This year’s Chart series is complete. As usual, it shows what I think might happen, not what will happen, and a lot can happen between now and the time any contract might be offered or not offered. You know this.

Twenty-four senior contracts run out at the end of this season. Not spread across two or three cycles the way you’d want them, ideally — all of them, the same summer, in the twelve months before a World Cup.

That’s not a scandal in itself. Contracts bunch, especially when you’ve done a run of two-year deals back to back, and every province is dealing with some version of it. When you add in that the two years a lot of those contracts ran through were guided by a different head coach, it makes even more sense.

But the concentration of deals is important, because a World Cup does a very specific thing to a player in his prime who isn’t in Andy Farrell’s plans. It gives him a deadline. If you’re twenty-eight and you’ve spent five seasons hoping a call comes, the summer of 2027 is when you stop waiting and take the French/English money instead, should it arrive, as it likely will in one form or another.

And almost none of this is about what we can afford. We’d find the money for Crowley. We’d find it for Edogbo. What we can’t do is manufacture a central contract, or promise Tom Ahern a green jersey, or tell Gavin Coombes something about his test future that the last five years haven’t already told him. Most of the calls on this list get made by somebody other than us — we just have to live with them.

So, with all of the units done, where do we stand?

Nine of these really matter for 2027/28 and beyond, and four of them could genuinely hurt us.

Jack Crowley is the whole season’s business in one signature. We’d find the cash — that was never the issue. The issue is whether the IRFU hands him a 60/40 central deal or fobs him off with another PONI, because one of those tells a man he’s a core international and the other tells him he’s at the whim of a coach who’s already flip-flopped on him once. Leicester were closer last time than most people realise.

Edogbo and Ahern are the same problem from opposite ends. Edogbo is the only elite heavyweight profile left in the building post-Kleyn, and that one-year extension was a negotiating play rather than a doubt — the big offer is due now, not in December. Ahern is 27, locked out of Ireland bar a great run this season that will tell him one way or another whether he’ll have a chance to play at the 2027 World Cup, and he’s perfectly aware that a 6’9″ lock with his lineout game and his pace is something that will be pursued in France and England. He nearly went last time on a late change of heart, by all accounts, and I wouldn’t bank on a second one unless he sees the World Cup as a viable option, rather than a moonshot.

Nankivell costs us twice over. We’d lose our best outside back, and the NIQ spot¹ his project-player switch would free up.

The high-risk four are all timing. Beirne turns 35 with a house ready in Kildare and a World Cup waiting in 2027 as a natural full stop on a legendary career. If he wants to stay on, we’ll try to make it happen, but it likely won’t be on a central deal, which complicates it. Evan O’Connell has the lane cleared for him, and he’ll likely look to find another one if we don’t use it. Coombes has a single test cap in the last three seasons and is in the middle of his prime, with French and English money circling. Quinn won’t hang around waiting on minutes or a definitive backup role.

And Tom Wood, who’s the easiest of the lot. Two years, by December, before anyone else gets an idea.

1. There are no hard-and-fast rules regarding NIQ numbers, necessarily, but the more IQ (or contracted past the point they would become IQ players you have, the more wiggle room it gives you. ↩︎

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Every single one of these re-signings costs more than the deal it replaces. That’s not a Munster problem, it’s just how contracts work. A lad who signed at 23 off the back of a good half-season signs his next one at 26 with fifty caps and a body of work, and he signs it knowing exactly what the market rate is, because his agent also represents a bunch of other players at other clubs, who are all negotiating on the same terms. Edogbo, Quinn, Evan O’Connell, Lee Barron — every one of them is a bigger number than he was. Kendellen too. That’s the price of developing players, and I’d pay it every time.

Twenty-four of them landing in one summer is a different proposition entirely.

Do the maths in the roughest possible terms. If two-thirds of an expiring group are getting rises, and the group is that big, the wage bill goes up substantially before you’ve signed a single new player. And we need to sign new players. A world-class tighthead. A wing who can win a collision on the edge. I’d argue that a second row might also be in the frame. That’s the whole plan from the last six articles, and it’s the first thing that gets eaten when the retention bill lands.

