When John Ryan spoke about getting cut on the 21st of December 2021 to Garry Doyle in the 42 this past week, you couldn’t help but feel for the guy. Who wants to be told that they’ll have to go club-hunting a few days before Christmas which, itself, was just a few weeks after getting trapped in South Africa because of the Omicron variant as a 33-year-old family man with 24 test caps and the guts of nearly 200 caps for Munster? Nobody. It plainly isn’t fair but that’s the cruel reality of professional sport.
Most players don’t get to go out exactly as they planned. Fairytale endings are what they say they are – fairytales – nine times out of ten. Remember CJ Stander looking up at an empty Thomond Park after narrowly losing a knockout game to Toulouse saying “I’m going to miss this place, man”? Cruel.
On the Stander Scale, John Ryan being told that there wasn’t a contract for him at Christmas and then walking off the field gutted after a devastating loss away to Ulster in the URC quarter-finals ranks pretty highly.
John Ryan is a good guy, a bloody good player and he just flat out didn’t deserve to leave the club he loves that way. So why is he leaving at all?
It’s complicated.
Sorry for the (semi) unintentional NewYorkTimesPitchBot there but it really is complicated, I swear. I think if times were normal, Munster would sign up John Ryan for another two years but times aren’t normal. The game is experiencing a post-covid financial crunch all across the leagues and it seems quite counter-intuitive. For most, the pandemic seems to be “over” – as much as it can be – so the idea that we could still be experiencing financial aftershocks seems counter-intuitive but it’s the reality. All across the top European sphere leagues, clubs are cutting playing costs and the Irish provinces as directed by the IRFU are no different. Leinster released six of their valued “second layer” of URC stalwarts on top of two veterans retiring. They also had the contract space “bonus” of Dan Leavy retiring mid-season, although I’d wager Leinster would have doubled his contract if it meant he’d be back to the player he was in 2018. Ulster cut Jack McGrath a few months before he took up another contract with them along with second-layer talents like David O’Connor, Ross Kane, Sean Reidy and Mick Kearney. Connacht decided to cut fairly deep by losing Arnold, Dillane, Papaili’i, Tuimauga, Robertson-McCoy, Robb and Masterson but Munster cut the deepest of all.
Jenkins, French, McHenry, Moore, Cloete, De Allende, Flannery, O’Byrne, Gallagher and John Ryan represents well more than a million euro cut off our wage bill. If you remove De Allende’s €500k a year from that list because it was 1014 funded, you’re still looking at approximately €800k coming off Munster’s provincial budget in one off-season. It can be a bit reductive to look at one year of a player’s contract payment instead of over the term of the contract but it’ll do for crude illustration purposes here. Munster were directed to cut the wage bill and did so.
The rugby market isn’t like football where you can “sell” players to other clubs to alleviate a budget crunch, you’ve got to wait for contract cycles to expire in the vast majority of cases. Sure, you see clubs paying compensation for breaking a contract – like Toulon did to sign Cheslin Kolbe from Toulouse last season or Montpellier did to sign Louis Picamoles from Northampton in 2017 or, back in the day, Saracens did to lift Mako Vunipola out of his academy deal with Bristol – but it’s rare enough to be notable when it happens.
You can tell certain players that are surplus to your requirements that, if they are able to find another club, they are free to leave mid-contract with no penalty but that’s increasingly difficult in the modern environment unless the player in question is of a high enough stature to match or even improve their money with the switch. Not a lot of clubs have that space to take on another contract mid-season, for a start, but even if they do, convincing the player to move can be tricky. We’d all like to think that players want to play at all costs but if that means moving house and losing money week to week, a lot of guys are happy enough to sit out their current deal and get paid to train.
You can always release the player from his contract – the nuclear option – but there is usually a break fee involved there that could be anything up to the remainder of the money owed on the deal, which defeats the purpose of releasing them unless they’re an almighty, team destroying pothole.
You can always negotiate a settlement on the contract but releasing guys from their contract doesn’t just have a financial consequence, it’s got the added bonus of destabilising players on the same tier as the released player because they get to wondering – what if I’m next? That can create an unhappy camp and an unhappy camp can get a coach’s contract terminated far easier than the other way around so you’ve got to be careful when you use that nuclear option.
Most of the time, you’ve got to prune the squad in two-year contract cycles.
There would have been tough decisions all through that list of Munster’s 30+ squad members when it came down to who to cut and who to keep this year.
The vast majority of the decision-making around that cut/keep list would have been done during the preseason with final decisions made around October/November when contract season would begin in earnest.
As always, there’s an element of horse-trading involved. You’ve got to manage the on-field needs of the “now” with the financial burden that comes with that and you’ll often find yourself spinning a tonne of plates to get there. Context can be everything.
For example, if you happen to be negotiating a contract with a player right after they get capped, you can end up paying way more than the player’s actual value. Dave Foley, for example, was rumoured to be on a very high-value contract during his last few years at Munster because he signed a deal more or less immediately after a Man of the Match performance for Ireland against Georgia on his debut and a good showing off the bench against Australia a week later in late 2014.
When you combine that with Donnacha Ryan’s ongoing injury issues at the time and Paul O’Connell’s impending departure to Toulon, Foley’s value was never higher in context and he struck while the iron was hot. That contract didn’t work out for Munster. We expected to get a guy who could replace O’Connell and partner Donnacha Ryan in the medium term but a succession of injuries in the two years following turned that into a “bad” contract by the time it was coming to an end in June 2017.
We signed Foley to a new deal as it seemed he was ascending to the next level but he never reached a level of output commensurate with that investment.
