The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Many hurdles for SRU
It’s at least raised a few eyebrows, and more than a few hackles. But the SRU’s reported interest in acquiring English Premiership side Worcester Warriors has more than a few imposing hurdles to negotiate.
The SRU haven’t confirmed or denied that they are bidders for the club jammed in the gap between the English rugby heartlands of the West Country and East Midlands.
“We never comment on speculation” has been the only official word from Murrayfield.
On the face it, it would seem an imaginative move. Worcester are an established Aviva Premiership club with a fully-formed infrastructure, decent fanbase and a modern stadium, and they’re for sale
Scotland is in need of a third professional team to widen the experience of existing players and also help grow the professional player base.
The price-tag – the Warriors were most recently valued at something short of £10 million – offers significant savings on setting up a third pro team in Scotland, be that in Aberdeen or elsewhere, from scratch.
Those are the practical benefits, but there are significant hurdles as well. First of all, Swindon Town chairman Jed McCrory is apparently still the “preferred bidder”, although his first bid was rejected and he let an exclusive period to table a second bid expire last week. The SRU are thought to be the only other contender.
Primarily, however, the RFU can stop this stone dead. Their current deal with PRL (the umbrella body for pro rugby in England) puts in £200m over eight years to the AP clubs from the enormous profits from Team England.
One suspects they’re at least going to be leery about that cash being used to develop young Scottish talent – indeed they’ve only recently complained to World Rugby about Wales and Scotland, on the lookout for qualified talent, checking birth certificates of players in their club academies.
Also, as part of the deal, AP clubs get more cash for having 17 players out of every matchday 23 being English qualified – the EQP threshold. If this Worcester team is to fulfil the SRU’s vision, it’s going to be very tough to do that.
In addition, the SRU is also going to have to get the approval of its fraternal unions, through the EPRC organisation that runs the European club tournament.
If other nations see the SRU running an English Premiership club as a conflict of interest, they could block access to European competition.
And there are other issues of whether this is really such a good deal for the SRU. Worcester lost £4m last year – all AP clubs with the exception of champions Exeter made a loss – and they haven’t been the most stable outfit in the AP on the field either, suffering several
relegations although usually bouncing straight back up from the Championship.
The SRU paid some attention to taking over London Scottish in the last two seasons but drew back, probably as they felt Championship Rugby wasn’t a competitive enough level.
Worcester are no strangers to playing there either, but there has been growing clamour from within the AP to end promotion and relegation.
Getting this idea past a sceptical Scottish rugby public is yet another matter. The SRU got approval last year at an SGM to seek more outside finance into the professional game, but there’s not been a peep of progress on that front.
Without inward investment, starting a third pro team is completely unaffordable for the Union, even though they are now making an annual profit, turnover is at a healthy £50m, and debut is manageable at just over £5m when once it was four or five times that.
But while most Scottish rugby fans want a third pro team, they will probably draw the line at it being based on enemy territory.
The London Scottish experiment was just about okay, given that club’s rich history and strong connections with Murrayfield, but Worcester in the very heart of Middle England?
The bidding process is due to end this week, and perhaps we’ll have some clarity then.
But some sort of illustration of the SRU’s motives and logic for being in this would be welcomed by puzzled Scottish rugby stakeholders.