Retaining marquee men could have dire ripple effect

COLIN Boag is right to flag up the potentially massive loophole in the new Premiership salary cap rules represented by provisions for marquee player exemptions.

This not only distorts the supposedly level playing field in favour of wealthier clubs, but encourages all clubs to continue to live beyond their means. This in turn means they will continue to fight tooth and nail to retain the massive subventions from the RFU, inevitably restricting the availability of funding for community rugby – both in terms of club facilities and central administrative support.

A further, inevitable knock-on effect of this is that the RFU’s ability to afford the kind of revenue sharing with tier two nations, proposed by Dan Leo and rightly widely supported across the game, is seriously constrained.

Any prospects of a more equitable spreading of the limited revenues available to the game of rugby globally depend fundamentally on a less blinkered and parochial view being taken by those currently with a stranglehold on cashflows in tier one countries.

In England this is the Premiership clubs and, while they may claim this merely reflects their support for the national side, this must increasingly come into question, as the flood of imported players continues unabated.

With players like Quins’ Andre Esterhuizen quoted in last week’s paper, stating that England is the best place for him to achieve his goal of getting back into the Springboks’ set-up, it is not just a question of opportunities for English players being lost.