Build a league that won’t leave players stranded
Anumber of United Rugby Championship teams got themselves stuck in South Africa after the Omicron variant of Covid was first spotted down there. The question is, what on earth were they doing there in the first place?
The URC has always seemed to me to be a totally flawed project, and just another attempt to make a credible league for the Celtic nations’ teams. It is much easier to make a viable league in France and England where there are enough teams with historic roots and longstanding enmities all in a single country, but it should have been possible to make an Irish, Scottish and Welsh league work.
The Welsh have never managed to create identities for their regions that make fans want to go out and watch them. Similarly, you can understand why the Scots would want teams in their major population areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh, even if it meant that the Borders, a proper rugby hotbed, effectively got ditched. The result is that Celtic rugby is now essentially Test match-centric, with the Principality Stadium and Murrayfield selling out, but not enough fans wanting to watch rugby week in and week out.
In Ireland, the clubs focus on European competition and often turn out weakened sides in their league to save their top players for the Champions Cup. Because of central contracts, their players are away for long spells, which is effectively thumbing their nose at supporters!
When the Pro 12 wasn’t working, they invited the Italians in: why? As if flying from Dublin to Cardiff or Edinburgh enough of a hassle for supporters, add in even longer flights to northern Italy, and when that proved not to have worked, why not bring in the South Africans from 6,000 miles away! Each time they changed the format, or expanded the league, there was over-thetop marketing-speak about how great it was going to be, but it has never delivered.
With climate change and then Covid, didn’t anyone stop to think about whether long-haul flights were a smart move, and besides, how many fans were ever going to travel to South Africa to follow the Celtic sides? Of course, the South African diaspora in the north will make the short trips to watch their teams, but is that really a reason for setting up the URC?
In addition, they’ve never really ‘got’ how a proper league works. As soon as you go away from each team playing every other team home and away, the league is devalued, and fans are bright enough to spot that. They know that the integrity of the competition has gone, and are less likely to fork out to go and watch games.
It is as if real live fans have been totally side wasn’t lined, probably making them even more likely to restrict their rugby viewing to Test matches. The knock-on effect is that the Champions Cup, one of the jewels in northern hemisphere rugby, is likely to see its Round One matches being contested by much-weakened teams.
There is only one answer to this conundrum, and it is the same one that has existed from the start: a league of ten teams – four Irish, four Welsh and two Scottish – playing in a proper league with 18 rounds, and then some sort of play-offs.
But, I hear you say, they tried that before and it didn’t work. Correct, but try it again, and make it work this time around, because it’s the only logical solution – Covid isn’t going away anytime soon, so build a league that won’t leave players stranded 6,000 miles from home.
With 18 rounds there will be room for fallow weekends which is what the Celtic nations will want.
If the people doing the marketing can’t make this work, then get some different ones in, and then stick to the proper league format with no tinkering for the foreseeable future – if they do that my hunch is that the fans will eventually take to it.