Picamoles move will turn Premiership into the wild west

League cannot afford to enter an arms race of spiralling transfer fees and soaring wages

This has been another fantastic season for English rugby. The Aviva Premiership continues to establish itself as the best league in the world, producing attractive, competitive matches, full houses and young talent such as Ellis Genge and Joe Marchant.

Yet while everybody is happy that the sun is currently shining, there are clouds on the horizon. Before the season began I picked Louis Picamoles as the signing of the season and I don’t think anyone would dispute the France No8 has been a sensation for Northampton. He is exactly the type of A-list superstar that the league wants to attract to put bums on seats.

But now Montpellier want to buy him out of his three-year contract, which in all probability would mean paying a seven-figure sum in compensation. Effectively he would become rugby’s Trevor Francis, the first £1million transfer.

That sets a dangerous precedent in two ways. First, transfer fees are rare in rugby. Clearly they happen – Bath did not do a straight swap of Freddie Burns for George Ford. But the more it happens, the less players will respect their contracts.

Already we have seen the examples of Carl Fearns trying to renege on his deal to join Gloucester from Lyon, Denny Solomona quitting Castleford to cross codes to Sale and the strange case of Johan Goosen ‘retiring’ from Racing 92 at 24, supposedly with a view to joining Montpellier. Now there are reports that Picamoles has signed a precontract to join Montpellier even before any negotiations have commenced with Northampton.

It is like the wild west, where agents and players are riding roughshod over their employers. If agents believe they can get away with breaking a contract then it would be naive to think that more and more will not start chancing their arm.

The second threat is that it will spark an arms race that I do not think the Premiership can afford. I have written before about the dangers of emulating the French Top 14, which pays far more money for an inferior product and a national team who struggle because of the number of foreigners in their league.

At the moment, the Premiership has got the right balance of a sprinkling of A-list superstars with domestic talent. Will Picamoles’s proposed transfer encourage other clubs to start flashing the cash? And what will be the knock-on effect?

As good as the Premiership is, I worry it is not sustainable in the long term. When only two teams, Exeter and Northampton, can return a profit in the last financial year that is a clear sign that everything is far from rosy.

A lot of stems from the decision to raise the salary cap, which will be £7million from next season. Clearly this was done because certain clubs were abusing the old system. Yet rather than punishing those clubs, the Premiership raised the overall ceiling. Good players will always be paid well but it is average players who are benefiting the most from the raised cap, being paid far more than they are worth.

The main consequence is that wage inflation has put the majority of clubs under a huge amount of stress. Unless you have a very generous or foolish benefactor to underwrite losses then you are

When only two clubs return a profit it is a clear sign that everything is far from rosy

going to be in trouble unless you run a tight ship, as Exeter do.

At the moment, the scales are finely balanced. All it would take is for a sponsor or television company to pull out of a deal for it all to come tumbling down. There is no reason to think that BT or Sky would pull the plug, but the sponsorship situation is worrying. The Premiership is losing Aviva as its headline sponsor at the end of this season. So, too, the Six Nations with RBS. The Champions Cup has struggled to find partners. That is not a healthy market and certainly not a time to inflate wages.

To ensure the long-term sustainability of the league, there needs to be a pause to the rise in the salary cap and potentially the introduction of a Financial Fair Play-style rule to link spending to turnover or, better, to profitability.

With mouthwatering play-off matches this weekend, there is so much to feel positive about in English club rugby. But Picamoles’s proposed transfer demonstrates the dangers ahead and if this brand of player power is not checked then the Premiership could find itself on the road to ruin.