Taking his talents to the world: Jarryd Hayne. Credit:Getty Images Sonny Bill Williams was able to go from an NRL finals series to rugby union Tests at Soldier Field and Twickenham on successive weekends, an unthinkable odyssey a generation ago. There are many fans saying Hayne hasn't won a premiership, he hasn't been consistently the best in his position, he hasn't achieved enough to want to move on at this stage. But the horizons of young men and women today are different. Their focus is global, not local. Thanks to advances in communication technology, we can immerse ourselves in any field of interest and completely ignore "local" culture. We can travel relatively cheaply.

If you are born with certain skills, there is no longer an expectation you will use them in the family business. Instead, people like Hayne want to see how far those skills can take them. Winning a premiership with your mates is one thing. Playing in the NFL and then in the Olympics is quite another. You only have one life, you might as well see how many different things you can achieve in that lifetime. The contradiction is that to many people around the world, the NRL is one of these "fringe" interests, something viewed through an illegal feed in the dead of night and spoken about via a network of chatrooms and online forums. But the NRL doesn't understand these people. Instead, it markets itself to the "un-Haynes" – to those whose horizons stretch not much further than their own suburbs and their own day-to-day battles to make ends meet. James Graham recently warned that if rugby union was to take off in America, the NRL could become its feeder competition. Again, the rules of our sports allow us to ring-fence our stars from the rest of the global labour market for athletes.

But such protections will be tested by the likes of Hayne, and eventually broken down, as happens to all trade barriers. What happens then is that in order to compete in a freer market, the Australian sports competitions are forced to eliminate inefficiencies (like, say, eight and a half clubs in one city) and rationalise so they can pay players more. Rep qualification solution Discord is a fan of allowing players who miss out on tier one national selection being permitted to represent a tier two nation without affecting their primary country of election. But it is no longer the all-purpose panacea that it once appeared. The measure, if not complemented by other measures, institutionalises the gap between countries three and four. How do we even have convincing, competitive World Cup semi-finals when all the players in team four have been passed over by teams one, two or three?