David Moffett was born on 17 April 1947 and is a businessman who has been the head of Sport England, New Zealand Rugby, Australia's National Rugby League, and the Welsh Rugby Union.
19 Facts About David Moffett
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Moffett has been involved in New Zealand politics, serving briefly on the board of the New Conservative Party and founding a political party, New NZ; this party later merged with the Outdoors Party and Moffett became its executive director.
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David Moffett's family moved to Kenya when he was three, and he was raised in Kenya and Tanganyika during the last years of colonial Africa.
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David Moffett moved to Australia at age sixteen with his father after his parents split up.
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David Moffett has a son Graeme who he says he named after the rugby league player Graeme Langlands.
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David Moffett is a naturalised Australian, though as of 2019 David Moffett was living in rural north Canterbury in New Zealand, owning 10 hectares as a blockholder.
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David Moffett was offered the role of chief executive for the English Football Association in 2003, but turned the position down.
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David Moffett was the CEO of the Welsh Rugby Union from 2002 to 2005.
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David Moffett took up his post at the WRU on 2 December 2002 having beaten off over 100 other applicants to the job, and immediately set about controlling the WRU's finances who were by this time heavily in debt due to poor management of funds and expenditure on facilities such as the Millennium Stadium.
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David Moffett created an 18-man board of directors, replacing a 27-man committee as part of his streamlining of administration at the Union.
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David Moffett gained backing to dismiss the Wales 'A' Team, long considered an important development side playing at a level just below that of full international level, in order to save money and develop rugby players at a higher level.
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However the most controversial decision David Moffett took was the introduction of regional rugby to Wales.
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David Moffett secured permission from the Millennium Commission, who had provided a grant for the construction of the stadium to obtain a sponsor for naming rights of the stadium on condition that the word Millennium remained in the name.
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David Moffett signed an extension to his contract which would see him remain at the WRU until 2008 in March 2004.
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David Moffett cited personal and family reasons for his departure.
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In 2014, David Moffett drove a vote of no confidence in the WRU board of directors.
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David Moffett first made political news in December 2018 when he attacked Jacinda Ardern and Winston Peters, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, over a non-binding UN migration compact which the government supported.
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In 2019, David Moffett founded a political party called the New NZ party.
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In March 2020, the New Zealand Outdoors Party announced that it had joined with the Real NZ Party, that David Moffett had become a board member for the Outdoors Party, and that he was now the party's executive director.