The Australian Rugby Championship, often abbreviated to the ARC and also known as the Mazda Australian Rugby Championship for sponsorship purposes, is a now-defunct domestic professional men's rugby union football competition in Australia, which ran for only one season in 2007. It was the predecessor to the current National Rugby Championship. The competition, similar to New Zealand's ITM Cup and South Africa's Currie Cup, aimed to bridge the gap between existing club rugby and the international Super Rugby competition then known as Super 14. The ARC involved eight teams: three from New South Wales, two from Queensland, and one each from the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria and Western Australia. From its inception the ARC divided many in Australian rugby, with arguments over the structure and format of the competition, and concerns that the creation of arbitrary state-based teams would undermine the strong club competitions in Sydney and Brisbane. On 18 December 2007, the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) announced that the ARC would be shut down due to heavy financial losses: the ARC lost A$4.7 million during the 2007 season, with projected losses of $3.3 million for 2008. On 10 December 2013, Bill Pulver, the CEO of the Australian Rugby Union, announced a new competition along similar lines, the National Rugby Championship, to include 8 to 10 teams in "major population centres". History The official announcement on the agreement to create a national rugby competition in Australia was made in mid-2006, following a 70-person three-day summit in Sydney that agreed to an eight team competition. However, the competition was not without its share of controversy, with some of the strong state-level clubs being against the formation of a new level of competition, claiming it could harm club and grassroots rugby. In September, an ARU board meeting, after hearing these concerns, officially approved the new competition. A month later, the competition kicked off, however the Queensland teams performed poorly as the East Coast Aces and Ballymore Tornadoes finished last and second last respectively. The Perth Spirit performed the best out of the regular rounds winning six out of eight games, but due to bonus points finished third on the ladder behind the Central Coast Rays and minor premiers the Western Sydney Rams. After the top four teams took part in the semi-finals, the Melbourne Rebels and Central Coast Rays would compete in the first and last ARC Grand Final: the Rays defeated