Is copying the Prem best way to achieve self-sustainability?

IS the formation of a company “overnight” really the route to salvation for the Championship, as Coventry’s Nick Johnston suggests last week? Or would this aping of the dominant Premiership merely produce yet another schism in an increasingly fragmented game?

At a time when Premiership clubs are struggling financially (even pre-Covid) and increasingly resorting to the wholesale recruitment of, presumably cheaper, foreign players to try and balance their books, do Championship clubs really want to go out on another corporate limb, to create yet another focus for narrow self interest?

My own hope is that the Championship Committee’s low profile policy, which Nick finds incomprehensible, in fact reflects a wish not to risk adversely affecting discussions with the RFU as to how the league can play a fuller and more integrated part in helping to lead the way for English rugby out from under the disproportionate control being exercised by Premiership Rugby under the Professional Game Agreement.

I don’t know that any such discussions are taking place, but I sincerely hope that they are, since that could, in my view, potentially benefit not only the Championship and its clubs, but the whole of the English game.

The biggest question of all, though, is perhaps whether the apparently widely differing views of the Championship clubs can be reconciled in pursuit of any course of action to achieve their essential goal of self-sustainability.

John Allanson Bishop’s Stortford RFC