PRETORIA – The Bulls will be culling its bloated stocks with more than half of the players on their books destined for the chopping block.
Director of rugby Alan Zondagh said they were tackling a system where the coaches did not know why players were contracted or in some cases why players left the union.
“We have too many players contracted at the union at the moment, we have the most of all the other three and we have already started cutting down,” Zondagh said. “But the guys have contracts and we are working through it continuously.”
Zondagh said they had approximately 202 players including 22 from Tuks on their books.
“We will carry on with our normal scouting but where we are sitting now I wonder if we will contract two players for the Bulls from the schools for next year,” Zondagh said.
“The Bulls will have 80 contracted players next year but a lot of the players’ contracts comes to an end at the end of the year in any case.
Those aren’t the ones that are the problems, the problem is the ones that you don’t want but they have contracts till 2020 or 2021 and you know they are not going to play Super Rugby.”
Zondagh said that in future they would contract players who at least have the potential to play in Super Rugby.
“The new emphasis will be if we are interested in a player, can he play Super Rugby? If you go to Saracens as an academy player they don’t get you there just to have players in the academy. Those players are there because they think they can play for Saracens. We need to change our mindsets when it comes to that.”
The Bulls have made a promising start to their 2019 Super Rugby campaign with a clean sweep of the South African franchise to top the conference log.
A major player exodus could undo all the positive momentum as they would have to start from scratch again next season.
“We can go from up here to down there within a season with the top players that we might lose but hopefully we can keep the bulk of them,” Zondagh said.
“We have top players in this country all wanting to leave and we are fighting against the money situation.”