The Market in Schoolboy Rugby Players in South Africa: the Law, the Rules, and How the Movement of Children Should Be Governed is a research paper of nearly a hundred pages. It can be downloaded as a PDF at the end of this post. Its annexures contain a draft National Code on the Recruitment and Transfer of School Rugby Players and a set of model bursary clauses, and every South African case it cites is grounded in a SAFLII reference.
This post explains what the paper is about, what it finds, and which parts of it different readers will want. It concentrates on the three people the public debate leaves out: the boy who is bought, the boy he displaces, and the man who found him.
Why a family lawyer wrote it
I have practised family law for decades. After rugby turned professional in 1995 I sat on the employers’ side when the first professional player contracts were negotiated under the auspices of SARU, and I drafted the first constitution of the South African Rugby Employers’ Organisation.
The market this paper describes has grown up in the thirty years since, underneath the professional game, and it has done so without any of the rules the adult game wrote for itself. Almost everyone in it is under eighteen. That makes it, in law, a market in children, and the law of children is the law I practise.
What the market looks like
On the reporting published in 2026, the leading rugby schools spend about R6 million a year each on their first-team programmes. Some allocate as much as R10 million to bursaries that begin at under-14 level. One player agent has estimated the collective spend of the top 200 rugby schools at well over R1 billion a year.
The market has a shop window in the SuperSport Schools platform, which passed 1.4 million registered users in the first quarter of 2026. It has league tables: several websites rank the country’s first XVs every week, and one ranks 200 schools at first XV, under-16, under-15 and under-14 level and combines the four into a single pipeline index. A thirteen-year-old’s A-team results now count towards his school’s national standing, and the pressure of a ranking reaches him at thirteen.
It has a signing season, in which provincial unions announce by name the current schoolboys they have secured for the following year. It has an agency sector whose head has said that nobody goes to Craven Week to scout players any more, because by then the scouting is done. And it has a public that argues about it in the language of school rivalry. An August post on recruitment on one of the schoolboy rugby websites drew more than a hundred comments in five days, and not one of them cited a rule, an agreement or a statute. That is not the commenters’ fault. Part III of the paper explains how little there is to cite.
The product the market fights over hardest is the late transfer: the boy developed at one school since Grade 8 and moved in Grade 10 or 11 to another school that needs him for its under-16 or under-19 pipeline, on a bursary, a fee discount, a stipend or a coach’s verbal promise. The disputes this produces have run without a break since 2012, through cancelled fixtures, headmasters’ agreements, charters and an anti-poaching resolution, to John Smit’s proposal this month that 80 per cent of a first XV should have been at its school since Grade 8. Part II sets out that record as it has been published, with every denial beside every allegation. The paper names no learner and ranks no school as a buyer.
What the objection is not
It is not an objection to the bursary that brings a boy from a disadvantaged community into a strong school at the start of Grade 8. That is an educational act, and the Constitution protects it.
Nor is it an objection to a family that moves. Parents relocate for work, for a marriage, for a divorce, for a hundred reasons of their own, and their son goes with them and plays rugby where he lands. Any rule that cannot tell a family that has moved from a boy who has been bought is a bad rule. The Code the paper proposes sends every such case to an independent panel, which certifies the boy as home-grown once the move is shown to be genuine. The objection is to timing, secrecy and conditionality. It is not an objection to opportunity.
The boy who is bought
Every recruitment conversation happens at a moment of imbalance. The school has prestige, legal advice and experience with bursary terms. The family sees a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The boy hears a pathway to provincial or professional rugby, even if the document he is eventually shown promises only financial assistance.
The published record contains the case of a boy who left his school on a coach’s verbal promise of a scholarship, was refused enrolment at the school that had promised it, was admitted by another school on a scholarship its official denied offering, and was excluded after one term for academic reasons. That is what the imbalance produces when nobody is bound.
The paper’s answer begins with what the family is told. Parents who accept a late offer act from love and from a sincere wish to give their son the best chance. They are neither the villains nor the dupes the debate makes them. The problem is the information on which they decide. Nothing published suggests they are told that three of every four boys identified as elite at under-13 level do not reach the under-18 national tournament; what happens to the bursary, the hostel place and the enrolment if form dips or injury strikes; that their son’s arrival will displace a boy already at the receiving school; or that a provincial eligibility rule may cost him his trials.
