Loose Pass: England’s club rugby crisis and Premiership Rugby and the RFU’s importance in improving the situation

Lawrence Nolan
Loose Pass image 27 September 2022.jpg

This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with England’s club rugby crisis…

If ever there were two juxtaposed headlines which emphasised the depth of the problems facing English club rugby right now, it would be the one regarding Worcester’s suspension from all rugby and the one with Premiership Rugby CEO Simon Massie-Taylor pleading for better visibility of club finances.

There are so many more layers to it all: not least the ongoing and constant devaluation of the club game by the intrusion of international weekends into the club season, or the cost of living crisis which is rendering even half-sensible financial plans null and void, but the ones above illustrate all the problems entirely.

Rugby’s visibility problem

Visibility is a problem in rugby generally. Years ago it was confined to the goings-on at the bottom of rucks, but cameras were brought in to sort that out. If the visibility has not been entirely prohibitive it has certainly acted as a deterrent.

But yet, despite repeated negative headlines, such as the one about how the 13 Premiership shareholder clubs lost a combined total of nearly £89million in the two years prior to selling a 27 per cent stake to CVC (back in 2020), or then-Richmond owner Ashley Levett saying: “I do not know anyone with a sound business sense who would do this,” shortly after he had pulled out and consigned Richmond to an amateur existence, many clubs’ finances remain as unscrutinised as they are inscrutable.

“Being an owner of a rugby union club is a complete lottery and I cannot go on throwing money down the drain,” continued Levett 23 years ago. Yet people have. Wasps were within minutes of bankruptcy 10 years ago (fans, those still left despite the club’s constant geographical attempts to shake them off, must be currently feeling stuck in some egg-shaped version of Groundhog Day). Bristol weren’t far away from extinction either. London Welsh ceased to exist.

Even cursory glances at club game finances should sound warning bells. A Daily Mail investigation into it three weeks ago was headlined by discovery of a combined debt level of half a billion pounds across the 13 stakeholder clubs. Even more disturbing was the 36 million owed to the tax man; Wasps are in trouble for owing less than the average tax debt while their gross debt is over 100 million.

Only five of the clubs made a profit last year, most of them aided in doing so by Covid loans which, according to an investigation by the Daily Telegraph, totalled 124 million across the clubs. Bristol owner Steve Lansdown and Northampton CEO Mark Darbon have both stated their concerns over the future of the clubs, while Newcastle and London Irish have both said explicitly in their published accounts that they have worries over the viability of the clubs as a going concern. Wasps have too, although they are now in deeper trouble.

It’s difficult to conceive that the game and its administration has not seen fit to try to regulate this, until you weigh up the wildly conflicting priorities. You could argue that the RFU – especially since it has the power to suspend clubs which go into administration a la Worcester – ought to play a more safeguarding role, but the RFU and Premiership Rugby have been in a state of conflict, either active or passive, for decades. When RFU CEO Bill Sweeney, in suspending Worcester, adds that the whole business model of rugby union in England needs to be improved, it is difficult to interpret that as him saying to the clubs: “you lot need to fit in around our agenda better.” But when it is an agenda that tends towards hoarding the clubs’ most precious resources (both star players and calendar weekends), why would the clubs do so?

Premiership Rugby has done a sterling job in sticking up for the clubs over the years, as well as creating an excellent league, but it has been hugely remiss in not heeding the lessons of crises past in creating a more thorough regulatory framework for financial stability. The negligence has left the clubs now severely weakened. A shame too, for given it now has powers to do things such as access player WhatsApp messages to govern its salary cap, you’d think that being able to look at club accounts of its stakeholders and formulating a framework for existential sustainability would not be beyond it. Notably, France’s Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR) has done so, equally notable is an absence of financial instability over the past few years.

The next round of talks between the RFU and Premiership Rugby is set for 2024. There, without a doubt, the subject of overlap between international weekends and the club game will be a hot topic, as will central funding and regulation.

RFU must bring stability to club rugby

It is often billed as a tug-of-war, but there are so many overlapping threads that it is not just that simple. Player availability is an issue, but if England’s league continues to weaken then players might understandably move to leagues where Worcesters don’t happen, leaving them unavailable to either the RFU or Premiership Rugby. It is in the RFU’s interests to make the club game as stable as possible in order to keep players in England.

It’s a convoluted picture of governance, such as rugby has always had. Efficiency and unity have rarely been words associated with the rugby administrative landscape but now it has claimed one club as victim, meaning hundreds of people are suddenly without employment and, in the case of Worcester’s caretaker, homeless overnight.

The clubs, administrators, governors, leaders and financiers of English rugby need to get together to create a sustainable financial model that no longer relies upon the generosity of a few billionaires, nor the boundaries of financial theory to survive. Otherwise, Worcester and Wasps will not be the last.

READ MORE: Worcester Warriors: Club has been suspended from all competitions after failing to meet RFU deadline