ON THE BACK FOOT
Rugby is lagging behind in terms of its pandemic planning … and with good reason
PROJECT RESTART has seen the Premier League easily reclaim its place as the prime entertainment for tens of thousands of Irish consumers.
The GAA has generated tremendous excitement with the announcement of dates and fixtures for radically altered 2020 championships in football and hurling.
There has been the attendant controversy, too, but it has contributed to the sense that sport is central to the resumption of life as we once knew it – for a time, at least.
There remain significant wrinkles to smooth out in efforts to get the domestic soccer leagues going again, but they are still planning to be back by the end of the month.
That leaves one of Ireland’s three dominant field sports to consider – and rugby appears some way away from anything resembling its old prominence.
Plans remain for inter-provincial matches in the Aviva Stadium in August, but contingencies for the Pro14 league, the European Cup and the Test game are necessarily qualified by the complications of international travel, quarantines, restrictions on mass gatherings and the latent dread of second surges of the coronavirus.
Efforts continue to get matches under way, but the international dimension looks very vulnerable.
And just to complicate things, Ireland’s professional players are in talks with the IRFU over pay cuts.
The problems confronting rugby, on this island and beyond, are extensive.
DOMESTIC AFFAIRS
What is remarkable in the history of professional rugby in Ireland is how well everyone has mostly got along.
Since the 1999 World Cup, which served as the last, miserable stand for the old way of doing business, and the dawning of a recognition that professionalism demanded a different approach, the IRFU have got an awful lot right.
That is worth remembering at a time when they are under enormous pressure and making some uncharacteristically panicky calls.
One of those was certainly letting a newspaper run with a story of planned 20 per cent pay cuts for players at a time when Rugby Players’ Ireland, the players’ representative body, thought that serious discussions had still to begin. Non-playing IRFU staff have been subjected to cuts of 20pc, and while players know they must feel some pain – the deferral arrangement quickly agreed between the union and players in March ran out on June 30 – they were furious with what they saw as an attempt to bounce them into an agreement.
A statement confirming their disappointment with the IRFU move quickly followed, and since then there have been several rounds of discussions.
The soundtrack to this has been provided by dire warnings from the IRFU chief executive, Philip Browne about the state of the union’s finances.
Irish rugby looked in remarkably good order at the start of this season. A year ago, they announced record revenues of €87.5 million, but within months, with the cancellation of a home Six Nations match against Italy, followed by the Pro 14 and European rugby, the summer tour to Australia and, inevitably, the November series of Tests, there were grave warnings of an existential threat to the game.
This was despite the strong financial position of the union before the crisis, as well as an immediate payment of €5.5m as part of the €33.5m the IRFU will receive following the sale of 28 per cent of the Pro14 to CVC, a private equity firm, in May.
The remainder of that money will be paid over the next three years. The IRFU will also share up to €40m in Government funding with the GAA and the FAI as part of the State’s support to an industry left reeling by the pandemic.
While the loss of revenue to the union as a result of rugby’s suspension is serious, the financial strength of an organisation that is debt-free is a factor in the current negotiations, with the RPI given access to the IRFU accounts.
While agreement is expected eventually between the two sides, the crisis will inevitably lead to change in how the business of rugby is done in Ireland. Specifically, Browne acknowledged that the reliance on gate receipts from filling the Aviva Stadium must be lessened.
‘We can’t continue to operate on the basis of being dependent on the number of people we get through the stadium door and the ticket price we charge,’ he said.
‘In the case of the Aviva stadium it is 51,000 (the capacity of the ground), that’s as big as it gets.
‘You can’t make it bigger and there is only so much elasticity in ticket prices that the public will bear.
‘So, we have to find new and additional sources of revenue.’
PRO 14
One of the most impassioned – and unconvincing – defences of the Celtic League model was given by Felipe Contepomi in the early summer of 2008.
Leinster won the competition with a hammering of the Dragons in the RDS on Saturday, May 3 that year. A week earlier, Munster had won a famous European Cup semi-final against Saracens in Coventry, and within a month they would win the final for a second time.
Comparisons between Leinster and Munster were irresistible in those days and, for the former, they were not flattering.
But that evening in south Dublin after the win over the smokeless Dragons, Contepomi tried to insist that winning the league was an achievement deserving of consideration alongside any European success.
Nobody believed it then, and nor do they now. Europe remains the measure of success for the provinces, with the league consistently utilised for giving games to younger players, squad members and as a way of introducing front-rank stars recuperating from injury or tuning up after being away with Ireland.
