URC: Dragons chairman calls for salary cap

Planet Rugby

Dragons chairman David Buttress reckons the United Rugby Championship needs to be operated under some form of salary cap, pointing out some glaring inequalities in the league.

The URC teams are not restricted in expenditure like the Top 14 or Premiership, in part because of the international nature of the tournament and the varying economic conditions in the respective countries, as well as their unions.

Big budgets sweep clean

But with the team with the biggest playing budget, Leinster, stuffed with internationals and winning the title four years on the bounce, Buttress says that change, or increased governance, is needed to level the playing field and make the competition more attractive.

“There should be a salary cap in the URC,” he told The Good, The Bad & The Rugby podcast.

“I love watching the English Premiership because every week anyone can beat anyone. You don’t know the outcome, the jeopardy is high in terms of who is going to win.

“If you want to create a league that’s exciting every week, you can’t have one side that’s triple or double the wage bill because then you all know what the outcome is going to be.

“Creating an element of uncertainty around the outcome makes a great product in sport, that’s why I love American sport because a different team can win the Super Bowl in any given year.”

Without naming figures, he also said he believed Leinster have a playing budget more than double his own team’s, not to mention having to labour under the financial uncertainties that Covid has created.

“We have got about £20m of Covid debt,” he said.

“We have got a 20 year plan to recover from that, so that’s going to be with us for a while and that’s going to have an impact.

“In Wales, rightly or wrongly, we have been a lot more conservative around the management of Covid and I can feel our supporters have lost confidence to come back into stadiums.

“So I feel Wales is going to take a bit longer to get back and the £20m Covid debt we have got is going to take a while.”

Buttress also criticised the current rugby calendar, saying that the league and the international game needed to be kept separate for the good of domestic competition.

“My big problem (with the game) is we allow overlap of fixtures. You would never see the Premier League football playing when there is an international game for England. There is a break,” he added.

“We should be ruthless about the quality of the product. You should never play a fixture unless all the best players are available. Less games would be much better for rugby, I think.

“We should not have as many games, but better quality occasions when you have them.”