Interesting article from the times
World Rugby will find itself at one of the most significant crossroads in the 20-year history of the professional game next week. If it cannot resolve the vast and complicated problems of its future structure, it risks sliding into civil war.
After the 2019 World Cup, there is not a single international fixture scheduled anywhere in the world and there is a reason for this. No one will sign up to a fixture schedule because the professional rugby world cannot agree on how the world schedule should look.
The players are rightly joining this debate with an increasingly loud and frustrated voice, shouting: stop all this nonsense, we are playing too much
The game sings with one voice on only one point: we need to better monetise our product. Yet different factions have different priorities:
● The southern-hemisphere teams want June tours stopped. They want European nations to shift summer tours to July.
● European nations do not want to tour in July, but some are questioning the value of summer tours altogether.
● In a document circulated to European clubs and unions, the southern hemisphere has also set out a vision that involves the European season shifting to start in October and running deeper into late June.
● The southern hemisphere wants to be paid a slice of European income when they tour in November.
● English, French and Celtic clubs want total separation of the fixture list so club games no longer overlap with international games, so that they no longer lose their best players during the Six Nations and autumn internationals.
● The European clubs want to expand their competition. A world final between European and Super Rugby champions is an intended annual event now likely to kick off next year. But a more ambitious proposal, now openly discussed, is a four-yearly World Club Championship.
Many of these priorities already conflict, and that is before we consider that, in trying to make professional rugby a better entertainment that more people will pay more for, the game is causing untold damage to its entertainers.
Yet the performers — the players — are rightly joining this debate with an increasingly loud and frustrated voice, shouting: stop all this nonsense, we are playing too much.
The players’ No 1 priority in this, as voiced officially by the International Rugby Players’ Association (IRPA), is for an annual 12-week break. This summer, though, the England players, will get nine, although it will be more like three or four before they start pre-season.
That the players are being busted and broken is beyond debate. Last week, Christian Day, the chairman of the English arm of the IRPA threatened that if this continues the players would go on strike.
While everyone protects their own interests, Gareth Davies, the chairman of the Welsh Rugby Union, said: “The only easy solution is someone designing a 60-week calendar.” In the absence of that, and given what we know about rugby’s inability to find administrative compromise, you don’t have to go far to find senior stakeholders in the game predicting “war”.
“It’s the one burning issue that everyone is talking about,” Damian Hopley, the chief executive of the English arm of IRPA, said. “If there is going to be a dust-down, then let’s have the scrap. The constant dithering and inertia has to end.”
Indeed, in a public statement, the players’ body has asked the leading stakeholders “to come together and open their minds to the potential benefits of change, and what that may look like”. The statement includes the following from Richie McCaw, the World Cup-winning All Blacks captain: “It could be a game-changer for professional rugby. It would be fantastic to address this longstanding season structure debate once and for all.”
The problem here is this statement was released three years ago. Nothing has changed since. Andrew Hore, chief executive of the Waratahs who held the same title at the Ospreys, has seen the same issue from different sides of the world. He says: “It’s like an alcoholic. World Rugby has got to fess up that there is a problem. World Rugby is saying: ‘It’s OK.’ Well no, it’s not OK.”
The closer we stumble to 2019, with no one reaching agreement and no agreed international fixture list, the more threatening any game of brinkmanship.
Steve Tew, chief executive of the New Zealand rugby union, broke from cover a few weeks back when he said: “We don’t believe the current system is sustainable. We are not going to default to the current one. We are going to force the issue.” In so doing, he threatened that the All Blacks — the biggest brand in the game — would start to organise their own post-2019 fixtures.
At present, the game relies on a schedule masterminded by World Rugby, where all the Tier 1 nations play each other regularly. This is an attempt to spread competition and the big commercial fixtures. The minute the All Blacks go off on their own, the whole system implodes.
And that is not all that Tew meant by “the issue”. The southern-hemisphere nations see the English and French clubs as the enemy; the leakage of their world-class players to contracts in the north with which they cannot compete has become a steady flow. The system does not stack up economically for them.
At present their income from June tours south is dwarfed by what the European nations make from November tours north (bigger crowds, cheaper tickets, more valuable TV rights). Tew believes that his All Blacks deserve a slice of the fortune they create in the north. The RFU, for one, is not shifting on that. The response from New Zealand has come in the form of threats not to come north in November at all. And so the fight begins.
Yet while there is a feeling of battle lines being drawn, there is also a long-shot opportunity. The world rugby calendar is an anachronism the professional game inherited from the amateur days.
The November tours remain a series of one-off games without consequence. Why tour in June and November at all? Because we always have done.
So why not start again. “There is no reason why we shouldn’t wipe the whole slate clean,” Hore says. “There is enough here where, if we get it right, we could produce something really special, unique.”