The Children’s Act asks a parent, before any decision likely to change a child’s education significantly, to give due consideration to the child’s views. That consideration cannot be genuine when the facts have been curated by an institution with a commercial interest in the outcome. The law’s answer is not to override the parent. It is to see that the parent decides on the facts, after hearing the child, and with the other parent considered.
Then there is what the boy is owed once he arrives. The school that boards, feeds, trains and disciplines a recruited fifteen-year-old is his caregiver under section 32 of the Children’s Act. It must safeguard his development and protect him from exploitation and emotional harm. A bursary boy is entitled to boundaries, to honesty about his injuries and to ordinary developmental failure. He should not be pressured to play injured, to specialise too early, to hide concussion symptoms or to accept abusive treatment because the school gave him a chance. Financial dependence is precisely the condition in which a child learns to keep quiet, and the schoolboy doping figures in Part II.4 show what silence produces.
The paper’s minimum standards for bursary contracts, in Annexure C, are written for him: the identity of the grantor and the exact benefits, the duration and the review criteria, the position after injury, illness, poor form, non-selection or a coaching change, and any repayment obligation resting on the parents, never on the child.
The move itself has a cost that the adults price at nothing. Grades 8 to 12 are the years from thirteen to eighteen, and the developmental research is clear about what those years are for. They are the years in which a young person’s identity is built, in which the opinion of friends comes to matter more than the opinion of parents, and in which belonging to a group protects against anxiety and depression. The move to high school is itself known to trigger the fall in self-esteem that makes adolescence the low point of a lifetime on that measure. A boy bought in Grade 10 or 11 goes through that transition a second time, alone, separated from the friends on whom his resilience depends, and placed in a squad where his belonging is conditional on the bursary that brought him.
The Children’s Act directs every decision-maker to the likely effect on a child of any change in his circumstances, and to his need to remain with his family. None of this makes the move unlawful. It makes it a decision the boy is entitled to be part of. That is why the Code requires his views to be taken separately from the recruitment conversation, and why the panel must ask whether the move serves his schooling and not only his rugby.
The boy who was already there
The recruitment debate is conducted as a contest between schools. Child law recasts it: every recruitment decision concerns at least two children. The second is the boy who arrived in Grade 8, has trained through four winters in the school’s jerseys, whose parents have paid full fees, and who on the first day of the new season finds that the position he was groomed for has been filled by a Grade 11 arrival on a bursary.
He is fifteen or sixteen. For three or four years the school has told him, in assemblies, on its walls and through its coaches, that effort, loyalty and patience are rewarded there, and he has done what he was told. Then a boy he has never met arrives at the start of the season, is handed the jersey, and is welcomed by the same coaches who told him his turn was coming. Nobody explains it to him, because the decision was taken in a meeting he was not at, by people who did not have him in mind.
He has no right to be selected, and the paper does not suggest that team selection on merit is a matter for the courts. But he is a child in the school’s care, and the school’s recruitment decision is a matter concerning him. The research on adolescent athletes tells us what he tends to conclude. Boys in elite programmes invest heavily in the identity of the player. That identity forms and settles between the ages of ten and fifteen, so losing a place is felt as an injury to the self. Being dropped produces real distress in a large proportion of adolescent athletes. Those not selected withdraw from the identity that was taken from them, which is to say they stop caring about the thing they cared most about. And a boy whose institution acts against him experiences it as a betrayal.
The neuroscience explains why his age matters. Adolescence is the period in which the self is under construction. The parts of the brain involved in judging oneself are more active then than in adulthood, and what respected adults and friends are seen to think is one of the materials from which a teenager builds his sense of who he is. A first-team squad is ability grouping in its purest form, published weekly, and the coach’s team sheet is the verdict the boy takes into his view of himself. He is not being oversensitive. He is doing, at fifteen, what the science predicts a fifteen-year-old will do when the adults he trusts rank him, in public, below a boy they paid for. Whether he stays in the game, or at the school, nobody records, because nobody asks. His parents, who have paid the fees that may have funded the purchase, watch it happen to their son.
