Josh Neill pulled on an Ireland jersey in Tbilisi on Saturday and started at blindside flanker for Ireland Under-20 against England at the World Rugby Junior World Championship. He was good enough in SA Rugby to be Player of the Tournament at the U18 Craven Week for Western Province. He represented South Africa at Under-18 level in 2024 and 2025. He is 19 years old, and he is gone.
Not gone to a rival South African province. Not gone to a URC franchise. Gone to Leinster. Gone to Ireland. And on Saturday, gone to Tbilisi wearing green — a different shade of it.
Neill is not an anomaly. He is a pattern.
In the same 2025 school-leaving class, Rondebosch centre Harry Soboil joined Edinburgh Rugby’s academy and has since been named in Scotland’s Under-20 squad for the same tournament. Michaelhouse centre Rourke O’Sullivan — formerly of the Sharks U18 Craven Week setup — debuted for Ireland Under-19 against Wales at Cardiff Arms Park and is now in Connacht’s academy.
Bishops utility back Rynard Gordon has joined Ulster. Kingswood College twins Josh and James Mackenzie, both South Africa Schools-capped players from the Eastern Cape, have signed academy contracts with Glasgow Warriors and will fly north in December after their matric exams.
Five players. Four European academies. Three countries. One school-leaving class.
Every single one of them qualified for a foreign nation through ancestry — Irish grandparents, Scottish grandparents, paternal heritage traced back across the ocean. That eligibility was always there. What changed is the calculation these young men and their families made about where their futures lay.
World Rugby’s regulations allow it. Nobody broke any rules. But that is precisely the point Dave Wessels has been making, loudly and on record.
Wessels, SA Rugby’s General Manager of High Performance, put it plainly in an interview with SA Rugby magazine earlier this year. “At the moment, the system rewards the buyer and punishes the developer. That’s the wrong way round.”
He went further. “We would like World Rugby to follow the FIFA model, which forces professional clubs to pay compensation to all of the schools and academies that played a role in the development of a player from the age of 13. It works well in football and would be an important way for the professional game to support grassroots rugby here. It would be fantastic if our schools could be compensated for the great work they do, which would enable them to fund bursaries and other opportunities for the next generation.”
That argument deserves to be heard, because the scale of what South Africa has built at schoolboy level is genuinely extraordinary. The top SA Rugby schools collectively spend well over a billion rand per year on their programmes — specialist coaches, full-time conditioning staff, analysts, nutritionists,
GPS tracking systems running from Under-15 upward. Some individual first-team programmes carry budgets of R6 million to R10 million annually. These are not schools running rugby on the side. They are high-performance operations that happen to also have classrooms.
The product of all that investment is visible every Craven Week, every SA Schools U18 series, every Junior Springbok squad. South Africa produces more elite schoolboy rugby talent per capita than anywhere else on earth. Former Springbok and Bulls coach Heyneke Meyer, who has coached in England, France and the United States, said it plainly: “There’s no question in my mind that the South African schools set-up is the most professional in the world.”
Ireland, Scotland, England and others have figured this out. The IRFU runs a dedicated Irish Qualified Rugby programme — IQ Rugby — that actively scouts and tracks dual-eligible players around the globe. Scottish Rugby has David Nucifora, their performance director, personally meeting with South African schoolboys during exchange visits to Perthshire.
Glasgow Warriors hosted the Mackenzie twins in Johannesburg during their URC tour specifically to accelerate the relationship. These are not accidental recruitments. They are structured, resourced, deliberate pipelines — built on the back of South Africa’s developmental infrastructure, at zero cost to the unions that benefit.
JAY | JPS SAYS: “The frustration in SA Rugby’s corridors is legitimate. You cannot spend a billion rand a year building the world’s best schoolboy system, watch Ireland and Scotland systematically recruit your products, and then be told the answer is simply to produce more talent. At some point, the game’s administrators have to ask whether the rules governing international eligibility and development compensation are fit for purpose — or whether they exist to benefit the unions that can least afford to build what South Africa has already built.”
The compensation argument has football as its precedent. Under FIFA’s solidarity mechanism, development clubs receive payments when a player they trained moves between clubs — proportional to the years the player spent in their system between ages 12 and 23. The money flows automatically, across borders, without requiring the selling club to negotiate from scratch every time.
Rugby has no equivalent. A school like Rondebosch Boys’ High can spend years developing a Josh Neill — Craven Week Player of the Tournament, SA Schools representative, Western Province captain — and receive nothing when Leinster signs him at 18.
The structural pressure this creates at selection level has not gone unnoticed. In June 2023, Western Province were excluded from the main match at the Grant Khomo Under-16 tournament after failing to meet the required number of players of colour in their squad. Injuries had forced them to call up two additional players, triggering a breach of tournament regulations.
A complaint was lodged — reportedly by the Bulls, whom WP had beaten in the previous round — and Province were moved to the penultimate match while the Bulls advanced to face Free State. The DA publicly condemned the decision, called for a Human Rights Commission investigation, and wrote to World Rugby. SA Schools Rugby Association chairman Noel Ingle confirmed the breach and the sanction.
The incident crystallised a tension that runs through the whole system. South Africa’s transformation targets in youth rugby are a political reality, government-mandated and built into tournament regulations at every age group.
They exist for reasons rooted in the country’s history, and that history is real. But their interaction with international eligibility rules creates a specific pressure point: dual-qualified players who see their pathway to selection complicated by demographic targets have a legitimate alternative on the table — one that Ireland, Scotland and others have made increasingly easy to pursue.
None of the young men who left did anything wrong. Neill made a decision his family described as “bigger than rugby.” The Mackenzies embraced an opportunity that began as a school exchange programme and became a professional contract. O’Sullivan’s mother spoke about the role of Irish connections within the IRFU that opened a door her son walked through willingly. These are individual choices made in individual circumstances, and they deserve to be respected as such.
But individual choices, multiplied across a generation, become a structural problem. And SA Rugby knows it.
The compensation push Wessels has taken public is the right argument in the right forum. World Rugby needs to hear it, debate it, and ultimately act on it — because the current model is asking one country to bankroll the development pipeline for the rest of the world.
South Africa has won four Rugby World Cups partly because of what its schools produce. The question being asked more urgently with every passing Craven Week is how long that conveyor belt keeps running if the system continues to reward everyone except the people who built it.
📸 Images via SA Rugby / IRFU
