Kick ring-fencing into touch once and for all and cut wages instead

THE price of freedom in Rugby Union, as with freedom in a wider context, is eternal vigilance. Nothing underlines this more than the Premiership ringfencers mobilising again for another big push aimed at ending promotion and relegation, and creating a monopoly at elite level for specific clubs.

Their strategy is to bypass the rugby public, avoiding open debate by concentrating their attentions solely on upper echelon administrators in this sport.

This time the plan is a concerted stealth attack aimed at persuading decision-makers within the RFU administration to abandon their established position of support for a meritocratic, aspirational English club structure in favour of a powerplay by a handful of owners who want their investment in this sport to be protected for good.

The key RFU administrators targeted by the ring-fencers are chief executive Stephen Brown, who is an ardent Bath supporter, and Nigel Melville, their director of professional rugby, and a former rugby director at Gloucester and Wasps.

The most recent ruse by a group of Premiership club owners surrounds the protectionist ‘P’ shares issued to the clubs in the top league in the early days of professionalism. There are 13 clubs with P shares, the 12 currently in the Premiership, and Bristol, who are in the Championship but are odds-on finally to win promotion back to the top tier this season.

The aim of the owner cabal is to control the entire allocation, and explains the £10 million offer made to relegationthreatened London Irish for their P shares reported in The Times this week. Their objective is then to ring fence the ‘new’ Premiership, including Bristol, at 12 clubs, with London Irish – whose recent call for investors outlined their financial difficulties – cut adrift to face life in the Championship.

The bid was rejected point-blank by London Irish chairman Mick Crossan, who vowed never to sell. However, the backing of Stephen Lansdown, the financial services billionaire who is the majority shareholder in Bristol Rugby (and Bristol City), makes their inclusion in the Premiership a much more attractive proposition than not only beleaguered London Irish, but also any other aspiring Championship club.

The danger is that the idea of pulling up the drawbridge once Bristol gain promotion has coincided with mollifying noises about the need for ‘the professional model to work’ coming from Twickenham.

When Brown was asked last month whether the RFU were still in favour of promotion and relegation he hedged his bets. “It hasn’t changed, but that doesn’t mean it won’t in future. The world is evolving constantly and we should always keep an open mind.”

Brown added that, “the dynamics are changing, we’re trying to fit the season together, and we need to look at the whole range of impacts on professional clubs and players, whether they be in the Premiership or Championship.”

There were no specifics from Brown as to what the impacts in question were, and how they were affected by promotion-relegation, and yet he added: “There is clearly a need to keep an eye on that. If it is to change and it is for the benefit of the professional game overall, then why would we close our mind to it?”

Here are a few factors relating to promotion-relegation that the RFU and the Premiership ringfencers should also not close their minds to.

The first is that there is not a ring-fenced league in Rugby Union that is thriving, or gets close to attracting the crowds or generating the atmosphere and income that exists in the promotion-relegation Premiership, or its equivalent in France, the Top 14.

With its shrinking crowds and dwindling TV audience the one-time Super Rugby showpiece in the Southern Hemisphere has highlighted the dangers of a ring-fenced tournament which lacks a truly competitive structure based on merit, and reward, and is constantly fiddling with its format. The same applies to the PRO14, where many of the drawcard Irish, Welsh, and Scottish internationals sit out large sections of the domestic club season.

Let’s also dispense with the balderdash constantly trotted out that relegation stops Premiership teams playing expansive rugby, or that it has contributed to this season’s poor showing in the European Cup.

Only one team goes down, and this season since about round six, London Irish have been stuck at the foot of the table. Though competitive, the Irish have struggled to get the wins required to make them anything other than favourites for the drop, so the idea that every club is hamstrung by fear of relegation is far-fetched.

A much more plausible explanation is that the rampant wage inflation for socalled marquee players in every Premiership club has backfired. With a bigger percentage of the increased salary cap of £7m being cornered by star players the rest of the pot is smaller, and squads have shrunk while the pressures of injury and burn-out have grown. Meanwhile, the lack of investment in the Championship, and therefore clubs thriving in a genuine second professional league such as the ProD2 in France, is a blot on the RFU landscape.

There are strong signals that the RFU are complicit in plans to shunt the Championship even further down the pecking order through the advancement of the Premiership A league. This despite the evidence this season that many Premiership clubs are unable to put out enough players to fulfil their intermittent A league fixtures.

Rather than presenting promotionrelegation as the genesis of their problems, the RFU and the ring-fencing cabal should turn their attention to the unsustainable wage bills and cockeyed management of resources that have pushed most Premiership clubs into the red.

“With its shrinking crowds the onetime Super Rugby showpiece has highlighted the dangers of a ringfenced tournament”