So Ian Costello and Clayton McMillan have to sit down and decide which contracts get rolled rather than renewed.

That’s the actual work here, and it’s the least romantic thing in rugby. You go through the chart, you identify the lads in their late twenties whose next deal is going to be their most expensive and their least productive — the ones where you’re paying for what they were rather than what they’re about to be — and you let the money walk. The hard part is identifying who you’ve seen the best of, and who you’ll regret letting walk out the door. Plus, as a bonus, you get to be hated by the guys you’re cutting, and their friends, and their supporters. It’s not an easy job.

Then you go through the early-to-mid twenties group, and you find the ones who can absorb those minutes at a fraction of the cost. Gordon Wood instead of a fourth senior midfielder. Calvey or Foley instead of a third-choice loosehead on senior money. Michael Foy and Sean Edogbo instead of another veteran back row or lock-hybrid on a two-year deal.

Every one of those swaps is a signing you can afford. That’s the trade. Not “who do we love”, but “whose contract can become half a tighthead”.

The uncomfortable bit is that this logic points straight at Gavin Coombes, and I don’t like where it points. But if you’re paying one of the highest non-international salaries in the squad to a twenty-nine-year-old at eight while a twenty-two-year-old is outcarrying him in the same jersey, that money isn’t buying you a #8. It’s buying you the absence of a lock. Or a tighthead.

In an ideal world, I’d keep him. I’d sign him to a two-year deal, and keep him in the building. But is that feasible at the price it would likely cost to do the deal?

One last thing, because it’s worth saying where this actually comes from.

None of it started this summer, or even last summer. The bunching traces back to the aftermath of 2023, when we won a URC nobody outside the building expected us to win and then set about keeping the group that did it. That was the right instinct at the time. You don’t break up a side that’s just gone to Cape Town and won a final — you keep it together, you back it, and you find out how far it goes. So a big chunk of the squad went onto two-year deals inside the same window, and when those came up, most of them went onto another two, because the same logic still mostly held and there was always a season in front of us to get through first.

Do that twice and this is where you end up.

The part that sits oddest with me is that nearly every one of these deals was signed to fit a Munster that doesn’t exist anymore. Rowntree’s side had a clear idea of itself, and it was a handling one — ball through the hands, forwards as distributors, width as the default answer, Snyman’s gravity underwriting the whole passing platform while he was here. Whatever you think of how it ended, the retentions made sense on those terms, and Rowntree was still driving most of these decisions in September 2024. A lot of those contracts would apply to 2025/26 and 2026/27 — this season.

Snyman’s long gone. Kleyn’s at Gloucester. Rowntree’s gone for a good while now, and the thing that gave all those decisions their internal logic went with him. What’s replaced it is a system being built by people who had no hand in signing a single one of these players, and which — on everything I’ve written across these six articles — wants something fairly different from most of them.

So the new group inherits a wage bill assembled for one idea of Munster and has to decide, in a single summer under a World Cup deadline, which parts of it are worth carrying into another one that hasn’t properly started yet.

That’s the real job this season, and it’ll shape the next five years.

So have a look back through the chart. Which of these twenty-four would you back with your own money before Christmas? Because that’s roughly the deadline, and roughly the standard.

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Whose squad is this, then?

Have a look at last season’s business, in and out, and see how little of it was actually an active choice.

Three retirements in Scannell, Ryan and Jager.

Kleyn to Gloucester, Abrahams to the Bulls — they were due, to be honest, as we weren’t seeing the best of either of them, even allowing for Kleyn’s excellent service here. Losing him wasn’t popular at the time, but it was a good example of “paying for what they were rather than what they’re about to be”.

Salanoa’s career effectively ended after three years of knee issues. He might cycle back in if he can prove his fitness, but that’s another big question mark. Butler, Patterson and Bartley released; Gibbons to Ealing, Smith to the Shute Shield. Eleven men out.

