From game one of Super Rugby Pacific 2025, the Chiefs have looked like champions-in-waiting.
They began their campaign with what was, in the end, a run-in-the-park victory against the defending champion Blues. What struck about that opening 25-14 win was the way the Chiefs stacked their bench with experience and talent and played to an orchestrated plan.
They seemed to flick a switch midway through the second half when they moved Damian McKenzie from full-back to first-five and unleashed the bomb squad of Tupou Vaa’i, Cortez Ratima, Anton Lienert-Brown and Emoni Narawa.
There was something deeply symbolic about it as the last time the Chiefs had played at Eden Park, eight months earlier in the 2024 Super Rugby Pacific final, they were wiped 41-10 and barely featured in a game where they had just 30 per cent possession.
It was a desperately disappointing night for a Chiefs team that had felt the sting of defeat at the same stage in 2023, when they couldn’t hold on, at their home ground, against a Crusaders team that surged to a late win on the back of their driving maul.
“We barely fired a shot,” head coach Clayton McMillan said after losing last year’s final. “That was disappointing for boys who put in a lot of work, disappointing for the fans who travelled up State Highway. We’ve got some great young men. We’ll get better and eventually win one. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.”
Clearly, the Chiefs came into 2025 hungry, organised and rejuvenated. McMillan and his coaching group obviously spent the off-season refining and modifying everything, entirely committed to ensuring that they make it third time lucky this year.
Some of the rugby the Chiefs have played has been on a different level to everyone else and indeed to anything they produced in 2023 and 2024.
Their performance on opening day made the Blues look stale, uncertain and perhaps a little guilty of not adapting and growing enough in the wake of their championship win. And that theme has only amplified as the season has gone on. The Chiefs have looked the most innovative and polished team in the competition.
Their points differential of 231 was crazily out of whack – massively higher than the Crusaders, Brumbies and Hurricanes – and it reflects just how well they have attacked this season, using both Josh Jacomb and McKenzie at No 10, to ignite the finishing skills of a backline that has a ridiculous depth of talent.
Some of the rugby the Chiefs have played has been on a different level to everyone else and indeed to anything they produced in 2023 and 2024. They have evolved and refined all their key areas, and they have hardened their resolve to not accept performances that they feel don’t meet their expectations.
There have only been three of those in 2025, the last one coming five weeks ago where they were beaten 35-17 by the Hurricanes and looked a little ragged by the end.
It was a surprising departure of form and Chiefs midfielder Quinn Tupaea revealed how the team responded to that loss in Wellington.
“We sat in the change rooms after the Hurricanes game and listened to them sing their song next door,” he said. “Clayton turned our speaker off, and we all sat there and listened to it, and it sort of fuelled us for this week. We had a tough review on Monday and two tough trainings on Tuesday and Thursday, which I guess prepared us well for this weekend.”
After listening to the Hurricanes whoop and holler the week before, the Chiefs bounced back the following week to defeat the Crusaders 35-17 in Christchurch and put themselves at the top of the table, where they have finished.
They are chasing something more than redemption and a Super Rugby title The Chiefs are potentially setting themselves up to build a dynasty should they manage to be crowned champions this year.
But there is a definitive sense that the Chiefs have learned not to feel anything about topping the table. They finished first in 2023 but couldn’t win the final. They finished fourth in 2024 but couldn’t win the final and so they know that where they finish doesn’t matter – the job is not done in late May. The job is not done by reaching the final.
The Chiefs know, perhaps in a way they previously never have, that their whole season has been gearing up to this stage, and that if they want to be crowned champions, they have to find another level again over the next three weeks.
But as this season has played out, it’s also become apparent that 2025 has developed enormous significance for the club. They are chasing something more than redemption and a Super Rugby title.
The Chiefs are potentially setting themselves up to build a dynasty should they manage to be crowned champions this year.
They are going to lose McMillan as their head coach – he’s off to Munster – but what he has done is set the club up to succeed long after he has gone. He resurrected the club in 2021, following their nightmare 2020 which saw them lose all eight Super Rugby games under Warren Gatland in the truncated New Zealand-only competition.
McMillan stepped up in 2021 when Gatland was away with the British and Irish Lions and gave the club a sense of identity and new energy – so much so that when the latter returned in 2022, he was pushed upstairs into a director of rugby role, before agreeing to then go back to coach Wales.
The McMillan era has seen the Chiefs have produced a consistency of performance they haven’t managed since Dave Rennie took over and won titles in 2012 and 2013.
What winning the title will do for the Chiefs is validate the sweeping style of rugby they have employed, the depth of their resilience, the strength of their team culture, and their ability to adapt and learn from adversity.
The squad, without question, has the necessary experience, balance, raw talent and longevity to establish the Chiefs as a dynasty club.
A title will set the Chiefs up to sustain what McMillan has built and potentially go on to build a dynasty the same way the Crusaders did between 2017 and 2023.
Everything is in place for the Chiefs to go on to dominate Super Rugby. They have signed the likes of McKenzie, Vaa’i, Samisoni Taukei’aho, Luke Jacobson and Wallace Sititi to long-term contracts and they have a cohort of emerging players such as Jacomb, Ratima, Simon Parker and Tupaea who are also locked in.
The squad, without question, has the necessary experience, balance, raw talent and longevity to establish the Chiefs as a dynasty club.
And while McMillan is leaving, it is already an open secret that he will be replaced by former La Rochelle director of rugby Jono Gibbes.
Gibbes has not yet been confirmed but his former Chiefs team-mate Stephen Donald appeared to accidentally reveal the news on Sky’s breakdown show. “I don’t know if it’s been announced but there is a guy in the building who has coached at the highest level in Jono Gibbes, who is a like-for-like,” said Donald. “If it’s Jono for example, it’s an easy transition.”
Gibbes, who joined the Chiefs coaching staff as an assistant this year, is seen as a man cut from entirely similar cloth to McMillan. He’s tough and uncompromising, unwilling to accept standards below expectation and entirely capable of driving a culture of excellence.
Winning the title this year will not only exorcise demons, but it will give Gibbes an established template from which to work, rather than having to rebuild the club from the ground up as McMillan had to.
That’s not to say it will be an easy ride for Gibbes, but he will be inheriting the strongest squad in Super Rugby and a group of players who know what it takes to win a title.
The next three weeks for the Chiefs will, therefore, determine much more than how the McMillan era is written into history. They could be the key to the Chiefs becoming Super Rugby’s most dominant force over the next decade.
