Championship just isn’t comparable with ProD2
In last week’s letters page someone suggested that I come out in support of promotion and relegation, which is odd, because it’s something which I’ve already done! It’s topical, however, because the victories of La Rochelle and Lyon respectively in the Champions and Challenge Cups – both clubs having recently been in ProD2, the French equivalent of our Championship – were leapt on by some as evidence that we should reintroduce promotion and relegation forthwith. This is, I’m afraid, simplistic in the extreme.
Comparing the ProD2 with the Championship is like comparing chalk and cheese, and that’s where the problem lies. Had we a second tier that was even vaguely like the ProD2, I’d be joining the ranks of the zealots, shouting from the rooftops that we should be relegating a Premiership side each season, and bringing up a Championship team to join a 14-club Premiership. However, the reality is a million miles away from this.
The ProD2 is a properly competitive league, and even the least wealthy club has a budget in excess of €5million. Compare that with our Championship where only a few teams actually want to be promoted, and where Ealing were long odds on to be champions before the season even started.
During the week, Simon Massie-Taylor, the chief executive of PRL, confirmed – or rather, nearly did – that a team will be promoted at the end of next season in order to make a 14-team Premiership, and then at the end of the following season there would be a play-off between the top team in the Championship and the Premiership’s bottom club. After that the presumption is that normal promotion and relegation will return.
As I wrote last week, this smacks of a deal that if Ealing quietly accepted not being promoted this season, a way would be found to allow them up at the end of the next one.
Massie-Taylor’s comments stopped short of absolute confirmation that all this would happen, which is hardly a surprise considering how many moving parts there are. Will Ealing come top of the Championship, and can they meet some sort of modified Minimum Standards Criteria? If another team came top instead of them, would they want to be promoted, and bearing in mind the ongoing financial uncertainties facing at least one club, will there still be 13 teams in the Premiership at the end of 2023-24?
Finally, if the Championship is still as much of a mess by then, would we really want to go back to the bad old days when a team went down, but was certain to immediately come back up, while a nohoper got promoted and was totally out of its depth, doomed to get relegated – that mustn’t be allowed to happen.
If you want the reintroduction of promotion and relegation, don’t focus on the Premiership clubs which are owned by people who have invested their hard-earned in the future of English professional rugby, often underwriting sizeable losses along the way.
Instead concentrate on the Championship clubs and the RFU, and find a way to build a sustainable second tier that’s fit for purpose, with at least some clubs that build stadia able to cope with decent crowds. Once that happens I suspect there will be something close to unanimity in bringing back promotion and relegation, but I’m far from confident that circumstances will change enough for that to happen.
The decision to allow South African sides to participate in the Champions and Challenge Cups is a shocking mistake, and another example of the complete contempt in which supporters are held nowadays.These are European competitions, and should be restricted to nations within Europe, not southern Africa.
One of the joys of the current format is supporters having a weekend away, and experiencing how different nations support their team – some of my best rugby experiences have been those foreign trips, but how many fans will be prepared to travel to South Africa? There’s an old saying, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and this EPCR decision has just devalued a great competition.
Pre-pandemic the home and away format worked really well, and goodness knows why EPCR didn’t simply revert to that. Instead they want to send teams and fans off to the country with the thirdhighest crime rate in the world, and a murder rate that makes it less safe than Mexico or Colombia! What on earth were EPCR thinking when they made this crazy decision?
“European competitions should be for nations that are in Europe”