Bulls put an end to talent hoarding
NEWS: The days of the Bulls trying to hoard the best junior talent in South Africa is over.
The Pretoria-based Union scrapped their infamous recruitment model and they are set to offload up to 100 players off their books.
In an interview with supersport.com, Bulls Director of Rugby Alan Zondagh said the current situation is not financially sustainable due to a number of factors, which includes the scrapping of the national Under-19 competition and the SuperSport Challenge.
“We have different types of issues, we have the top players in this country all wanting to leave.
“We are fighting against the money situation and we have too many players contracted at this union at the moment. We have the most of anybody and we have just started cutting down, we still have the most.
“Guys have a contract, so you can’t just cut them,” Zondagh explained.
“We are working on that every single day – Pote [Human], myself and [CEO] Alfons [Meyer] – and my other staff are also helping with the contracting now. We have a completely new recruitment model where all my coaches are involved, from Pote right down to the other coaches. They are all responsible to look at talent, locally and overseas so they all have responsibilities and specific jobs.
“Everybody is involved, it isn’t a case of you have a player arriving here and you don’t know why or a player leaves and you don’t know why he left. That has changed completely now and has started to run, but it will take time to sort this out.
“I’ve made a decision that if we send somebody away, a young player that is here and he is not going to be part of our new plan, I will make sure that we place him somewhere where he can carry on with his rugby, that is the least we can do. The parents sent their boy to us.”
He added: “We have a number of players we can loan and we are in discussion with other franchises in South Africa and teams overseas. People are always looking for players, but we must first decide who we must keep. The young boys who have arrived here, I don’t know them.”
supersport.com
Watch the interview below:
