Western Daily Press (Saturday)
‘Top-flight teams must be able to compete on the pitch… and off it’
Andrew Arthur talks to a former rugby player who has made the transition to the boardroom about the incredible challenges professional sports clubs have faced during the pandemic
GLOUCESTER Rugby’s chief operating officer, Alex Brown, has suggested that any team promoted to the Gallagher Premiership in future seasons should be able to prove it is a “viable business” in order to compete in the league.
The former England international, who made more than 200 appearances for the West Country club, said the Rugby Football Union Council’s vote to suspend relegation from the Premiership for the 2020-21 season, which saw matches cancelled due to coronavirus, was the “right thing to do”.
Next season will see an expanded Premiership, with the winner of the second tier Greene King IPA Chamrugby pionship set to join the current 12 teams.
In a statement released after the vote in February, the RFU Council said it and representatives of both leagues would be working on recommendations for changes to the season structures for “2021-22 and beyond”.
The statement added that it hoped these would include proposals for “a different approach” to promotion and relegation from the Premiership, and that new minimum standard criteria for competing, including investment in facilities and club funding, would be discussed.
A report by the Daily Telegraph following the vote suggested that
authorities had discussed the possibility of suspending relegation from the Premiership for three to four seasons, and further expanding the competition to 14 teams.
Former lock forward-turneddirector Mr Brown said while he would be against permanently scrapping promotion and relegation to and from the Premiership, he thought it was important that teams were able to compete both on and off the pitch.
Mr Brown said: “I would be in favour of a more competitive league. I think promotion and relegation is actually quite important. But what is really important is that the teams that come up, if they are eligible to come up, they have to be a viable business.
“It has to be a viable club that actually can support themselves in the Premiership. So if it was, say, Cornish Pirates, they’d have to prove they can commercially, and from a playing point of view, actually compete in the league.
“I think that it is quite important that they have that infrastructure and support.
“There will be a lot of Championship teams that actually don’t want to get promoted because it’s not within their business model; it just doesn’t work for them.
“There are 13 teams, probably 14 including Ealing as well, who are all able to compete in the league. But they all have to meet minimum criteria to come up, because we can’t have a situation where we bring someone up and they just get beaten easily every week. It just doesn’t make the game any better.”
Mr Brown was appointed rugby operations manager at Gloucester Rugby’s home ground Kingsholm in 2013 after injury ended his career at the age of 33.
He joined the Cherry and Whites’ board of directors in 2019 before being promoted to his current role of chief operating officer last year.
His responsibilities span both the club’s commercial and team performance divisions. As well as being involved in the recruitment of coaching staff and players, he has been helping the club to attract new
We decided in the first week, when we knew that this virus was going to be here for a relatively long time, in order to help the club survive we all had to take a slice of that pain ALEX BROWN
business partners and supporters, including local shelving and storage company Bigdug and Oxfordshirebased cleaning products firm Karcher.
He has also been involved in establishing Gloucester Rugby’s Business Club. The initiative invites local businesses to market themselves via the club’s online business directory and connect with other like-minded firms at networking events. These will be online initially, but it is hoped in the future they will be held at Kingsholm.
The club is currently searching for a new main sponsor for next season after Mitsubishi Motors, which has sponsored the club since 2007, announced it was set to end its involvement.
It follows the car manufacturer’s decision to stop selling new models of its vehicles in the UK as part of a cost-cutting overhaul of its global operations.
Mr Brown said: “Mitsubishi have been a fantastic main sponsor of ours over the course of the past 15 years. We’ve had a longstanding relationship and a very enjoyable one.
“Sadly, though, they are leaving the European market, which is a significant move for them as a company. So they’ll be leaving us as main partners for next season.
“Onboarding a new main partner has been our goal for the past year or so, and it’s been a challenging time to do that, obviously, given the current financial situation of every company in the country.
“But we have been able to secure some new business. New partners have been able to join us. We’ve had Bigdug, a local company who have been doing very, very well during the pandemic and actually thriving as a business, and Karcher, but no one to replace Mitsubishi yet; we’re still working through there.”
Mr Brown said helping to run the club during the coronavirus pandemic had been the toughest challenge he had faced in his entire career in rugby.
In a statement released in March last year, Gloucester Rugby’s chief executive, Lance Bradley, revealed that all staff at the club, including first team players, were to take a 25 per cent pay cut as part of plans to help the club’s finances with the loss of income generated by matchdays and tickets.
Mr Brown admitted when he first heard the news about the coronavirus outbreak he initially thought the disruption would only be a “fiveweek problem”.
He said: “I remember the news came out and we thought the league would be suspended for five weeks and then we’ll be back on our feet and we’ll be fine.
“And here we are, over a year later – it’s been very, very difficult. We’ve had numerous board calls, budget planning – we’ve done probably about 30 different versions of the budget.
“We’ve all had to make sacrifices in salaries just to keep the club afloat and rely on the generosity and support of not only our supporters and fanbase but also our sponsors.
“They have been hugely generous, supportive and understanding of our position and have really helped us in the pandemic.”
Speaking about the salary cuts, Mr Brown said: “We decided in the first week, when we knew that this virus was going to be here for a relatively long time, in order to help the club survive we all had to take a slice of that pain and we all as a club, staff, players, everyone, took a reduction in salary.
“And that was a really tough thing to go through. We had to make some redundancies just to get through. Very, very difficult times.”
He added: “I’d say that the last year has been particularly challenging for me personally and I’d say the same for all the other directors and staff at the club who have worked tirelessly throughout the year. We’ve scaled back our operation to fit our budget and that has meant we are all stretched, we’re all doing a lot more than we were.”
Mr Brown praised the club’s “hugely resilient” players and staff for overcoming the adversity that this season had thrown at them.
Gloucester are set to play their first game in front of supporters in over a year when they take on local rivals Bristol Bears at Ashton Gate Stadium on May 17, before welcoming back their supporters to Kingsholm for home games against London Irish and Bath Rugby.
Mr Brown said the nearing return of fans to games was “welcome news” both in terms of atmosphere and income.
He said: “It’s been a challenge playing games behind closed doors. It works from a TV perspective and still delivers a product that keeps people engaged with the sport and is equally good for some of the sponsors.
“But from a community standpoint – and we’re a very community-orientated club, in terms of outreach and getting the Gloucester Rugby message out there to everyone to really embrace what we are as a club – having crowds back is the key part.
“We’ve got a wonderful fanbase and they’ve not been able to come to Kingsholm and enjoy it. We’re very much looking forward to having them back.”
During his playing career, Mr Brown also made more than 80 appearances for his home town club Bristol, during which time it changed its name to Bristol Shoguns, after a model of jeep made by Mitsubishi.
The rebrand was made to reflect a sponsorship deal the club had with the company at the time.
It subsequently reverted to Bristol Rugby Club before again rebranding to Bristol Bears in 2018.
While acknowledging the growing commercial side of rugby, Mr Brown said he doubted that the club he had spent almost 20 years at would make a similar move.
Mr Brown said: “Gloucester is a difficult one because Gloucester Rugby is Gloucester Rugby. It’s known as that and it’s part and parcel of being that community club.
“But never say never, because who knows where the sport is going. More and more stadiums certainly are being rebranded and naming rights are being associated with many, many stadiums across the country now, and that’s kind of the next thing.
“Whether that would happen to Kingsholm, I’m not sure – probably would be met with a bit of resistance, I would expect! But it’s not out of the question as sport does need to get more commercially savvy. So you never know.”