Brad Weber

Brad Weber got into Super Rugby through somebody else’s misfortune. Tawera Kerr-Barlow was hurt before the Chiefs’ 2014 opener against the Crusaders, Weber came off the bench in an 18-10 win, and nine years later the two of them were team-mates in Paris.

Scrum-half at Stade Français, 1.72m and 75kg, and 35 years old.

Napier raised him. St Patrick’s, then Napier Boys’ High, junior rugby at Napier Old Boys’ Marist and a Ross Shield place in 2003. In Dunedin he played for the Sharks while taking an applied science degree at Otago, and still throws a Fins Up after scoring.

The professional route nearly closed twice. Fumiaki Tanaka blocked him at Otago; then Josh Renton was picked ahead of him in 2013 and he turned back towards his studies. A month into that season the Waikato coach Johnny Walters rang, wanting more competition at nine, and the move north put him in the Chiefs’ wider training group inside a year.

He captained Waikato in 2014 and shared it with Whetu Douglas in 2015, a season that finished with a second-half hat-trick against Hawke’s Bay to take the Ranfurly Shield. He then signed to go back to Napier and play for the province he had just beaten.

New Zealand capped him against Samoa on 8 July 2015, after a junior world title in 2011 spent largely behind TJ Perenara. His two international tries came in the same match, against Canada at the 2019 World Cup.

Ten years at the Chiefs ended in 2023. The move to Paris was for three seasons, and he debuted off the bench against Racing in November and scored twice against Vannes the following September.

He is of Ngāti Porou descent, and has said he wants to be an example to people of Māori descent who do not think they look it, and who might go looking for their whakapapa because of it.

Note on his current club: Weber is still listed in Stade Français‘s squad data. A serious ankle injury needing surgery cost him the second half of his second season and all of the first half of 2025-26, and the club released him early in December 2025. He joined Mitsubishi Sagamihara DynaBoars in Japan and played his first match for them on 10 January 2026.