— SRU CHIEF EXECUTIVE MARK DODSON Can investment save pro clubs?

‘Extra investment is required to maintain growth and stay at the top table’

NEXT Friday night could be a watershed moment for Scottish Rugby when chief executive Mark Dodson seeks a rule change which could allow pro clubs Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors to be sold to private investors.

Dodson, who needs the backing of two-thirds of the country’s clubs at the Special General Meeting to proceed, has discovered that — even with BT’s injection of £5million per year — the spiralling costs of professional rugby are proving to be unsustainable.

The SRU tried to attract investors a decade ago but failed. Firstly because of a resistance to hand over sufficient control to interested millionaires and then, when former chief executive Gordon McKie did hand Edinburgh to media entrepreneur Bob Carruthers, a failure to secure a mutuallybeneficial partnership.

Now, however, the potential franchising of the two pro teams is back on the table.

Dodson revealed the SRU would hand over the £10m-plus currently spent on player salaries to any new owners in return for agreements on maintaining a healthy majority of Scottish-qualified players and academies, and releasing players for international duty.

Here, Dodson and chief operating officer Dominic McKay tell

Sportsmail why the time is right to bring private investment into the game and what chances they have of succeeding.

Q: Firstly, why do you need a Special General Meeting, as it was not required when the SRU gave Edinburgh to the Carruthers consortium in 2006?

MARK DODSON: I wasn’t here then and don’t know the details, but if we want to have external investment coming into our pro teams or any part of our business, it’s clearly in the by-laws, so this is what we have to do before we can take the teams to market.

Q: You have been in place for five years, and in the past laughed off suggestions that Scottish rugby needed private investment, so what has changed?

MD: We’ve not had anybody from Scotland who has been remotely interested in coming in and spending that kind of money, so we had to fund it ourselves from the Union, and we have done that successfully from 2012 to 2016. What we are now saying is that inflation in the game is running at such an extent that we see a limit to our ability to earn the amount of money needed to maintain growth and stay at the top table. That’s what has prompted us to look for external investment — that and a global appetite for sports franchises that wasn’t perhaps there four or five years ago.

Rugby is one of the fastest growing team sports in the world. After the Rugby World Cup in 2015, if you look at viewing figures globally, you’ll find that people are taking rugby seriously as a global sport and, as a collision sport, it excites people in different countries perhaps more than it has done before.

So, we’re selling a proposition of two teams in big cities in a league with no promotion or relegation, and we can build sport franchises out from there. People are clearly buying franchises like this all over the world, whether it’s MLB (Major League Baseball), MLS (Major League Soccer) or the English Premier League in football, where four of the West Midlands clubs have all gone to Chinese buyers. If I’d have said that to you five years ago you would have looked at me strangely.

Q: Would the SRU release control of the clubs and how will you guard against the teams being filled with foreign players?

DOMINIC McKAY: The intention is to keep a majority position in equity at both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Now that’s not to say that if we are granted permission to pursue this and we unearth investors who want a majority stake that we’d be blind to that, but the intention is to ensure that the Union retains control of both Glasgow and Edinburgh and has a partner who comes along for the journey to make sure we have the best players, Scottish-based players ideally, into the national team.

The reason we’re doing this is to protect the international team and make sure it is as strong as it possibly can be, being fed by two strong professional clubs, and to grow the game at the grassroots. So if that’s our raison d’etre, then the agreement we have with any potential investor, who would be a partner of ours, would need them to recognise that they have to support the aims of the governing body, which is to deliver quality players into the national teams.

Q: How confident are you that investors will come forward, and from where?

MD: I won’t be hung yet on a figure or a timeline because I don’t know what’s out there. I’m not a betting man but we’re not saying where this will come from — we’ll look globally, simple as that. There have been no informal approaches but we have been researching the market for some time. If we fail, we fail, but I’d rather try than not try.

DMcK: It remains an unbelievably tough sell.