SO it’s back to the future with the RFU CEO Bill Sweeney telling the Championship that they either don’t understand or have been misinformed as to what the new PGP will give them and what is expected of them. Or, as he says, it’s about the standards you have in the second tier to make it a ‘really investible model’ rather than what he perceives they currently are.
Personally, it may be I’m being a bit naive but I see the Championship as the second tier of the English rugby union league system. It has many clubs who have worked hard over the years to develop players of a standard to beat a number of other clubs and rise up the league structure to where they are now. Before the leagues were put in place we had a group of clubs that saw themselves as something special at the top of the game and not allowing access to outsiders. Sound familiar?
The advent of leagues opened the door to ambitious clubs who were once expected to stay in their little corner of the game allowing them to take their chance and begin the climb to the top. Admittedly not many clubs have made a success of that climb to the Premiership, but a lot of that can be put down to the obstructions put in place by the Premiership clubs which have been allowed by the RFU. Whether the minimum stadium capacity criteria (which many of the Premiership clubs themselves didn’t meet when put in place), parachute payments for relegated clubs, or lower payment to promoted clubs, all deny a fair chance for the promoted club to compete at the top. Worst of all is the Pshare with the shares not automatically being passed from the relegated club to the promoted club, so always leaving the promoted clubs at a financial disadvantage.
Sweeney says that all parties want a better geographical spread of clubs while allowing the Premiership to create the obstructions that has seen a number of northern clubs refused promotion, purely because they didn’t meet the Premiership’s changing criteria.
Then there is the idea that Wasps, Worcester and London Irish should be allowed to come back into the Championship once they get their houses in order because they are ‘great rugby brands’. Weren’t Richmond, London Scottish, London Welsh, Leeds Tykes and Rotherham great brands as well? Yet they were forced to restart from the bottom of the league.
As someone who played for both Richmond and Wasps I am obviously sad at the position they have found themselves in when forced into administration, hoping they would find a way to recover. However, it would be morally wrong to force one group of clubs who suffered from financial mismanagement in the past to restart at the bottom of the league structure, while allowing clubs who did the same more recently to rejoin at the elevated level of the Championship.
Sweeney says: “If they come back with a strong business model, good financial investment in a good geographical location why wouldn’t you want them in the second tier.”
To a certain extent he is right. That said, it was probably the fact that the other teams were made to start at the bottom of the league structure that may have lost them the investment that was available to those in the higher leagues, but could have returned once they began to climb the leagues.
As for geographical locations, Wasps are talking of moving to Kent which is home to a number of other clubs, including Blackheath, the fourth oldest rugby club in the world, currently in National One. At the present time Wasps do not have any players or a stadium so we can’t be sure of the standard of game they will play at on their return.
Worcester will probably return to their Midlands home in close proximity to Premiership clubs Leicester and Northampton, while London Irish may well look to return to London as their home. None of these returning clubs will be breaking into new areas for the game and may in fact take support away from other nearby clubs causing more financial issues across the game.
Reducing the competitive gulf between the Premiership and the Championship will only be possible if there are games between the two with a cup competition and perhaps a play-off between the top two or three of the Championship and bottom two or three of the Premiership. It needs to be that many as a single club could rest players to ensure their team were prepared for a one-off match that would decide their fate.
Sweeney is right to say an injection of cash will not necessarily narrow the gap but a reforming of promotion and relegation without any minimum standards criteria would certainly go a long way to helping the Championship increase its attractiveness to sponsors.
At the end of the day it was the sense that there was no way forward to the Premiership for Jersey’s Championship-winning club that led to their backers pulling the plug after years of support.
If the RFU are correct in wanting a fair and robust league system with reasonable levels of sponsorship and support for all, they must first make it open for all clubs to be able reach the top if their team on the pitch win the games.
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