Could fan power stop Super Lge in rugby?
When football was disappearing into its dark night of the wallet at the start of last week, it seemed a good moment to exhume a longburied philosophical joke and give it an up-to-date twist.
The new version went like this: a club president was at dinner with friends when a genie appeared, offering him a choice between wisdom, beauty and a place in the European Super League worth countless billions. Knowing that the ancient Greeks considered wisdom to be the greatest of virtues, he did not think twice before answering.
After a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder, the president sat, silent and miserable, staring at his food. “What’s the matter?” asked a companion. “I should have taken the money,” he replied.
As things turned out, the six pariahs at the top end of English soccer did things the other way round, choosing the cash before realising that wisdom would have been the better bet.
But the fact remains: professional sport IS all about the money. It pretends to be about other things, but it isn’t really. Not in football, and certainly not in rugby.
Witness the abolition of the Celtic Warriors and the disenfranchising of the long-established Union communities of Bridgend and Pontypridd in 2004; the removal of serious rugby from the Scottish Borders three years later; the All Blacks’ shameless chasing of the dollar from Hong Kong to Chicago; the pauperisation of the Pacific Islands; the continuing desperation of England’s top-flight clubs to end relegation for an extended period – yes, even after the events of the last few days.
The 15-man game has never been slow to look down its noses at football and there were plenty of old-time sneerers and scoffers taking pleasure at the sight of the world’s most popular sport choking on its own entrails.
To which the Super League closedshoppers might legitimately have questioned those who run the Six Nations, the Rugby Championship and the Premiership over their own commitment to open doors, pyramid structures and meritocracies. Equally to the point, it is only seven years since the biggest privately-financed clubs in England and France, backed by television money, led a Heineken Cup palace coup and reshaped the tournament to their own design.
It was amusing, in a bitterly ironic kind of way, to listen to the outpourings of fury from fabulously wealthy ex-professional footballers who condemned the Super League dash for cash as an exercise in purest greed and declared their unshakeable solidarity with marginalised “working class fans”, without acknowledging for a second that skyrocketing ticket prices
“Business types can resist everything except temptation to make yet more moolah”
and wildly overpriced merchandising helped pay their wages back in the day.
Not for the first time, it took a highquality journalist to cut through the nonsense. “This is the inevitable consequence of where we’ve been going for the last 20 years,” said the highlyarticulate and clear-thinking Rory Smith, an old colleague on The Independent, in the course of a stimulating radio debate with Chris Sutton, once the most expensive player in England. “We’ve welcomed the money in, and in the end, money always wants to make more of itself.” Dead right.
Senior figures in Rugby Union, envious of the jeopardy-free American sports model, have been talking about a European Super League for almost as long as the owners of Manchester United and Real Madrid and Juventus have been pondering it in football, and if the financial ravages of the pandemic are still being felt in three or four years’ time, who can say for sure that the owners of Bristol, Bath, Saracens, Racing 92, Toulouse and Lyon won’t consider playing the cosy cartel card?
And if they do, what will stop them? Not fan power – there aren’t enough of them in rugby to generate the level of fuss that forces politicians onto their hind legs – and the ability of sporting regulation to survive its first sight of a courtroom wig has yet to be properly tested.
Rob Andrew, better informed than anyone on this subject having spent long years on both sides of rugby’s club-country divide, said the following five years ago: “The question is not whether the big teams on either side of the Channel will run out of cash and throw themselves on the mercy of their respective governing bodies, but at what point they decide they have enough money of their own to disengage with those bodies in the way Premier League clubs cut the cord with the football establishment back in the early 1990s.”
In commercial terms, which are the terms that matter most nowadays, rugby will never be anything other than football’s toddler-sized brother. But with increasing numbers of digital broadcasters in the market for “live” content and mighty multinationals on the look-out for “sportswashing” opportunities, there is a lot of temptation out there for the oval-ball business elite.
And business types can resist everything except the temptation to make yet more moolah. Which leads us to another elderly philosophical joke acutely relevant to the here and now.
“Would you sleep with me for a million bucks?” “Wow…probably.” “Would you do it for five bucks?” “Hell no, what do you think I am?” “We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”