Now the other column. Five of the nine arrivals — Sean Edogbo, Ben O’Connor, Foxe, Clein, O’Donovan — are academy promotions, so they weren’t necessarily signings (other than O’Donovan, but he was signed to the academy first). They were guys already in the building whose time had come. Van der Merwe and Aungier were done and dusted midway through the season. Brookes came in late because Jager retired towards the end of the season, which wasn’t in anyone’s plans. Harrison is a one-year punt at a position we hadn’t decided on yet.

What you’re looking at there is a squad that replaced itself, not one that was rebuilt.

Which is why next summer matters the way it does. Clayton McMillan came in during the summer of 2025. He’s had a full season in the job; he’s had an off-season to tear the system up and start again with a new coaching staff, and he still hasn’t had a recruitment window he actually controlled from the start — a season inheriting other coaches’ players, other contract decisions and, for a good while, other people’s problems.

2027 is the first window where that second column gets populated by decisions instead of circumstances — where a fella leaves not because his body gave out, but because we looked at what he costs against what the new system needs and said no.

And that’s the part I keep coming back to. His first genuine act of squad-building is going to be a subtraction, and he’ll be making it on the evidence of a system he only got to install properly this summer. He’ll have to tell somebody who has given this place the guts of a decade that there isn’t room, on a data set he doesn’t fully trust yet, against a World Cup deadline.

That’s a rotten position to be in, but time waits for no club.

If we’re running a new system — and we are — that has variables we can’t really control. What worked in the previous four seasons, and what informed retention and recruitment in that time, might not suit what’s to come.

So how aggressive will the squad reshaping be? How aggressive should it be?

My honest answer is: less aggressive than the numbers suggest, and more aggressive than the club will find comfortable.

Here’s the argument against going hard. We’re making these calls on one season of data from a system that we changed this summer, and I’ve spent six articles arguing that last season’s numbers lied about half this squad. Milne’s carrying was suppressed by where we asked him to carry. Quinn never got the ball in a position to do damage. Nash’s four metres per carry is a description of where he was receiving it, not what he is. Kelly’s gainline rate tells you about the ball he got at 13, not about Dan Kelly.

If all of that is true — and I think it is — then cutting hard on the back of it means selling players at the bottom of a market we created for ourselves. That’s how you end up watching a fella tear it up somewhere else while you’re paying somebody else to do a worse job.

And the case for going hard is just as strong, because the reverse risk is worse. A season of “let’s wait and see” doesn’t leave you neutral. It leaves you having re-signed everybody at a premium, with no NIQ room, no contract space and no elite tighthead, going into 2027/28 with the same group that finished where we finished, all a year older.

Every individual decision inside that outcome looks reasonable at the time. That’s exactly what makes it so easy to arrive at.

So where does that leave it?

I’d be aggressive about the profile and patient about the player.

There’s a difference.

Being aggressive about the profile means deciding now, in September, what this system actually needs. You write that list, you protect the money for it, and you don’t let it get eaten one sympathetic re-signing at a time. That decision doesn’t require any 2026/27 data at all, because it comes from what the system demands, not from what last season measured. After preseason and the first few URC games, we should know exactly what we need from this system.

Being patient about the player means giving the lads already here a genuine run at filling those slots before you go outside. Quinn gets the ball on the edge properly. Foxe gets a real crack behind Brookes and Aungier. Kilgallen gets a run. Shay McCarthy gets more than 65 minutes. If Evan O’Connell is going to be a proper player, as his potential suggests, he needs to show it this season. If any of them takes that opportunity, you’ve solved a gap for a fraction of the price, and you’ve got a player who’s already in the building. If they don’t, you’ve got your answer by November, and you go shopping with a clear conscience.

The bit that ties both together is timing, and it’s the thing I’d hammer hardest. Every one of those decisions gets more expensive the longer it takes. Tom Wood in December is reasonable; Tom Wood in April is a negotiation. Barrett should be a formality right now; Barrett after five good URC games is a scrap with another club. A tighthead approached in November has options; a tighthead approached in March has baggage. Patience about players is only affordable if you’re ruthless about deadlines.

