Cut salaries, cut matches and solve north-south divide
In an 11-month season, how are you supposed to peak for big games?
THERE was a huge reaction across the game after Mike Brown and Joe Marchant told The Mail on Sunday last week that the game was boring and in need of serious surgery. We canvassed opinion from top figures in the game to see what should be done on the big issues facing Sir Bill Beaumont in his second term as World Rugby chairman. Our man WILL KELLEHER spoke to former Saracens CEO Edward Griffiths, Northampton flanker Tom Wood, Worcester director of rugby Alan Solomons, France defence coach Shaun Edwards, Wales coach Wayne Pivac, Exeter boss Rob Baxter and a leading rugby TV broadcaster...
FINANCES
EDWARD GRIFFITHS: Club rugby in England and France has been driven by a small band of wealthy individuals. They’ve propelled the game to where it is today, but that era has passed. The model has to change.
Player salaries should be linked to commercial revenue. In the last five years the salaries of the top 100 Premiership players have doubled or trebled. That’s completely unsustainable.
The Premiership salary cap is £7million plus two marquee players. It should decrease.
Maybe the cap goes higher, but the English game would be well advised to maximise revenue, work out a sensible percentage that goes on salaries, divide it by 12 and that’s your salary cap.
If 60 per cent of the revenue the clubs make together is £70m, for example, then dividing that by 12 the cap becomes just under £6m with no marquees.
With private equity and CVC [the company who have bought a share in the Premiership], it’s far too soon to suggest that their influence on rugby will be positive. CVC have one aim — to make money. Rugby shouldn’t just sell the family silver to venture capital, instead they should come up with a viable model and cut costs.
TOM WOOD: Personally, I’d be fine with being paid, say, 25 per cent less to play fewer games per season. You’d get a lower salary, but your career would last longer, so you could earn more over a longer period, the games would mean more and possibly generate more income because there would be more of a clamour to watch them with fewer played.
TV BROADCASTER: CVC have underestimated the fiefdoms in rugby and how much amateurism is left in the ‘professional’ era. They think they can bring everyone together so easily but nobody does squabbling like rugby.
THE CALENDAR
WOOD: Players crack on, but the structure of rugby is a bit of a mess. I can’t complain because it makes me money, but rugby dilutes everything so you end up with fewer special spectacles.
It all overlaps because they’re trying to fit everything on top of each other and nobody wants to give up any ground, or access to players. I’m not complaining, as I love rugby, but the amount of weeks I just get through with my body falling to pieces. My game is based on attrition — I’ll make 20 tackles, hit 30 rucks and make 10 carries a game — so Sundays and Mondays are a write-off. You’re in pieces. It’s like a car-crash.
If you’re Courtney Lawes, Maro Itoje or Owen Farrell what do you peak for, with the World Cup, European Cup, Premiership, Test matches and Lions tour?
In an 11-month season I don’t know how you’re supposed to physically or mentally peak for the big games. ALAN SOLOMONS: We should create a nine-month season with total alignment between the hemispheres, and not play in December, January and February.
Have Christmas and New Year with families and a season between March and November.
For six months play domestic and cross-border competitions in an uninterrupted window. So the likes of Premiership, Pro14, Top14, European Cups, Super Rugby, Currie Cup between March and August. Every Test match player would be available, lifting the level of competition.
Then a three-month Test window between September and November, and alongside those not involved play domestic cup competitions to develop the next generation. That moves the Six Nations, but opens up the prospect of a Nations Championship — which doesn’t have to be every year, like the Lions tour.
Rugby is not a global game. The Nations Championship will help.
Japan need access to a competition, USA is a massive superpower economically to involve. The Pacific Islands? Relaxing eligibility laws would allow them to field potent teams.
Good coaching, proper financing and access to their players — with no club clashes — will help Fiji, Tonga and Samoa become real threats at World Cups.
SHAUN EDWARDS: I wouldn’t move the northern hemisphere game to the summer. Rugby
league did it and people like my dad find the winters so long. The fans are key to the game, and a winter game means interesting tactical adaptations. WAYNE PIVAC: If we lose some rugby it can’t be Test matches as that’s what brings in the most money.
GRIFFITHS: The future of it is realigning hemispheres, so Australia and New Zealand look north to Asia and Japan, and South Africa look north to Europe. It’s not inconceivable to see the big South African franchises following the Cheetahs and the Southern Kings into Europe, and the Six Nations becoming the Seven Nations with the Springboks joining.
THE LAWS
ROB BAXTER: Rugby has a desire to continually tinker, thinking there is some sort of better game out there. We’re good at making it virtually impossible to understand.
We make it harder to officiate, harder for players to be good at what they do as the parameters keep changing, and impossible for anyone other than a dedicated watcher of the game to understand the laws quickly.
I struggle to understand the desire to de-power mauling and scrummaging and discard bigger players. People have a massive misconception that if you lose well-contested mauls and scrums smaller players will have more input — they’ll have less, and hybrid players will rule.
Rugby is not boring. In the last five Premiership seasons lots of points and tries have been scored.
Not many games are decided by defending and kicking the ball long. We don’t need to create a game with more tries — that would be a boring, onedimensional sport.
EDWARDS: Stop people latchingon before contact in attack. We see so many tries now from multiple pick-and-goes, with players forming a ‘flying wedge’ by binding together before contact — you’re not supposed to do it. Outlawing that we’d see teams playing off 10 and passing the ball in the 22 more. That would be more exciting.
Union has always been a collision game, but it should be one-on-one, not three on one. This change would stop tacklers getting injured as much too.
The idea to introduce a 50-22 kick, where the attacking team get the throw at a lineout if they kick the ball from their own half and it bounces into touch in the opposition’s 22, would bring more creative kicking and fewer boxkicks from scrum-half — which take far longer to set up than the five seconds supposedly allowed!
The game isn’t boring, it’s great. We’ve never had as many points scored in matches as now — you get 30 or 40 points in some and hardly any 9-6 scores.
TV & MEDIA
TV BROADCASTER: Rugby is quite niche. Live terrestrial Six Nations games can get eight to 10 million viewers but for Premiership matches on BT Sport a good number is high 200,000s — vastly up on what Sky Sports used to get, though. Having around seven UK broadcasters is bananas for a small sport. Everything’s so disjointed.
We need to engage with the players way more, be able to tell their stories and get people to care about them. Too many are told not to show their character.