It doesn’t feel good, does it?
After 10 years at the club, Jean Kleyn will depart for Gloucester at the end of the season. Ten years. I don’t think anyone is going to have a decade like it ever again.
Let’s get our timeline right.
Jean Kleyn moved to Munster in 2016 under Rassie Erasmus and made an immediate impact. He very quickly became a core part of the squad: dependable, physical, and — crucially — exactly the sort of tighthead-lock profile Munster packs tend to need. He played a big part in that first season rise under Erasmus alongside Donnacha Ryan.
After three years of highly consistent performances at tighthead lock, he qualified for Ireland and made the World Cup squad off the back of that form. This, of course, was met by the usual howls of derision from Leinster pundits — people who, at that point, wanted the deeply washed Devin Toner in there instead. “What’s a tighthead lock??” they screamed indignantly, a concept they would later come to understand intimately when a Leinster player was ready to fill that very role.
Kleyn played five times for Ireland and did mostly OK in a side that was, frankly, on its last legs — as the World Cup and the immediate aftermath would show. Then Joe Schmidt stepped away, Andy Farrell took over, and Kleyn dropped out of favour almost immediately. That didn’t change what was happening at provincial level, though: Kleyn kept churning out incredibly consistent performances in injury-racked Munster packs where he was often the only true heavyweight lock.
And then came 2022/23: the season that basically underlined everything you need to know about Jean Kleyn. Between the 7th of October 2022 and the 27th of Mayz 27th of May 2023, he played 22 games in a row, right through the grind, right through stumbling Munster performances, from bad to good to great, Kleyn was ever present on the way to Munster winning the URC title in Cape Town against the Stormers — the very side he’d joined Munster from seven years earlier. That run was definitional: availability, durability, and a specific kind of hard ballast that lets everything else in your pack function.
That title-winning season also did something else: it convinced Rassie Erasmus — the same Rassie who signed him for Munster in the first place — that he needed what Kleyn brings to the Springboks after several other prospects hadn’t worked out. The paperwork went in, Kleyn redeclared for South Africa that summer, and he made his Springbok debut against Australia soon after.
Naturally, the switch upset the same Leinster pundits who didn’t want him in the Ireland squad in the first place, because it carried an implication they didn’t like: that Andy Farrell — a man who sometimes looks like he needs a second opinion from the podcasts before he trusts his own — might have made a mistake. After all, if Rassie Erasmus, a World Cup-winning coach who looked like he could well win a second at that point, decided Kleyn was worth bringing into the Springboks fold, what does that say about Andy Farrell’s decision-making? No, no, that can’t be right.
Kleyn then made the World Cup squad, played in a World Cup final, and won, coming off the bench with 20 minutes to go and playing a key part in stopping the All Blacks’ rumble in a maul at the end.
He became the only Irish international to win a World Cup winners’ medal — albeit the long way round.
You’ll never see anything like it ever again.
From unwanted to undeniable — with the medal to prove it. Honestly, when South Africa won that final, it felt like a vindication for Munster fans who had long declared that Kleyn, when he was eligible, should at the very least have been involved in wider Irish squads in the same way that, say, a Quinn Roux was.
It was also great to see such an objectively great guy, who had become a Munster stalwart at that point, and who owed as much to the province for his development into a World Cup-winning lock as anything that came before. Ireland lost, but they won. Jean Kleyn just won.
***
It’ll feel weird to see Kleyn in Gloucester colours.
It also almost guarantees that we’ll play them in Europe next year, so just get used to that now.
By all accounts, Gloucester offered Kleyn — 33 this year — a three-year deal which, if true, was a no-brainer for Jean Kleyn to sign. Munster could not provide a contract of the same duration. There are a few reasons for this.
Kleyn is, as we’ve gone over on these pages a fair bit, a NIQ player in the Irish system. At the time of his last renewal, Munster were given a straight decision by then Performance Director David Nucifora. Jean Kleyn or RG Snyman. Not both. Pick one. Jean Kleyn was freshly NIQ, and with the four years spent being Irish Qualified but not used by Andy Farrell, deemed to be meaningless, that created a problem with no easy option for Munster. Pick Snyman, and you’d have to release Kleyn, a club stalwart who played a core part in the title win, who had given years to the club and was available every single week, and who then went on to be a World Cup winner. Pick Kleyn, and you’d have to cut Snyman, losing a world-class talent — when fit — only t0 see him tearing it up at his next club.
That club would go on to be Leinster — and it was clear to me at least that Nucifora helped engineer Snyman to Leinster — but the cost for Munster remained the same.
As I wrote back in late 2023;
It’s fanciful to think that, if Jean Kleyn hadn’t been called up to the Springboks side, we could have used the potential of an Irish recall as a carrot to keep his wage demands down. That gambit would not work. Jean Kleyn had been an Irish international since 2019, but he hadn’t been called into an Ireland camp since Farrell took over as head coach of the Irish national team. There was no test rugby that we could reasonably offer as a makeweight when the inevitable competition for Kleyn’s signature would arise from France and elsewhere.
Do you want to know the value of a 6’8″, 125kg tighthead lock with a big scrum, breakdown and maul focus? Ask a head coach in the TOP14.
[…]
But when Kleyn won a World Cup medal with the Springboks, his contract value went up and rightly so. At 30 years of age, this next contract is Kleyn’s “banker” deal, likely his last big one before his value starts to slump due to wear and tear in his roleset as he reaches his mid-30s.
On the face of it, Munster re-signing Kleyn to a two (or three) year deal makes a ton of sense. He’s experienced, he’s settled in the area, he’s really good in a valuable role, and he’s a core part of the Munster front five – that hasn’t changed since last season.
Munster picked Jean Kleyn — the only decision we should have made at that point, realistically — and paid him what his CV demanded. That contract expired this summer, and several factors like Kleyn’s age, NIQ status and wider squad-building needs limited what Munster could offer. We wanted to keep him, but sometimes the realities of what a club wants and what the player deserves diverge, and this seems to be a good example of that.
One thing is for sure, though. And that is that Jean Kleyn will go down as one of the best players to have come through this club, and in his decade of blood, sweat and tears, he gave us more than we can ever pay back.
He’s not done yet by any means — a big end to the season to come — but we’ll miss the big adopted Limerick man when he goes, and hope he comes back to Castletroy when his outstanding career comes to an end.
