Here’s what is essential for the future of professional club rugby union. Paradoxical as it may be, the key remains at the very top end of the sport — international rugby. That’s where the serious money dwells, that’s where the marketing maxes out. That’s where the game — to use one of its borrowed commercial phrases — grows. Without Test rugby there is no professional game.
This week the Premiership set out a future that doesn’t spend too much time thinking about the fit of the international game and the nature of the structural problems it has historically caused for Premiership Rugby. Rather, it considers the NFL and American football, a sport that has benefited enormously from its franchise system. In the world’s most devout capitalist country, there’s even a whiff of socialism in the air when it comes to its national sport.
The poorer a team’s season, the more prioritised the draft pick. It’s a game designed to be as competitive as possible for those within the system. Premiership Rugby likes the idea. It likes the fact that, in the absence of dread that relegation brings, investment should flow. The logical question is a simple one: who would invest in a competition where there is a risk of relegation and potential financial obliteration?
But it isn’t quite this straightforward. American football expanded during the peak years of American power, when capitalism was a religion as well as an economic system. These are very different times. Those charged with protecting the professional club game argue that the challenges of today make the need for a form of protectionism all the more vital. But protectionism doesn’t work. It shrivels the body from within. And that is what Premiership Rugby promises.
The division can grow to 12 or 14 teams only with the advent of clubs who meet the cold-blooded corporate criteria. Financial stability and regional value are more important than the identity and spirit of any team. Professionalism is cut adrift from the rest of the game for the sake of investor stability, which takes away the heart and soul of the game, its lifeblood.
Indian cricket is another cited example. India, like the United States, is a giant country with a vast population of which marketing men and women in Europe can only dream. Test cricket is being challenged by a dumbed-down version of the game, while the US has a triumphant sport all of its own without the burden of it being global. It’s a flawed comparison.
International rugby dominates the sport in every way. It already has its championship in the southern hemisphere, its various tours, the revered Six Nations and — above all — the World Cup. These are the peaks of the sport. In the US, there is no such sporting mountain range. NFL is the elite. Win the Super Bowl and you are the best team in the world. Hype on!
We have lived through a combination of 20th and 21st-century marketing. It is an age with a commitment to consumerism, the likes of which we are unlikely to witness again. Those who run the NFL control a massive and unique sporting product. It makes American football a great cultural studies subject for academia but not any sort of template for the future of rugby union.
We look worlds and economies apart for inspiration when the greatest success story of this rugby century lies just across the Channel. France has a thriving professional club game. It is driven by rivalry, by promotion, by relegation, by the fear of the drop and the possibility of rising — like Exeter Chiefs — through the ranks. The crowds are larger than ever. The ambition, the spread of the game, is greater than we have seen.
France missed out on winning their home World Cup and, yes, they keep blowing one game a year in the Six Nations, but they are now a rugby nation always there or thereabouts at the top of the Test-match tree. It would be no surprise if they were to win the World Cup in 2027, which would ignite the sport even more.
The Test team feed the appetite for the club game, while the clubs offer France ready-made excellence from teams such as Toulouse and Biarritz. Yes, the salary cap is advantageous to the French clubs but how does England improve its financial position? By copying alien sports based in utterly foreign cultures or by taking a hint from the most successful rugby country — financially and corporately — a hop and skip away? English club-rugby thinking is too short-termist.
The Premiership knows that having ten teams is inadequate. We are tied to a system in which 40 per cent of teams make the play-offs and none fear relegation. The so-called “run-in” is more like a trot in the park. Same faces, same teams, same same.
There is an immediate opportunity to grow the game, by offering the laurel branch to three or four Welsh clubs. To strengthen England’s regional rival by bringing it into a tournament that generates crowds and passion is to help a national team whose decline is a threat not only to Wales itself but to the international game in the northern hemisphere. Rugby union’s great strength, compared with rugby league, is the global spread of seriously competitive nations. Union cannot afford to lose countries such as Wales, but the connection is not being made.
The Six Nations and World Cups fuel the interest of the game; that creates, in itself, the potential for more players, more spectators. A club game in one of the most significant rugby countries on the planet has to connect with the established powers that be. Daydreaming about franchises as a panacea for the game’s problems generates optimistic headlines but has all the depth of thinking one would expect from the present American president.
