer binds them.
Money is the obvious fault line. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, citing people close to the talks, the two sides opened tens of millions of dollars apart on the minimum the game should spend on wages over five years. The gap narrowed over several months but never closed.
RUPA chief executive Adrian Turner, a former in-house lawyer at the union who took the top job in April, has played down the prospect of a strike, saying the players "remain focused on their playing commitments". He said the union tabled revised proposals in the final week, only for RA to confirm the Rugby Bodies would not lift their financial offer.
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RA, for its part, said it had been open with the union about the game's present and future finances, and complained that it had repeatedly asked to put its offer to players directly and been knocked back.
Although most of the high-profile headlines have been about salaries, there is also an important argument about risk. The same reporting identified the funding of players' career-ending insurance, along with who covers their private health premiums, as an important sticking point in the final rounds.
Since February 2012, professional players have been protected by a group programme in which each contracted player gives up a small percentage of base salary to fund the income protection element, according to RUPA. The union has described it as the first player-funded scheme of its kind in Australian professional sport.
The programme has three layers. RA's sports injury policy covers accidental death and spinal injury during training and matches; a capital benefits policy adds round-the-clock cover for death and severe spinal injury; and a professional player income protection policy pays out, around the clock, when a single accident ends a career.
The last agreement, settled at the end of 2022, put more money into that career-ending policy, alongside higher minimum wages for Super Rugby and sevens players. Over its term, the players' share of game revenue rose from 29% to 31.7%, RUPA says. Having accepted lean deals through the COVID years, the union wanted a far bigger slice this time, pointing to the money RA banked from the British and Irish Lions tour and expects from hosting the 2027 Rugby World Cup.
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The dispute also lands right in the lap one of the sport's main insurance intermediaries. Gallagher is the appointed insurance broker to Rugby Australia and also RUPA's insurance partner for the player income protection programme, as Insurance Business reported when it looked at the broker's wider sports insurance strategy in July. Its RA partnership, renewed last November, spans elite men's and women's squads through to the national club competition.
There is no suggestion the dual role is improper, but it does mean that whatever RA and the players eventually agree on premium funding will flow straight into a programme the same firm helps run for both.
Specialist cover for individual professional athletes is not exactly thick on the ground in Australia, and Insurance Business has already reported that Zurich moved to exclude concussion claims from active policies for high-contact professional sports.
In London, the High Court ruled in August that more than 500 former union and league players can take brain injury claims against the sport's governing bodies to trial, roughly half the original group. World Rugby denies liability, arguing that head injury is a known risk players accept when they take the field. Closer to home, the AFL is defending concussion class actions in Victoria.
Clyde & Co partner Janine Clark has warned that a successful test case here could push insurers to rethink their appetite for contact sport all the way down to grassroots level, as she told Insurance Business in a piece on rising concussion claims. For a code negotiating how much it will spend protecting players' long-term health, that is not an abstract risk.
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There is also a question of adequacy. Association-backed career-ending schemes often carry limits that are modest next to a professional's earnings or the value of the rest of a contract, one UK specialist broker told Insurance Business in a recent look at athletes' hidden cover gaps. With RUPA also pushing for better pay and conditions for women's players, the pool of athletes whose cover needs to keep pace with their earnings is growing.
For now, the players are no longer bound by the terms of the expired agreement, which technically opens the door to industrial action. The calendar is crowded: the Wallabies meet England at Twickenham on 8 November, the first of three Tests in the new Nations Championship; Australia's sevens teams start their World Series campaign later this month; and Super Rugby squads begin pre-season training this week.
Turner's comments suggest the union would rather fight on commercial rights than withdraw labour. Blocking RA from using player images would hit sponsorship and broadcast value, though how far it bites is unclear at the moment: some players reportedly have individual commercial arrangements written into their contracts. RA insists its offer was strong and designed to protect the whole game, not just the professional tier.
What neither side has said publicly is how player cover is handled in the gap between agreements. Brokers working with professional clubs, academies or individual players may want to check how existing programmes respond while terms are in limbo, and whether premium contributions tied to the old deal are still being collected.
Questions worth putting to sports clients now:
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The last two agreements were written with the game fighting for survival. This one follows a Lions tour and comes ahead of a home World Cup, and the players want their insurance, as well as their pay, to reflect that.