The interprovincial derbies generate large crowds, and organisers pluckily push games and rivalries that, outside of local derbies, struggle to generate wider attention.
Issues around competitiveness and the dire quality of many of the teams were raised long before lockdown saw all sport suspended.
Now, the short-term ambition remains re-starting the competition, with two rounds of derbies over the final two weeks in August, followed by semi-finals, with the final in midSeptember.
However, one enormous complication could be the quarantine restrictions applied in many countries, including this one.
Fears about a resurgence of the virus is leading to concerns about foreign travel, with Ireland’s plans to ease quarantine restrictions here from July 9, for instance, expected to be significantly revised.
This is a problem for all transnational sporting competitions but last week Martin Anayi, the Pro 14 chief executive, told the Business Post that discussions were ongoing with governments on the issue.
‘There is some alignment happening in terms of easing restrictions,’ he said. ‘A relaxing of the distancing, and that’s really important to our teams.’
In such a quick-shifting environment, though, circumstances can change in a matter of hours.
EUROPE
The board of European Professional Club Rugby confirmed dates for the knock-out stages of its competitions last week, but detail was vague.
European Cup quarter-finals are fixed for the weekend of September 18 to 20, with the semi-finals a week later and the final, still planned for Marseille, on Saturday October 17.
Leinster are due to play Saracens in Dublin in the last eight, while Ulster are away to Toulouse.
Tournament organisers said ‘exact’ venues, dates and kick-off times would be announced in the ‘near future’, but they are at the mercy of the virus and its reach.
Ambitions to play games with fans in attendance may officially remain, but the prospect looks remote.
A fresh complication, and one that applies to the Pro14, too, is the particular attention paid to foreign travel over the past week.
Public health officials here, and in other countries, have raised the volume on warnings around the dangers it presents, and there are similar reservations around large crowds among Irish officials.
As plans to restart Irish rugby next month gather a tentative kind of momentum, the situation is much less clear in Europe’s big two countries, England and France.
While the pay impasse between the IRFU and its players is a rare example of industrial tension in the Irish game, the Covid19 pandemic has triggered a fresh row in the long-running hostilities within the English game.
Clubs have implemented swingeing cuts, which led to talk last month of a players’ strike.
That did not materialise, and instead star names have either had to accept drops in pay of up to 25 per cent, or else refuse and leave their clubs.
Manu Tuilagi of Leicester is the most famous name in the latter category, but most of England’s biggest names have accepted reduced terms.
This is, in large part, due to the absence of a Plan B. The Top 14 cancelled their season, while their clubs are also making painful financial readjustments in light of the crisis.
And that means the traditional lucrative option of a move to France for star players is currently not available.
If the European season is indeed completed, then teams like Saracens and Toulouse have enough residual quality to compete. But in the longer-term, the financial effects of the pandemic, on top of the domestic scandal that has relegated Saracens, will reshape the European game dramatically. And that could end up benefiting Ireland’s provinces, provided they can endure the tough months ahead.
THE TEST GAME
World Rugby’s council was to meet this week to finalise plans for autumn fixtures and rescheduled games.
The meeting was postponed to allow time for more discussions between unions and clubs over not only the completion of games for 2020, but also a more ambitious – and much more contentious – desire to reshape the entire rugby calendar.
This is part of a plan to align the schedules of the northern and southern hemispheres.
This is with a view, at least in part, to strengthening the commercial attractiveness of the sport, but any change that would threaten the calendar slot or structure of the Six Nations would meet with resistance – almost certain to be led by Ireland.
Browne has recently rejected the notion of relegation from the Six
Nations, and that is a stance shared by his peers.
These are matters of restructuring the game, but the desperation for cash throughout the sport means getting Test games played in the autumn is the priority.
Nothing remains certain, but the latest speculation was an expansion on the plan for a November Six Nations. The new idea would see the Six Nations teams joined by Japan and Fiji.
The eight teams would split into two groups of four, with matches played on November 14, 21, and 28, and a final between the two pool winners contested on December 5.
It has the virtue of novelty, but it also reflects the urgent need among countries for matches of some stripe to be played.
Australia, South Africa and Japan were due to come to Dublin for autumn Tests, but the southern hemisphere teams will not travel.
In the absence of the paydays guaranteed for all Six Nations teams by the visits of the big three from the south, alternative ways of making some money had to be found.
There will be no full houses for any of these games, and the presence of crowds of any description will be determined by public health considerations.
However, they will bring in some cash through broadcast agreements and, while it will be way down on what a visit from the world champions to a heaving Lansdowne Road would guarantee, something beats nothing. These are hungry days.