Six Nations, just like the Lions, risks destroying what makes it so special
Taking one of sport’s most prized events away from mass viewers on free-to-air TV and selling it to the highest bidder will not grow the game but damage its legacy
One measure of an event’s appeal is whether people with no great interest in the sport itself tune into the event, through ritual and instinct. Every year, a mass of floating TV viewers do this for the Six Nations Championship because they know what they will get to relieve the long slog through winter.
And what they “get” is combat, passion, unpredictability, physical self-sacrifice and the purity of six sporting nations taking each other on in a formula that resists life’s other baffling changes. You would have to be crackers to mess with it.
The same goes for British and Irish rugby’s other prime attraction: the Lions tour. But guess what? The Six Nations and Lions are both being messed about in a way that makes you wonder whether rugby’s governance has entered a death spiral.
Most easy to spot is a familiar contradiction between guardianship and deal-making. Many sports governing bodies are really “money chasers” with inconvenient governance duties attached. They measure themselves by how many deals they can cook up. “Growing the game” is often a cover for selling chunks of a sport to the highest bidders. Shaking the money tree is the raison d’etre.
The Six Nations is embedded in our psyche in a way CVC Capital Partners understands only too well. But the measuring stick is not the tournament’s emotion or identity. If a great sporting event in the depths of winter can be so popular, CVC would ask, why is it not worth more? Why is the brand not being sweated like a tighthead prop in a desert marathon?
Rugby, which has pursued the myth of an undiscovered gold mine since it went professional, is attacking itself with gusto, undermining cherished traditions on the road to El Dorado. Next summer’s Lions tour of South Africa has been trimmed to eight games and will start one week after the end of the Premiership final – scheduled for June 26 – which England’s hubristic clubs refuse to move on. Trust me, you have to be pretty creative to damage the Lions – as with Premier League football, where the video assistant referee has found a way – but somehow rugby has managed to treat them as an imposition.
Of course, the game has to finance itself, especially after committing £220million to Championship clubs over eight years: a figure that turned out to be unrealistic, thus necessitating cuts at a time when the country’s No1 club, Saracens, were being relegated from the top tier for salary-cap violations. You can see where this is heading.
The row about whether parts of the Six Nations Championship should be sold to Sky or Amazon – or whoever – is really a microcosm of the deluded belief that “revenue” is more important than roots and visibility.
Of all the big sporting carnivals, the Six Nations is up there with the Open and Wimbledon as one of the most coherent. It should not make the mistake therefore of thinking CVC is offering the Six Nations £370million just for a 15 per cent share of the commercial income and a seat at the table, where it will sit ever-so-’umbly while the blazers preserve sacred customs.
Private equity firms do not donate to sport; they are not here for the beer. They spot undervalued “brands” and change the structure, purpose and essence to gouge a return on their “investment”.
Nothing wrong with that, you might say, in most fields of business. But sport is not “most fields of business”. You have only to watch players crying during the anthems or observe swarms of fans mixing happily in Paris, Dublin or Edinburgh to know the Six Nations possesses a special magic.
What we need to see is the terms on which CVC has agreed to buy a stake. How much influence will it really have? A clue is this lurch towards pay TV (the Six Nations has been free-to-air since 2002). This is just the start.
The cricket parallel is not wholly accurate. There was no free-to-air station willing to broadcast five days of Test cricket or, indeed, 50-over matches. Rugby still has the BBC and ITV desperate to broadcast Six Nations games. As
Martin Johnson, England’s World Cup-winning captain, told the Daily Mail: “I have a lot of friends who don’t watch any other rugby, but they love the Six Nations. It’s part of their sporting calendar. There are certain things that are very traditional, that people have watched all their lives.”
True. Beyond TV packaging, though, we see a sport willing to stage autumn internationals at Twickenham at 8pm on a Saturday night (England v Argentina, Nov 14), flirt with the idea of adding South Africa to the Six Nations roster while denying Georgia and other European nations. We see a game beset by concussion rates that have risen for seven consecutive seasons and shocking injury counts caused partly by dramatic body-mass increases.
If this sounds like a demolition of rugby union, it is not meant to be. The aim is to illustrate how a sport can self-destruct if it violates what made it cherished in the first place.
The Six Nations could be about to throw a brick through its own shop window.