“If we can crack it,” Rob Nichol, chief executive of the players’ body, said, “how good would that be? It could be magic.”
There are two ways of looking at this. One: take the present calendar and fight over individual weeks. Here is a microcosm of that prospect: the northern hemisphere wants the World Cup shifted two or three weeks back from a mid-September start to the end of August so that it does not overlap so damagingly with the start of the domestic season. But that would bleed into the Rugby Championship and the southern-hemisphere nations would not want that. Immediately you have conflict.
Two: scrap the present calendar completely, work out what will sell and build from there.
The idea of the World Club Championship, for instance: finish both European and Super Rugby competitions after the quarter-finals, take the four semi-finalists from each hemisphere and throw them into one big tournament of eight. Once every four years? It would clearly have merit; under the status quo, it would be impossible.
What the game needs, then, is strong and enlightened leadership. No one is accusing World Rugby of that right now.
“It is proving a complex process,” Brett Gosper, the World Rugby chief executive, says. He says that certain proposals have been made but were rejected.
Last year a small working group from north and south and the IRPA, and led by John Jeffrey (former Scotland flanker, now a World Rugby council member) was formed but got nowhere. This was then passed on to a group of the chief executives of the Tier 1 nations. They last met at the end of February and still no white smoke.
Beaumont, the former England captain and incoming World chairman, has plenty of problems to solve
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER MARC ASPLAND
The whole issue will come to a head at next week’s World Rugby council meeting in Dublin. World Rugby has been waiting for new leadership, in the form of the incoming chairman, Bill Beaumont, who will be voted in (against no other candidate) on Wednesday. Before that, on Monday, the Tier 1 chief executives meet, and their views will be informed by a prior meeting between Sanzar and Six Nations heads.
Then, on Thursday, IRPA meets World Rugby. After all that, many of them will move on to Lyons for next weekend’s European finals.
Do not expect an immediate solution. However, if there is no significant ground made by the end of Lyons, then the stand-off will edge towards a fight.
There are huge issues to be resolved to keep the game balanced and thriving. The southern hemisphere seems to want more concessions than the north. The northern unions have more of a problem in representing clubs as well as country.
Ideally, the European clubs would have a seat at the table but they have not been invited. The Premiership clubs have given the RFU two proposed models, one radical, one more conservative. They can only hope that the RFU fights their corner.
Some nations are in the eye of the storm. France is a massive problem. The Top 14 cannot be squeezed into any reasonable integrated global calendar. And yet the French clubs have money and power and are not shy of taking on the establishment. The danger of club rugby accelerating past the international game has already become reality in France; the Top 14 finals overlap with the France summer tour to Argentina and you can be sure that the players with the overlap will not be travelling.
South Africa are a challenge too. They are tied into Sanzar competitions that are on the wrong time zones and therefore do not serve their TV audience. Plus the players’ travel schedule is preposterous, which is just one reason for the never-ending player exodus to Europe and Japan.
Another is the economics; the three biggest rugby economies are England, France and South Africa and while there are still wealthy investors circling, the conversation about South Africa taking the financially astute option and aligning themselves with Europe is not completely dead. If you started with that clean slate, South Africa would never be where they are now.
Where they and everyone else ends up after 2019 is a complex challenge that must be addressed with urgency. The game structure the professionals inherited from the amateurs no longer works. This can be an opportunity or a battleground; standing still is the one option that no longer works.
Owen Slot’s four year plan
2017 Lions tour
2018 World Club Championship
2019 Summer tour and World Cup
2020 No tour at all. Rest.
Global calendar
Southern hemisphere
Aug-start Oct: The Rugby Championship
Nov: Break
Dec: Winter internationals
Jan: Break
End Feb to end June: Super Rugby
July: Summer stuff, see above
Europe
Sept: Domestic season
Oct: Domestic season
Nov: Domestic
Dec: Autumn (winter) internationals
Jan: Winter break
Feb: Domestic
Mar: Six Nations
Apr: Six Nations / Domestic
May: Domestic
June: Domestic
July: Summer stuff (see above)
Aug: Off
● Domestic leagues restricted to ten-team leagues.
This would save England/the Aviva Premiership and the Guinness PRO12 four weekends.
France, get with the programme, please.
● Southern hemisphere has to agree to December internationals instead of November.
This allows northern hemisphere continuity of the winter international season.
● In Lions years: In Europe, four weekends overlap of domestic and international rugby, domestic season finishes at the end of May. Lions tour June and July. Three Tests in July after Super Rugby has finished. Lions players not allowed to rejoin the following season’s domestic season until October.
● The December internationals should be five weekends, not three. And there should be a share of revenue, between the two hemispheres, to account for southern hemisphere losing some of its tours.
● This format gives almost complete separation of club and international fixtures in Europe.