The school owes him what it owes the recruit: to safeguard his development and protect him from emotional harm, and to give him a fair and determinable process. In this setting that means published bursary criteria, honest communication with squad members before the team sheet goes up, selection that adolescents can recognise as fair, and support rather than silence for the boy who has been displaced.
It also owes him something in its own interest. Loyalty is the elite boys’ school’s core asset. The old boys’ union, the bursary trust and the reunion weekend all rest on the same bargain: five years of belonging, repaid over a lifetime. The displaced boy has been shown, at the most impressionable age, that the bargain runs one way. The point is not that a recruited boy cannot be loyal. Most boys are loyal to their schools, and some who arrive in Grade 11 come to love the place as fiercely as any boy who arrived in Grade 8. The point is that loyalty is grown over years, out of belonging, and a school that buys a player for two seasons has not bought, because it cannot, the thing it will need from him at forty. Each visibly bought jersey spends a portion of the loyalty that paid for it, and the school does not even record the sale.
The scout, the recruiter and the trust
The one place in SA Rugby’s rulebook where dealings with under-eighteens are regulated in detail is the Players’ Agents Regulations. An accredited agent may not approach a player under eighteen without his guardians present, may not take a fee from a boy between sixteen and eighteen, may not bind him beyond two years or beyond his eighteenth birthday, and must have a parent sign. It is a proper regulatory design, and it is better than World Rugby’s.
But it binds only the accredited agent and the rugby bodies that deal with him. It does not bind the talent scout who sources players for a school’s intake on verbal agreements with parents, the director of rugby with a network for acquiring players, the old boys’ body that pools the money, or the union coach who approaches a boy at a festival. The result ought to embarrass the system. The professional intermediary who might one day represent a sixteen-year-old is subject to a detailed code, and the school, the scout and the union that actually move him are subject to none.
The person who does the buying is, at many of the leading schools, not an outside intermediary at all. He is the school’s own recruiter. At a public school he holds a governing-body post and is paid from the school fund; at an independent school he is employed by the company or trust that owns it. His job is to find players in the open market and bring them in. Everyone calls him the school’s agent except the regulations. The money he offers is often not the school’s either. It comes from an outside fund, a trust or an old boys’ foundation that pays the hostel and school fees of the boys he finds.
His method is the one parents complain of to me most. The first conversation is with the boy himself, at a festival, after a match, or by message on the phone in his pocket. The parents hear of it afterwards, if at all. That conversation is not, in itself, actionable by anyone, and the paper does not pretend otherwise. What it does is bypass the guardian, who under the Children’s Act is the person who must assist or represent the child in contractual and other legal matters, and it extracts from a child a promise to which the law gives no effect. A scout who obtains a fourteen-year-old’s telephone number and messages him is also processing the personal information of a child, which the Protection of Personal Information Act allows only with a competent person’s consent or on another lawful ground.
The simplest protection in the whole paper is the one the market most routinely ignores: nobody acting for a school should approach the boy at all except through his parents. The accredited agent is already held to that. There is no reason the school’s own recruiter should be held to less. The developmental research adds a reason of its own. The teenage preference for a smaller reward now over a larger reward later fades only through middle adolescence, so the fifteen-year-old offered a first-team jersey at a festival is the one person in the transaction least able, by his stage of development, to weigh it.
Rule 8 of the proposed Code supplies the lever. Any person who identifies or introduces a learner to a school for sporting purposes on the school’s behalf, whether employee, contractor or volunteer and whoever pays him, performs an agent’s function and must be accredited, and the school answers for the bodies that act in its name.
The argument the paper had to answer
The strongest objection to any rule of this kind was not made by a headmaster. It was made in August by readers of one of the schoolboy rugby websites. Their argument was that a bursary which takes a boy from a rural Eastern Cape school to a Johannesburg boys’ school, and a second move that takes him on to a bigger programme, gives him a free hit at life; that the traditional schools drew boys from other provinces for decades without a word said; and that the objectors do not care about the boys but about whether the status quo is changing.
The accusation of hypocrisy is largely true, and the paper says so. The same schools appear as accuser in one season and accused in the next, and a code drafted by the losers of the last transfer window would deserve the suspicion it would attract. That is why the Code binds by category and not by name. The home-grown rule counts when a boy arrived, not where he came from, and the sanction falls on the buyer whether it has a century of first XV photographs on its walls or fielded its first strong side in 2024.
