Ireland’s top rugby stars can only dream of the latest contract agreed in France

The big contract, if you can get it, in Irish rugby is for three seasons.

That means not having to worry about a contract for a two years before your team and agent [or players themselves if they prefer to do it that way] go back into a room to negotiate a new deal. Rugby can be a heartless game at times. Players are a commodity and can be spat out almost as quickly as they are chewed up. To that end, players must look out for themselves and do what is best. Many have young families and are fully aware that they may only get two or three decent contracts in their professional career. As Ireland coach Joe Schmidt noted recently, the average career span in professional rugby is six years. For every evergreen, like Peter Stringer or Donncha O'Callaghan, there are players that had their playing careers cut far too short. The IRFU has cut down on the amount of centrally contracted players in recent years and is conscious of the fact that there are only so many lucrative deals they can hand out. Next June, the contracts of a dozen senior Ireland stars expire and the union will need all its nous - and the carrot of World Cup 2019 inclusion - to get most of these players to sign new deals. https://twitter.com/SportsJOEdotie/status/935599538148126720 Tadhg Furlong, CJ Stander, Iain Henderson, Garry Ringrose and Peter O'Mahony are the priorities but deals are also running out for the likes of Tommy Bowe, Kieran Marmion, Rob Kearney and Ireland captain Rory Best. Best, Kearney and certainly Bowe may be willing to sign up until the conclusion of the World Cup campaign [as Paul O'Connell did in 2015] but the union could yet bring out it's trump card to get their priorities signed up - three year contracts. Johnny Sexton, Conor Murray, Sean O'Brien and Jamie Heaslip are all at various stages of three-year deals with the IRFU. However, all of that is a mere triviality when compared to the contract just penned by French winger Noa Nakaitaci. As flagged by Oyannax coach Mike Prendergast on The Hard Yards, the 27-year-old is moving from Clermont to Lyon on a whopping five-year deal. Nakaitaci, who was born in Fiji, was announced as a Lyon player for 2017/18 [and beyond] along with Clermont lock Raphael Chaume, Jean-Marc Doussain (Toulouse) and Patrick Sobela (Oyonnax). Nakaitici's deal, if he makes it through the entire five seasons, will be a reported €4m [€800,000 per season]. The deal is 50% more than what Clermont say they could afford to pay the winger under the current Top 14 salary cap. In an interview with 'Les Décodeurs', Clermont president Eric De Cromières bitterly remarked that the likes of Nakaitici and Scott Spedding 'are hunted by clubs that show an appetite of ogres'. Private owners across the French Top 14 and Pro D2 are skewing the market but, with the arrival of five-year contracts, the players are not inclined to worry about that too much.