Rugby schedule has little to do with player welfare

AROLL of drums and a fanfare of trumpets late last summer heralded a new title sponsor for a tournament acclaimed by the mightiest of Springboks as ‘the best club rugby competition in the world’.

Picking up where Eben Etzebeth left off last season, Investec, naturally enough, extolled the virtues of an event deemed worthy of their title sponsorship. It would ‘celebrate exceptional talent while creating transformational value for spectators, players and communities’.

The Anglo-South African banking and wealth management group also acknowledged the tournament’s ‘dedication to pushing boundaries’. The organisers, European Professional Club Rugby, spoke about ‘a combined passion’ to ‘deliver our new ambitious strategy for the Investec Champions Cup’.

All that poured forth amid mutual back-slapping bonhomie on August 31 last year which only goes to show that eight months is a very, very long time in the volatile world or professional Rugby Union.

Now it would appear that the Champions Cup is so good that in 2028 and for every four years thereafter it will not be completed. Instead during those seasons it will be left in a perpetual state of suspension as soon as the pool stage has been completed.

Back in the day when it was known as the Heineken Cup, the event had a magic all of its own. That began to shrivel when the clubs, mainly those of England, France and Wales, seized control from the Unions, the same people who run the Six Nations, because they (the clubs) thought they could run it better.

Not wishing to pick a fight, least of all with Mr Etzebeth, let us concede that the Champions Cup really is the best club tournament on the rugby planet, even in its current diluted form. So now the same organisers, ECPR, are sacrificing it on the altar of what is supposed to be an even better tournament.

The happiness or otherwise of the title sponsors has yet to be made clear. When they agreed the terms of their five-year deal at the start of the season, Investec could hardly have known that the goalposts would be shifted quite to starkly or quite so soon.

That the supposedly supreme event is to be superseded on a quadrennial basis by the World Club Rugby Cup will strike many as a fearful step into the unknown. It can hardly be what Investec envisaged when they praised ECPR’s ‘dedication to push boundaries’.

They had, after all, pushed them far enough to welcome teams from another continent into a European competition. Now they’re intending to go the whole hog, this time encompassing Asia as well as Australasia.

The plan is for the eight qualifiers from the Champions Cup pool stage to play quarter-finals against the top six from Super Pacific Rugby. The numbers, of course, don’t add up, hence the need to invite two from elsewhere, in this case Japan.

They could have guaranteed the Fiji’s solitary Super Rugby franchise, the Drua, a place irrespective of where they finished but prefer to opt for the top two in the JRL1, currently occupied by the Wild Knights and the Brave Lupus. A degree in economics is not necessary to work out that Japan will bring a lot more commercial clout than the South Sea Islands.

If it all comes to pass, ECPR will need the trickiest of spin-doctors to explain why they have chosen to devalue their own event, albeit once every four years. Money will have something to do with it, if not everything.

The global equity company, CVC Partners, didn’t invest north of £700m in the sport for any altruistic reasons like saving it from going bust. They did so to make a return for their investors and presumably they see a global champions cup making more than the European version.

Whether fans on this side of the Equator consider an Auckland-Bordeaux final more appetising than one between any two of Leinster, Toulouse and Northampton remains to be seen. An all-New Zealand final in this hemisphere would be as hard a sell as an all-European one in the other.

It will take more than a fistful of dollars to persuade the three major European leagues to bring their finals forward by a month from June to clear the decks for the new event. Disciples of Europe’s supreme competition, the French Top 14, have reason to take more convincing than those of the English Premiership and the URC.

Some will see the project as another desperate attempt to make the game pay its way, in this instance one made all the more desperate by the vast amount of travel involved. It comes in a week when one quarter-finalist needed no fewer than eight different aircraft to fly their squad to England in the name of the Champions Cup.

The Pretoria-based Bulls’ entourage is no bigger than anyone else’s but seven days notice of their tie at Northampton explains why they had to book through so many airlines for the requisite number of seats. According to sources in South Africa, that cost £175,000 in airfares alone.

The logistical problem of flying inter-continental at short notice is the consequence of another example of a competition struggling to make up the numbers. The advent of four South African teams into what started out as the Celtic League enabled the Pro 12’s transformation into the United Rugby Championship.

That Jake White opted to leave most of his first team resting at home ahead of Munster’s visit to Pretoria in the URC next weekend increased the absurdity. The Bulls head coach estimated that it had taken them 28 hours to get to Dublin for their Leinster fixture over Easter and another 27 hours to get back home.

And still those who run the game, from World Rugby down to the individual Unions who form the Six Nations, will tell anyone who cares to listen that player welfare is a top priority.

They have a strange way of showing it, planning a schedule for the European elite which for the 11-month season of 2027-28 will be crammed with World Cup warm-ups, the World Cup, Europe’s national leagues, the Six Nations, a truncated Champions’ Cup, domestic play-offs and a World Club Cup.

Maybe the players will tot up the days they’ve spent strapped into an aircraft seat and decide they’re the ones being taken for a ride…

“Some will see the project as an attempt to make the game pay its way”