The constitutional part of the objection is also right about the danger. A rule that fixed every boy at the school where he stood at thirteen would bear hardest on the boy whose Grade 8 school could not develop him, and those boys are, in this country, disproportionately black and poor. So the Code does not fix the boy. It leaves the Grade 8 bursary untouched. It certifies as home-grown the boy from a disadvantaged community who is admitted later on a bursary that funds his education and not only his rugby. What it restricts is the solicitation of a boy already at a strong school for the last two seasons of his rugby.
It also puts the exemption decision with a panel on which no serving school office-holder sits, and it publishes the results by region. If the exemptions run to the traditional schools and the refusals to the rest, the register will say so and the Code will need amending. Part VIII.7 sets this out in full.
The best answer to the drain from the provinces, in any event, is the one a Kimberley school gave this month when it announced that it would send its junior teams and its first XV to the national festivals in 2027 so that, in its own words, local schoolboys no longer need to look to other provinces to play top-tier rugby.
The law that already applies
None of this needs new legislation. A late transfer is a matter concerning the child under section 28(2) of the Constitution. In AB and Another v Pridwin Preparatory School and Others [2020] ZACC 12 the Constitutional Court held that the best-interests standard binds independent schools, that it has a procedural component requiring “a fair and determinable process”, and that children have “a self-standing right to have their views heard” in matters concerning them.
Pridwin supplies the standard by which the recruitment of the one boy and the displacement of the other must now be tested. Part IV of the paper applies it to each of them, to the parents who consent, and to the public school’s money. Part V treats the bursary as a contract and finds that contract, delict, enrichment and interdict leave the losing school substantially without recourse when its bursary holder is taken. That is not a defect in the law. It is the law declining to treat a child as an asset.
What the paper proposes
Part VI surveys how New Zealand, Ireland, FIFA, the NCAA and the American states govern the movement of minors in sport. Part VII tests the proposals now on the table, including the 80 per cent rule, the KwaZulu-Natal rule, the Western Province resolution and the FIFA-style compensation model, against the best-interests standard, and finds that the sanctions which do bite fall on the boy.
Part VIII sets out the alternative: a National Code adopted jointly by SA Rugby, the Department of Basic Education, the schools’ associations and the schools’ rugby associations, resting on five principles. The child is never the object of a sanction. Recruitment is regulated by timing and transparency rather than by prohibiting opportunity. The rules bind the adults and institutions that transact. Every transfer after Grade 8 goes through the fair process the Constitutional Court has already required, recorded on a single document signed by both principals and the parents, with the boy’s own views noted. And every school that competes must spend more on coaching the boys it has, with an accredited coach for every team from under-14 upwards, than on sport-linked benefits for boys recruited after Grade 8, certified annually.
Each element is mapped to the legal power that can enact it today. Annexure B contains the model provisions; Annexure C the model bursary clauses.
Who should read what
Lawyers will want Parts IV and V. Headmasters, governing bodies, directors of rugby and bursary committees will want Parts II, III and VIII, and the annexures. Rugby administrators will want Part III and the comparative models in Part VI. Agents and scouts should read Part III.4. Parents will want Part IV.5, on what the law asks of the family that is offered a bursary, and Part IV.6, on the boy who was already there. Anyone who suspects that the paper is a charter for the established schools should read Part VIII.7 first. The reader’s note at the front of the paper says more.
Permissions
The paper may be quoted, with attribution, for comment, criticism, review, teaching and reporting. The model provisions in the annexures may be adopted and adapted by schools, associations and unions, with attribution. It may not otherwise be reproduced in whole or in substantial part without permission. It is written in a personal capacity and does not constitute legal advice to any person.
Written by Bertus Preller, a Family Law and Divorce Law attorney and Mediator at Maurice Phillips Wisenberg in Cape Town and founder of iDivorce and iANC. A blog, managed by SplashLaw, for more information on Family Law read more here. For free and useful Family Law tech applications visit Maintenance Calculator, Court Day Calculator and Accrual Calculator.
Download the full analysis: Schoolboy rugby recruitment and children’s law in South Africa (PDF)