So: aggressive, yes. But aggressive in the sense of deciding early and holding the line, not in the sense of clearing out ten contracts because a spreadsheet from a system we no longer play said so.

The thing I’d fear most isn’t a hard call that turns out wrong — it’s twenty-four soft ones that all turn out OK. Stasis is the enemy heading into 2026/27.

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The non-negotiables, for me, are a top-class tighthead, a lock-profile back-five player, and a 10/15 hybrid, with a power winger as a possibility if the 10/15 hybrid doesn’t pan out.

At 10/15, I’d look to move on from Will Harrison — unless he has an elite season, but it would need to be elite to keep him as an NIQ — and replace him with Callum Harkin from the Hurricanes, whose contract expires in 2027. Harkin, who remains Irish-qualified, had two outstanding seasons at fullback for the Hurricanes, and he’s exactly the creative, second-playmaker profile we’re looking for, and he can also play #10.

It’d likely be a tricky deal to do — he’s likely to be highly contested by other Irish clubs, as well as other teams in England and France, never mind elsewhere in New Zealand — but if he’s not going to make the All Blacks squad off the back of his work last season, I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There’s a window there, an expensive one, but a system fit. The fact that he’s Irish-qualified would also leave us with room to go big in the other spots.

In the back five, depending on who we keep and who we don’t, I think we could make a decent play for a lock/backrow hybrid for a potential post-Byrne world.

My dream signing here would be Tupou Vaa’i, although it would be almost impossible to get done outside of a possible sabbatical, as the NZRU — and most everyone else — will be throwing a big contract at him as he comes up to his contract year.

He does have a pre-existing relationship with Clayton McMillan, however, and if he did come on the market — a big if — that would count for a lot, especially if we happened to have around €450k a year to offer him. It’s a long shot, but I’d run whatever I could to make it happen, if possible.

The tighthead question is the key.

With Ala’alatoa departing at the end of the season — he’s staying on this year in a role similar to the one Slimani filled last season for Leinster — there’s an obvious spot to add a game-changing, level-raising tighthead to the roster to pair with Aungier, to back up Brookes in his last season, and to help develop Ronan Foxe, as well as the other young tightheads and looseheads.

Tyrell Lomax is an active consideration on a one-season sabbatical post-World Cup. He has that option baked into his new three-year deal with the NZRU — it is, in effect, a four-year deal — and Munster would be well placed to win his signature when he chooses to activate that, most likely post-World Cup with the Lions series coming a year after any potential sabbatical.

That has upsides and downsides.

The upside is obvious enough that I nearly didn’t write it down. Lomax is a genuine top-five tighthead in the world game when he’s fit, and there’s nobody available in that bracket who isn’t either in their mid-30s, heavily contracted, or a bet on a man we’ve never seen scrummage in this hemisphere. He’d walk into the 1A slot, push Aungier into the role he’s actually best suited to, and give Foxe a full season of mentorship alongside one of the best in the game, never mind what it would do for our looseheads. He’s also the difference between a scrum you have parity on, and a scrum you attack with.

He’d also arrive at the precise moment the chart needs him. Brookes finishes up, Ala’alatoa’s already gone, and Foxe would be 25 with some real minutes behind him rather than one bad afternoon in November. You’d be adding the best player in the room to a room that finally has some depth in it, rather than plugging a hole with the first body available. We’ve done enough of the latter.

The downsides are structural, and there are three of them.

The first is that a sabbatical is one season. You’d be spending a NIQ allocation and a very large chunk of the budget on a player who has a return flight booked before he lands. That’s fine if you’re topping off a squad that’s already competing — Leinster have done exactly this, and it works for them to a point — but it’s a strange fit for a group that’s mid-rebuild. You’d get one year of a transformed scrum and then be back at this exact table, except a year older and with Brookes gone.

The second is that we’d be third in the queue on his timeline, not first. A sabbatical option gets activated when the player decides, not when the club needs it, and there’d be nothing to stop him taking it in 2029 instead, or taking it in Japan where the money is silly and the season is short. We can control our offer. We can’t control the year.

