Highest Paid Rugby Coaches: £800,000 at the Top

The best-paid coach in world rugby earns a reported £800,000 a year.

The ninth-best-paid college football coach in the United States earns $10.8 million.

That gap, not the ordering at the top, is the story.

The reported top three

Rank	Coach	Team	Reported salary
1	Andy Farrell	Ireland	~£800,000
2	Steve Borthwick	England	£700,000
3	Scott Robertson	New Zealand	£600,000

Farrell has committed to the IRFU through to the 2031 Rugby World Cup, and his new contract is what moved him above Borthwick.

We publish three names, not ten. Figures below this point are not reported consistently enough to rank, and we would rather show a short list than pad one.

The sources disagree, and that matters

Search this and you will find Borthwick described as the world’s highest-paid rugby coach — including in reporting that explicitly places him above Farrell and Rassie Erasmus.

You will also find Farrell described as having taken that position.

Both were true at different moments. Borthwick led until Farrell signed a new deal. The pages saying otherwise have simply not been updated, which is the recurring problem with this entire category of figure.

Because rugby unions do not disclose head coach pay, every number here is journalism rather than accounting — the same limitation set out in our guide to the highest paid football managers, where Diego Simeone is reported at around €35 million and Pep Guardiola at £20 million with no club confirming either.

Contrast that with American college football, where most employers are public universities and the contracts are disclosable, covered in our guide to the highest paid college football coaches. That ranking can be checked. This one cannot.

Four sports, one job

Sport	Top reported salary
Football (club)	~€35m — Simeone
Football (Premier League)	~£20m — Guardiola
US college football	$13.3m — Kirby Smart
Rugby union	~£800,000 — Farrell

Rugby’s best-paid coach earns roughly 4% of Guardiola’s reported figure. Even the ninth-ranked college football coach, on $10.8 million, is an order of magnitude clear of the entire rugby list.

The NBA is further clear still: Steve Kerr is on $17.5 million, and four coaches sit together at around $11 million — see our guide to the highest paid NBA coaches.

None of that reflects the job. Farrell coaches a Six Nations and World Cup programme with a national profile in three countries. It reflects who employs him.

National unions, not club owners

This is the structural explanation, and it is the same one that runs through our ownership coverage.

Rugby’s head coaches are paid by national unions, not by clubs with owners. Farrell is employed by the IRFU. Robertson is employed by New Zealand Rugby, which is itself owned by 26 provincial unions — set out in our guide to who owns the All Blacks.

A union answerable to its member provinces is a very different employer from a private investment group. It has no owner willing to absorb a loss for a trophy, and its surplus is committed to the game beneath it.

The competition itself works the same way: the Six Nations pays its winners £0, and its money moved through a private equity sale of broadcast revenue rather than a prize fund — covered in our guide to Six Nations prize money.

Rugby is not underpaying its coaches relative to its revenue. It has less revenue, and a governance model that reinvests most of it.

How we checked these numbers

Andy Farrell’s reported ~£800,000 salary, his position as the world’s highest-paid rugby coach and his commitment to the IRFU through to the 2031 Rugby World Cup are from Ruck. Steve Borthwick’s £700,000 and Scott Robertson’s £600,000 are from Ruck and Rugby Culture Club’s 2026 ranking, with additional context from Huge Rugby. The competing claim that Borthwick tops the list is from Ruck’s earlier reporting, retained here deliberately because it explains why published rankings differ.

No rugby union publishes head coach pay. Every figure on this page is a reported estimate. Treat the ordering as current at the time of writing and the individual amounts as approximate.

The cross-sport comparisons use figures from our own coverage and mix currencies — £800,000 against $13.3 million against €35 million. We have described those relationships in orders of magnitude rather than converting, because exchange rates would change the precise ratios without changing the conclusion.

Review class: event-driven. Recheck on any new head coach contract, appointment or departure at a major union.