by RFU, PRL, PGP, PRB, IDP, TNT, CVC, RPA – are you drowning in the alphabet soup yet? Welcome to the new world of English rugby, where there seems to be no problem too big for an acronym to solve. With a few more added over the summer, it’s perhaps no mere coincidence that Premier League rugby directors recently received a lesson in language.
It is said that they were all called into a meeting room and urged to be more vocal about their public views in the coming season, to embrace and celebrate the gladiatorial nature of the sport rather than shy away from it, and, in short, to make things a little more exciting.
Related: RFU lays off 42 staff – weeks after selling Twickenham naming rights for £100m
It is said that one wag raised the point that the Rugby Football Union had a habit of hitting him on the wallet every time he spoke his mind. But the recently agreed Professional Game Partnership (PGP), we were told, had ushered in an era of unprecedented cooperation between club and country, so one might hope for some leniency from the disciplinary department.
The point is that the Premiership season finally kicks off on Friday, five weeks after the Premier League, and there is a realisation that the battle for attention has never been greater. France’s Top 14 kicked off last week with great fanfare and a litany of big-name English stars, putting it one step ahead of the Premiership, most of whose players have not played in the competition since May.
The salary cap has been raised again to £6.4 million, but most clubs are not spending to the limit. And although the appointment of Michael Cheika as Leicester head coach will be a box office hit, the days of clubs signing top stars from overseas are long gone. The arrival of Fiji captain Waisea Nayacalevu at Sale may be the exception that proves the rule, but overall clubs have offloaded significantly more players than they have signed.
A recent count put 37 players without a club, having been released at the end of last season. Although this is an inevitable consequence of a 10-team Premiership and therefore fewer games, squads have shrunk. If this means members of the England Under-20 team that won the World Junior Championship in the summer get the game time they often miss, all the better. But it won’t be the lure of seeing foreign stars that sells tickets this season.
It is also a consequence of the ongoing post-pandemic recovery at a time when government bailouts are yet to be repaid and the financial situation is such that a club like Harlequins – which sold out all but two of its home games last season and plays two games a year at Twickenham with great success – sees the £500,000 mark as being on the break-even point as a reason for optimism.
As outgoing Northampton chief executive Mark Darbon puts it: “We and the other clubs are striving to get to that financially sustainable model and many of us are making good progress but we are not yet consistently profitable on a profit and loss basis. That feels like it is still a step in the future so we need to continue to work really hard to make sure we have a model that can be successful in the future. Otherwise we will face challenges like we have seen in recent years with the loss of some clubs.”
With most clubs reducing their demands accordingly, the Premier League has become extremely competitive – so much so that it has now become the league’s selling point. But if clubs have stabilised since three clubs went bust, there is an awareness of the need for growth. The extension of the title sponsorship deal with Gallagher for another three years is a positive development, but that need explains the language lesson and TNT Sports’ promise to push boundaries this season.
“We need to continue to grow the audience and broaden its appeal,” adds Darbon. “Only then can we monetise that offering and get media and broadcast companies to invest properly to help us sustain this into the future. We need broadcast companies to want to invest in our sport because there is an audience that follows it. We need big corporate partners to invest at league level because they want to be in the Premiership.”
The contract with TNT was extended for a further two seasons earlier this year, albeit at a reduced price, which attracted even more attention from the Premiership’s top brass. It also explains why talk of Anglo-Welsh and British-Irish leagues continues to simmer, especially since the Champions Cup moved to Premier Sports because TNT saw no value in keeping it – a decision some insiders see as the death knell for the once-vaunted competition.
The RFU has long believed that the best way to promote club football is to have a successful English team. The union’s chief executive, Bill Sweeney, often laments that England have won the Six Nations only four times and the Grand Slam just once since winning the 2003 World Cup. The RFU is unclear about its aims for the PGP, which gives Steve Borthwick more control over a select group of players.
“Anyone who looks at the age profile, the profile of this England team, the current growth of this team, the players potentially coming into this England team, they just look at that and think, ‘England only go one way’,” says the RFU’s Conor O’Shea. “The proof will always be on the pitch and that is what we have to deliver, but the agreement allows us to deliver that on a consistent basis.”
That view is echoed in the Premiership, albeit not quite as enthusiastically. “It’s a better deal for the development of international football and it’s what brings the most support, resources and funding to the game,” says Sale rugby director Alex Sanderson. “[But] It’s definitely more intrusive in terms of the way I can manage these players.”
Rob Baxter, Exeter’s director of rugby, has expressed his concerns about the PGP but was enthusiastic after subsequent discussions with Borthwick. Whether it will change the English landscape for the better, however, remains to be seen. “I didn’t get the impression before that it was a bad thing,” says Baxter. “The most important thing the sport of rugby can do is stop making changes every time it thinks changes are needed.”
“After Covid, salary caps were reduced, they’ve only now been reinstated. People are even now talking about whether they should be raised again, the RFU always say they don’t have enough money, they didn’t support clubs at all during Covid, which is one of my criticisms. To get a bit more money now, clubs have to give up more control. It doesn’t sound like a completely unified game in this country and it’s probably going to feel that way for a while.”
Whether the PGP delivers on the RFU’s objectives will ultimately depend on Borthwick. With all the details of the agreement, with all the individual development plans (IDPs) drawn up for his players, the key will be how he manages his relationships with the clubs to ensure he gets the most out of his players without alienating the directors of rugby. “I had a good relationship with Eddie [Jones] and now Steve,” Sanderson says of the former and current head coach of the England national team. “I’m not always going to get on with everyone and when there are differences of opinion like that, the player is caught in the middle. If Steve isn’t there and I don’t get on with the next head coach of the England national rugby team, that’s my concern.”
The hope is that it will at least no longer be unattractive for clubs to have a number of England internationals in their ranks and that the exodus to France will slow. While Premiership games no longer coinciding with Test weekends will help, the maximum number of appearances a player can make has been reduced to 30, meaning clubs will have to plan when to rest their internationals even before Borthwick tries to tell them exactly when.
And then there’s the British & Irish Lions tour of Australia next summer. There are no strictly prescribed welfare limits for the players selected – which is worrying given that 10 extra games are tacked on to the end of the season – but perhaps more worrying is the Wallabies’ current form. It doesn’t lend itself to the kind of narrative Lions tours need to be successful – that of a newly assembled side travelling to the ends of the earth to take on one of the world’s leading Test sides against all odds.
Selection for the tour will be a season-long affair, starting on Friday at the Rec, where Bath host Northampton. Will Andy Farrell use Finn Russell as his link-up? Perhaps he can be displaced by Fin Smith, who may be 22 but can play with an authority unmatched for his age. More importantly, ticket sales for Friday’s opening game have been slow. This is worrying as the Rec is usually a popular place to be under the floodlights on a Friday night, even more so as it is a repeat of last season’s final.
It gives Bath an early chance to avenge their four-point defeat in June after Beno Obano was sent off in the 21st minute for a dangerous tackle. Whether that sending off ruined the game or brought Bath within a whisker of one of the most famous victories in recent history is debatable, but it is not good for the sport that last season’s Premiership final, Champions Cup final and World Cup final all saw red cards.
These were all correct decisions under the letter of the law, but none of them involved blatant acts of violence. Instead, marginal errors were punished in an era of zero tolerance, against a backdrop of concussion litigation, and at a time when it is increasingly difficult to prioritize safety over spectacle. If only there was an acronym for that.