The third is the one that actually worries me. If you’re holding budget open for a Lomax sabbatical that might land, you’re not spending it on a two-year signing that definitely would. And we’ve been here before — we held the tighthead chart together with Archer and Ryan for two seasons while we waited on the definitive answer, and the definitive answer arrived injured and mostly stayed that way.

Waiting for the perfect signing is how you end up with no signing.

So I’d chase it, but I’d chase it with a floor underneath it. Get in early, get the relationship built, make sure that when he does activate it, we’re first in line. But run a parallel process for a two-year tighthead at the same time, and if that man becomes available before Lomax commits, sign him and let the sabbatical go. A very good tighthead for two seasons beats a great one for one, in a squad at this stage of its life.

Finding that other tighthead is the hard part. Sale’s Alex Sanderson put it best in the Daily Mail back in January, comparing the availability of tightheads to trying to find teddy bear shit.

There’s not much point, for me anyway, in shopping in the veteran category for this one — guys who are in that 34/35/36 age bracket. We’ve already got that in Brookes for 2026/27, so we don’t need to double up.

In the NIQ market, there are no obvious slam dunks who fit the criteria without a contract break, which might be possible before the World Cup, but always comes with complications.

In the IQ market, however, there is one name that stands out as a possibility. A difficult deal to do, for sure, and one that’s going to be heavily contested by his own club and others.

I’m talking about Sam Illo.

Sam Illo will be one of the most hotly contested contracts in Irish rugby this season. Leinster will likely make a move for him post-Furlong to pair him with Clarkson, but will find it difficult to sell the move to the other young tightheads they have coming through who they don’t want to force elsewhere, especially with their wage bill tied up in ways it hasn’t been since the mid-2010s.

Illo came up through Leinster, so might well have a desire to go back there, but what if the pitch to him isn’t about going home?

Go and look at where he actually sits among tightheads in this league, because it’s the bit that makes this contract worth fighting over. Illo is winning around 84% of his attacking scrums while going forward on roughly 30% of his carries. That combination is rarer than it sounds. The median tighthead is at about 77% and 21%, so he’s clear of the middle on both counts at once, and the number of men in the URC who manage that is small enough to count on one hand.

You see it best in what the alternatives cost you. There’s a group of props, all looseheads, at the far end of the carrying scale — Boyle up around 57% dominant carries, Schoeman at 50, Paddy McCarthy at 48 — all of them scrummaging at or barely above that 77% median. Then at the other end you’ve got Furlong, up near 89% in the scrum, off about 15% dominant carries — the best scrummager in the country and not asked to be a ball carrier anymore in the same way. Illo gives up twenty points of carrying on the first group and buys eight points of scrum for it. That’s the exact trade you want at tighthead, and it’s the trade almost nobody in this league offers. And he’s Irish.

The Leinster part of that is interesting too, because Clarkson is at something like 18% and 70%, below the median on both. If the plan there is Illo alongside Clarkson post-Furlong, the numbers tell you exactly why they’d want it — and exactly how much they’d need it to work in a year when they’ll also be finding extra cash for Porter, Furlong (if he fancies one or two more years), Caelan Doris, Ryan Baird, Jack Conan, Sam Prendergast, and even Niall Smyth, their own tighthead prodigy.

Which is where the pitch changes shape a small bit. The thing keeping Illo out of the Ireland conversation fully isn’t his profile — the profile is already there. It’s Furlong’s shadow and a queue at Leinster he’s left once already.

The Munster version is simpler to say out loud. You’re the 1A from the first week. You’ve got the heaviest hooker in the country to your left, a coach rebuilding the unit around precisely what you do well, Brookes for a season as veteran cover, and Foxe developing alongside you rather than competing with you.

Of course, Connacht will be throwing the bag at him too — and rightly so — but it would be insane not to make a play for him, regardless of how contentious it would undoubtedly be, as he and Foxe have the potential to lock down our tighthead chart for the next six seasons, with Aungier as support.