Melville is PRL’s new executive chairman
FORMER England scrumhalf Nigel Melville is the latest former RFU big gun to join Premiership Rugby after being appointed executive chairman of their investor board, The Rugby Paper can reveal.
Melville, 59, left his role as director of professional rugby at the RFU in 2019 but has now resurfaced with the umbrella body of England’s top-flight clubs, where his brief will include looking after the Premiership’s elite in matters such as governance and competitions.
Melville will also have a key role to play in managing the labyrinthine Professional Game Agreement (PGA) with the RFU – a task for which he is ideally suited given the intimate knowledge of the eight-year, £220m deal he gained during his three years spent at Twickenham.
In addition, he will be dealing with the potential ramifications for Premiership Rugby (PRL) of the brain injury litigation that has been enacted by a number of former players.
The Yorkshireman’s appointment comes as part of an owner-led reshuffle at PRL which has seen chief executive Darren Childs have his role redefined. He will now focus solely on the commercial side of the business, leaving all rugby matters to Melville.
Childs, heavily criticised during the Covid-19 crisis
for a lack of visibility, appeared uncomfortable in his previous over-arching role.
Freed of rugby responsibility, however, he has scored an early success by tying up a new £110m, three-year TV deal with BT Sport, while his remit will also see him engaging with CVC in an attempt to maximise returns on their 27 per cent stake.
Melville’s appointment follows a recent pattern of PRL assimilating intellectual knowledge from the RFU, after Ian Ritchie – architect of the current PGA – left English rugby’s governing body in May 2017, only to reappear ten months later as chairman of the top-flight.
In December 2019, Ritchie was replaced in that role by Andrew Higginson, who previously served as a nonexecutive director of the RFU between 2011 and 2016.
Higginson will now work closely with Childs and the club owners as the Premiership battles Covid-19.
The Rugby Paper understands former RFU professional rugby director Rob Andrew was also sounded out for the role taken by Melville – who has already started – while former RFU finance director Nick Eastwood was another to be linked with a senior role in PRL.