Ireland’s high performance guru set to join Scottish Rugby Union

David Nucifora, the high performance guru credited with transforming Irish rugby over the past decade, is set to take up a consultant role with the Scottish Rugby Union (SRU), according to both Irish and Scottish sources.
The Australian, 62, cleared his desk at Lansdowne Road less than a month ago and departed with the gratitude of the Irish rugby public on the strength of recent successes during his time as the Irish Rugby Football Union’s first “tsar of rugby”.
Ireland have won four Six Nations titles since his arrival in 2014 including two grand slams and three Under-20 grand slams in the past five years.
Nucifora’s appointment will be regarded as a coup for the SRU but will upset some in Ireland as he will be able to share with the Scots the intellectual property that he has built up working alongside the likes of Joe Schmidt, Andy Farrell and Gary Keegan. Relations between the two unions have been frosty since the Scots failed to support their neighbour’s bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
Last December, Rugby Australia announced that Nucifora would be joining their organisation in an advisory role — a move that made even more sense given that his former associate Schmidt had become Australia coach. But it would appear it is possible to act as adviser to two unions at once and in a recent post on LinkedIn, Nucifora wrote of his desire “to seek to work globally on independent high performance advisory projects as they come to light”.
Scottish Rugby has been without a performance director since the departure of Jim Mallinder half-way through last season. The SRU does not even have a chief executive to rubber-stamp a new performance director after Mark Darbon, their top target, switched direction at the last minute and took a job at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.
Scottish rugby’s player pathways are also in need of direction, following last season’s decision to do away with the “Super Series” competition that formed a bridge between the amateur and professional games.
Relations between the unions are unlikely to improve any time soon, given it is an open secret that Ireland are not supporting John Jeffrey’s candidacy to replace Bill Beaumont as World Rugby chairman in November. That decision was not about political revenge, however, more to do with the emergence — yet to be officially confirmed — of a more forward-looking commercially-minded alternative candidate in Australia’s Brett Robinson.
If the major unions are agreed on one thing, it is that professional rugby is not financially sustainable in its present guise. Hence World Rugby’s decision to host an emergency summit dealing specifically with the commercial future of the sport, to be held in Dublin on September 24.
On a related matter, it has been reported in the French media that Qatar’s bid to host the first Nations League final in 2026 has been knocked back, with France and Ireland being primary opponents of the deal — though it is unclear for now whether the objections were born of ethical misgivings over Qatar’s human rights record, or based purely on commercial considerations.