It’s time to rethink a British and Irish League
The best we can say for the United Rugby Championship is that the revamped tournament is having a near-life experience: eyes blinking and muscles twitching, its breath weak but just about audible. Whether it survives the acid test of early spring, when the Celts find themselves schlepping all the way to South Africa for a weekend’s thud and blunder, is by no means clear.
Meanwhile, the English Premiership churns along in its half-fat state after sacrificing all forms of competitive jeopardy on the altar of pounds, shillings and pence. What slogans might our fragrant Prime Minister, who is said to enjoy his rugby, use to describe the state of the domestic game in these islands? “Levelling down” sounds about right. “Building back worse”? Even better, so to speak.
A governing class blessed with even the faintest trace of imagination would be thinking of the best ways to reshape the sport for the post-pandemic age: structurally, commercially, every which way. But as we are only too aware, rugby’s rulers are hostage to their own vested interests and have all the vision of the England midfield circa 2015, when Brad Barritt and Sam Burgess thought the “A” in “A-game” stood for agoraphobia.
Happily, this doesn’t mean that the rest of us shouldn’t come up with a notion or two. Here’s one for starters: a British and Irish League.
Strictly speaking, this is a reheated idea rather a freshly-minted one. It has been aired more than once over the last dozen years, most recently in the summer of 2019 when the private equity firm CVC were looking to increase their investment in the sport.
But things have happened since then, most of them serving to undermine the Premiership’s claim to be the strongest domestic league in the world (a deeply questionable assertion, even at the best of times). The French have doubled down on promotion and relegation by establishing a third fully professional division and the Japanese
“Regular AngloWelsh fixtures would rejuvenate club rugby west of the River Severn”
have gone full IPL with a supercharged club competition, the impact of which could be very considerable indeed.
Equally to the point, the top brass at Twickenham have just about given up on the idea of the “seamless game” in England (not that they will say so publicly) and the URC, with its bizarre South African dimension, already has the appearance of what the French would call a petit-dejeuner de chien.
Under the circumstances, a British and Irish League ticks more boxes than you find in an Amazon warehouse. Regular Anglo-Welsh fixtures alone would rejuvenate club rugby west of the River Severn – where, God knows, rejuvenation is badly needed – while the Leinsters of this world would find themselves more seriously tested, more often, than is currently the case.
How would it work? In its launch year, there would be 24-teams – the 13 top-flight England clubs, the eight Irish provinces and Welsh regions, the two professional set-ups in Scotland and one more from somewhere (North Wales? The Borders? One of the precious few English second-tier sides with a trace of ambition running through their veins?) – playing in two conferences. Results would establish a first and second division going forward, with a two-up, two-down gateway at the end of each season.
For a generous period – five years, say – the bottom club in the lower league would be safe from any cull. What happens after that would depend on who, if anyone, met an agreed set of criteria as proof of adding value to the tournament.
What about the Champions Cup, you say? Wouldn’t a British and Irish League take a sledgehammer to the premier cross-border competition in the northern hemisphere? This has always been the principal argument against such a venture and until now, it has been a persuasive one.
But currently, the Champions Cup is a pale shadow of its former self: a lustreless lament for the glory days of old. Having forgotten where it once was, it has no sense of where it might be going. To borrow an old Roxy Music song title, it is time to Remake/Remodel.
A slimmed-down, more intense Champions Cup, taking in the best of the South African teams if that is the mood of the moment, would fit the bill. It could even be a single-venue event, done and dusted in short order.
And the Italians, you ask? What happens to them? The response from those who believe they should be thrown out of the Six Nations on the grounds of uselessness will be a brief and brutal “who cares?”. For those of us who recognise that the international game has quite enough problems without seeing Rome wiped from its landscape must also accept that they have become a drag on the sport.
Can a case be made for the two professional Italian sides joining the French league system? Geographically, it would make sense; politically, there is more chance of Jacob Rees-Mogg declaring that the Bolsheviks had been right all along. Bluntly put, their competitive future should be high on the agenda of World Rugby, always assuming the Non-Governing Governing Body has an agenda.
This is, no doubt, a flight of fancy: an exercise in “blue sky thinking”, as the trendy young things like to put it. But Rugby Union is in dire need of some imaginative energy. Does anyone have any better ideas?