Dave Foley suffered a season-ending wrist injury just a few weeks after signing the new deal that would keep him out until September of 2015 and set him back for months. There was a real worry that he’d have to finish up at one stage and, in combination with O’Connell leaving for Toulon ahead of the World Cup, Munster signed veteran Wallaby lock Mark Chisholm on a two-year deal in August 2015 that, given his experience and resume at the time wouldn’t have been a cut-price deal by any means. Chisholm played one season, essentially, before missing the entirety of 2016/17 because of a concussion.
That was another “bad” contract that made sense at the time it was signed but was something of a financial anchor around the neck of the province by the end of the term. Both Chisholm and Foley would be gone from the province at end of 2016/17.
So it’s difficult. No one has a crystal ball. You try to make as good a judgement as you can in the hope that it works out on the field without costing you a fortune off the field.
Sometimes there’s a real need to DO something – to sign someone, anyone, because there’s a gap there to be filled and, isn’t it better to have a player and not need one than to need a player and not have one?
We’re in that position at the moment with our tighthead depth chart.
I wasn’t privy to the thinking used by the Munster higher-ups when they were deciding how our tighthead chart for next season would look but I’ve managed to find out what I can in the interim.
First of all, this season was unique in that Munster had deliberately moved all of our senior tightheads onto the same expiry year over the previous few contract cycles so that we could retain all, some or none of them based on a few different factors at the end of this season. It was vanishingly unlikely that we’d release all of them, mind, but the option was there to do that. A more realistic approach is that we’d take the five senior tightheads on contract at the start of the season and reduce that number to four with an academy addition underneath.
Of those tightheads, it’s likely that John Ryan was on the highest value contract when you consider his age, the context of his re-signing in December 2018 as he was racking up a lot of key involvements as part of the main trio of Irish tightheads at the time and the length of the deal he signed.
The new three-year contract Ryan signed in December 2018 was when he was at the peak of his value to Munster and Ireland but the context had changed in the meantime. Ryan’s involvement at test level started to dry up post-World Cup where he was used in lower priority internationals until he was replaced by Bealham ahead of this season.
When Ryan fell out of the reckoning as one of Ireland’s top three tightheads, his contract value to Munster plummeted because he was already being used as a scrummaging impact player by Van Graan, almost since the day he signed his last contract.
Ryan’s involvement as a starter for Munster had gradually been declining over the last three years. He went from starting 50% of games in 2019/20 (37-minute average per game) to a Rainbow Cup inflated 59% in 2020/21 (45-minute average per game) to a career-low 43% (39-minute average per game) this season.
What was John Ryan’s start percentage when he signed his three-year deal in 2018? 70%.
Van Graan and Larkham used Archer and Ryan as a super consistent and durable 1-2 punch across the entirety of John Ryan’s contract. Archer, whose starting percentage has never dipped below 65% under Van Graan and Larkham, was the heavier hitting, stronger mauling all-rounder with John Ryan mostly used as a mobile, highly aggressive scrummaging destroyer brought off the bench to tear into the replacement loosehead and hooker while also adding more mobility around the pitch than Archer without necessarily being a massive step up in power output on phase play. Ask yourself this, who gives you more impact off the bench out of Archer and Ryan? You know the answer to that.
Given it was Van Graan and Larkham who would have been leading the thinking on this contract decision – Graham Rowntree wouldn’t even interview for the position of head coach until after John Ryan had been informed there was no contract for him in December 2021 – it’s likely that they were earmarking Ryan’s role as an impact player off the bench to one of the younger props.
To understand the thinking behind that, you’ve got to look at the wider state of the contract environment. As we’ve seen in the last two seasons that if you’re a senior player (aged 27 or above) on a higher-tier contract who’s not currently involved in the test game and not a core player then you are in danger of getting drastically cycled down the pay tiers or getting released altogether.
From a tighthead-specific perspective, these same contract questions are all being asked in an environment where David Nucifora and the IRFU are also looking at Munster and asking where the next chain of Irish-qualified Munster tightheads is coming from given, to be blunt, Stephen Archer has never been an active contender for test consideration outside a brief window in 2013 and John Ryan, as good as he was, was solidly behind Porter and Furlong from 2018/19 onwards and, post-Porter Switch, Bealham and O’Toole had jumped ahead of him.
The IRFU needed to see Knox and Salanoa invested in as senior players so they were awarded two and three-year deals respectively. James French showed enough at different points in the season to be worth a punt on a two-year deal. That left a decision between Ryan and Archer.
So, with everything you know based on their usage to this point over the last three years do you;
A: Sign Archer on a one-year-and-done cut-price veteran deal where he retires in 2023 and cycles down his minutes in 2022/23 to allow your young core of tighthead props to ascend to starting and finishing roles?
or
B: Try to convince John Ryan, who has two or three years left in him at this level, to continue his role as a bench impact player when you have directives from above to scale up both Knox and Salanoa next season and you figure you’re going to give Ryan’s role to one of those players at the very least? Do you pay him in line with his tenure and experience, even at the risk of spending “bad” money on that contract?
Essentially, how much do you want to spend of your limited provincial funds on a prop who you use off the bench? How many contract years can you afford to give that guy given you have three guys you are under instruction to develop as Irish options the following year?
To do that – and release Archer – you would be looking to immediately transition Knox or Salanoa to a starting role unless you’re radically changing what you’re expecting from your tight five as a unit.
In that environment and that context, there was only one decision to make. Only time will tell if it’s a good or bad decision.
