‘We have to prioritise professional game’, reiterates Sam

SAM Warburton has doubled down on his claim that the Welsh Rugby Union should prioritise the professional game over grassroots level, suggesting that building “iconic teams” at the top of the sport is the way forward.

After Warren Gatland’s side’s disastrous Six Nations campaign, the former Wales captain gave his take on where the game should go from here, telling the BBC that investment in professional teams should take precedence over spending on grassroots.

While his comments took many by surprise, he maintained that doing so would breed interest in the sport from the top down, with young players given something to aspire to.

Now, Warburton has expanded on his argument and claimed that the WRU must aspire to build “iconic teams” and make rugby “sexy” to generate sustained interest and longterm success.

Appearing on former Scotland international Jim Hamilton’s podcast The Big Jim Show, Warburton doubled down on his previous comments and said young players “ain’t going to care” about rugby unless there are successful professional teams to inspire them.

He added that while grassroots sport cannot be neglected, it is “naive” to think that the focus should be there rather than at the top of the game.

“Maybe naive people will say ‘you’ve got to invest in grassroots,’” he said. “I’m like ‘really?’ Investing in four or five-year-olds now is going to change the game? No. You can try and encourage me to do something, but if I’m not seeing something aspirational at the very top, I’m going to be like ‘what’s the point? Why am I going to bother with this?’

“I’m not saying you neglect grassroots, there should always be a proportion of your turnover which goes to grassroots or goes to community projects. [But] you can go to as many schools as you want, they ain’t going to care if there’s no product to look up to.

“That’s why I think with Welsh rugby, if you’ve got a successful national team and you’ve got successful regions, guess what, all the youngsters watching are going to think ‘this is a pretty sexy sport to play and I want to be that next icon and role model, that’s going to be me.’”

The former British & Irish Lions skipper added that it was watching the successful Cardiff and Wales teams of the 90s and mid-2000s that inspired him to pursue a career in the sport.

Without that same level of success at the top of the sport, he argued, interest will fade with potential stars being lost and the national game’s future put in jeopardy.

He also pointed to the likely impact that England’s World Cup win in 2003 had on a whole generation of future rugby internationals, with children wanting to emulate their heroes.

“That’s what inspired me when I was growing up,” he continued.

“There were good Cardiff teams when Cardiff were in the European Cup final in the late ‘90s, Wales won a Grand Slam in ‘05, I was like ‘I want to be that guy.’ If you haven’t got that success, the bottom of your pyramid is going to get much smaller.

“So when people think it goes bottom-up, you actually reverse it, it comes top-down. I always think you’ve got to invest in your professional game first and foremost.

“Look at England in ‘03, when they won the World Cup, I bet you because they won the World Cup engagement in rugby clubs around the country would have been flying and interest would have been flying.

“How many kids were probably cupping their hands, kicking goals in their local parks because they wanted to be Jonny Wilkinson. You’ve got to build these stars, build these iconic teams, and naturally the interest will follow,” he added.