Test revamp will only widen gap

Rugby’s big wigs are pressing on with their plans to revamp the international game and have a more competitive structure in place by 2020.

They say they want change to invigorate test rugby — have a greater number of games that can’t be deemed “friendlies”. It is, they say, all about giving the fans more reason to buy into the game, to engage with test football in a continuous rather than sporadic form.

Except it’s beginning to feel it’s not about that at all. The proposed revamp — which could see the top 12 teams in the world play each other every season with an in-built playoff process to find a kind of pseudo champion — is maybe all about money.

This presumably won’t come as a great surprise because for the last decade rugby has been chasing the dollar oblivious to what collateral damage is caused along the way.

This relentless desire to have more has been at the expense of player welfare and fan experience. It has been at the expense of supporting the Pacific Islands and in some parts of the world it has been the root cause of internecine warfare between clubs and national unions.

But despite the toll, executives everywhere have bought the more is better philosophy and we have seen greed drive change just about everywhere.

Super Rugby has expanded from 12 teams to 15. The Five Nations has become the Six Nations. The Tri Nations is now the Rugby Championship following the inclusion of Argentina and there is talk of expanding the World Cup to 24 teams in 2023.

The appetite for growth is insatiable and the June and November test windows as the last untouched relics of the amateur age were inevitably going to be subjected to a professional makeover.

In the executives’ perfect world, there would be the potential to expand the windows and then cram more tests into each.

But there genuinely isn’t a spare weekend to be found so instead they have had to come up with a way to get more value out of the same piece of real estate as it were.

Hence they have hit on this notion of creating a sort of world league where the top 12 teams play each other at least once in a calendar year.

The idea is that the Six Nations and Rugby Championship are part of that competition and the June — which by 2020 will be July — and November windows will see the rest of the fixtures played.

The detail is sketchy about how this will actually work but there is nothing vague about the bigger picture: this is a naked attempt to make test football more profitable.

If fans fall in love with it so much the better but the executives don’t feel it’s imperative or even that important for the format to make perfect sense or tick every box.

It’s only important that broadcast and sponsorship revenue jumps. It’s only important that the financial pie gets bigger and the Australians haven’t hidden the fact they are metaphorically salivating at the prospect of bigger test pay-days.

The Australians aren’t alone among the major unions in being desperate for cash, but the big danger of this brave new world being envisioned is that it will quickly become closed and exclusive.

The rich, if they can be called that, will become richer and effectively kill the hopes of those emerging nations hoping to break into the upper echelon.

It feels awfully like it will be a land of the haves and have nots with those nations in the top 12 using their increased wealth to stay in the top 12 and those lower down the rankings finding it almost impossible to break into that elite group.

The likes of Georgia, Samoa, USA, Spain and Russia are all ambitious — they all want to be in the top 12. But if they are not on the gravy train when it leaves the station in 2020, there may be no way to catch it.

What we might see instead is a mechanism for everyone to pretend the game is growing and the new set-up is equitable.

Stand-by, then, for an increasing number of tests between the highest ranked sides to be played in those emerging tier-two nations.

Another test between New Zealand and Ireland on the eastern seaboard of the USA could be on the cards. England playing Argentina at the Nou Camp in Barcelona would be a possibility; France playing in Canada . . . a couple of heavyweights playing in a big football stadium in Germany.

This is the future for the lesser nations — a role as host to the big boys who will say they are doing their bit to spread the rugby gospel but are really on a pillaging mission.

Rugby will seemingly be everywhere but it will be smoke and mirrors and certainly the money won’t be everywhere — it will be heading mostly into the pockets of the major nations.