Rugby risks a dangerous rift if RFU Council cancel relegation

ON Friday the 55 member RFU Council will convene for an online meeting which threatens to trigger English rugby’s second Great Schism. This time the bitter dispute polarising the game is promotionrelegation, whereas the first split in 1895 came when 22 Northern clubs resigned from the RFU over its strict amateur code before setting up Rugby League.

Any optimism that the pandemic would bring about a new spirit of co-operation and working towards the common good in English rugby appears to be a forlorn hope.

Instead, the game is on the precipice of another damaging rift with community clubs asking if the RFU any longer speaks for them. This has been forced by 13 Premiership clubs who are prepared to ride roughshod over the principles on which the league structure was founded by taking the unprecedented step of changing promotionrelegation regulations in midseason.

Unfortunately, it is being reinforced by an RFU management board which appears to be dedicated more to serving the interests of the Premiership than those of the other 1,900 clubs who form the membership of the co-operative society on which the English game has been built over the last 150 years.

The silence from Twickenham over the Premiership’s clear intention to ring-fence the top league is ominous. It points to RFU management board collusion in bringing about the ring-fencing the governing body has refused to countenance since the English league structure was introduced in 1988.

The plan, to allow promotion this season but dispense with relegation, is a cherry-picking exercise which will allow Saracens to return to the Premiership after serving their one-year salary cap relegation.

Scandalously, it might also include permitting the secondplaced club in the Championship – with Ealing Trailfinders the favourites – to buy their way into the Premiership at an asking price of £20m. The next step is to to pull up the drawbridge by introducing a suspension of promotion-relegation for two more years.

It is expected that the RFU management board will ‘instruct’ the RFU Council to rubber-stamp these proposals.

If they are approved, it will allow the 13 (or 14) privately-owned Premiership clubs to become virtual national franchises despite acting entirely in their own self-interest – which includes dismantling a merit based promotion-relegation system that is in the wider interests of the English club game.

The Premiership argument is that match cancellations forced on it by the pandemic, and the danger of clubs going bankrupt, justifies ringfencing. It is claptrap. We were in the middle of the coronavirus crisis when the new season started, and the end of the previous season had already involved cancellations, so every Premiership club knew the landscape when they signed up to a new campaign which included promotion- relegation.

This culture of obfuscation and double-dealing, rather than transparency and clarity, goes to the heart of a growing anger and dissatisfaction among English community clubs with the governance of the game by senior administrators within the RFU, and the Premiership.

The financial carnage caused by the pandemic has affected every club in the English game, not just those in the Premiership.

The difference is that the problems in the Premiership were present well before the pandemic, especially in the broken financial model that saw every club apart from Exeter trading at a significant loss year after year. Most of the problems are player wage inflation.

Yet, the Premiership owners want to run the league as a private fiefdom – but one supported by RFU finance, with their cartel cornering over 60 per cent of the RFU’s funding following the PGA renegotiation in 2016.

To make matters worse, the RFU turn a blind eye to the Premiership financially handicapping the promoted side. And the governing body have handed the keys to the national academy system to the Premiership clubs, giving them control of the young talent produced by England’s community clubs and schools.

Premiership owners claim the risk of relegation stops investment in the sport, and yet most of them have made their money in the business world where risk is a fact of life, and ‘investments can go down as well as up’. Their decision to invest in Rugby Union clubs does not give them the right to total control over the future of the club game in England.

By failing to recognise this, or to provide anything that resembles a clear vision for the future, the RFU leadership is failing the sport.

This is happening at the time when every club in the country knows that the bedrock of the game, which is male participation, has fallen alarmingly at late teenage

and adult level over the last decade. Those clubs know also that despite the recent growth in the women’s game, female participation levels are relatively small, and are unlikely to come close to filling the decline in male numbers.

An uplift can only come through striking the right balance between a vibrant shop window at international and elite club level to inspire youngsters, and a thriving grassroots game that gives them the opportunity to play.

At the moment that balance is fractured, with the RFU management board basing the future of the game on a Premiership cartel which is ring-fencing already through punitive restrictive funding for any promoted side.

Any bounce back post-lockdown is dependent on the RFU offering hope and inspiration to a game in dire straits. This is evident in our report that the Championship, where owners have also invested heavily in clubs, may be reduced to six participants when it restarts in March.

This contrasts starkly with the French club leagues. They are in good shape, sustaining 44 professional clubs in the Top 14, second tier ProD2, and third tier Ligue Nationale, whereas the Championship has been virtually cut off at the knees by the lack of RFU funding – and the pain is shared all the way down the leagues. The duty of the RFU Council is to act in the interests of all its member clubs, not just 13 of them. If it fails in that duty, there is the prospect of another great schism in which there is a split between the community clubs and the Premiership.

This could lead to a new RFU administration cutting the Premiership loose, and restructuring, with the Championship becoming the top league of a merit-based promotionrelegation league system. It would mean the RFU finally being in a position to have central contracts for England international players, and to take back control of the academy system.

The RFU Council has a choice on Friday. It can become fit for purpose by blocking the ring-fence, and calling the Premiership’s bluff. Or it can fold, and watch the cracks in English rugby grow ever wider.