Australia's two Rugby World Cup-winning captains have praised the flexibility of the new player contracting system.
The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) on Thursday announced a new system starting from 2016, allowing a select number of players to have stints overseas.
The 'flexible contracts' will let players on long-term deals with the ARU to have one season in a domestic competition and members of the 2016 Olympic Sevens side will be permitted to play in the 2016-17 Japanese domestic season.
Nick Farr-Jones, the Wallabies' 1991 World Cup-winning skipper and halfback, said Australia needed to continue being flexible in allowing players to spend time overseas while not making them ineligible to represent the Wallabies, which had been the case in the past.
"We are put between a rock and a hard place, potentially post-(2015) World Cup, losing some of our greatest players (overseas)," Farr-Jones said.
"So I think a flexible system that allows those guys to maybe have a year or two (overseas) and to still be available for selection, I think it makes a lot of sense.
"Look what the New Zealanders are doing for a couple of players. They have the sabbaticals, as they call it.
"I think flexibility, particularly for people who have been around the game a long time, and some of the big stars of the game, is important."
Lock John Eales, Farr-Jones' 1991 teammate and captain of the triumphant 1999 World Cup team, regarded the revamped contracting procedure as a positive development.
He stressed the notion of a sabbatical actually stretched back to his early playing days in the early 1990s, before the game fully embraced professionalism in the second half of that decade.
"When i first started, it was all amateur so people did have sabbaticals, but they just did it off their own bat," Eales said.
"Even then, it was definitely more lucrative for a lot of people to play overseas than it was to play here.
"These circumstances are not unique, but I think they are magnified at the moment.
"You've always got to be looking at ways how you can best handle the circumstances and I think the latest announcements this week have been positive."
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