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Then there were 12. Less than a month into the new season, the demise of Worcester has left the Premiership cartel and the RFU reeling following the failure of the club’s owners to meet the RFU’s Monday deadline for “a credible plan” to allow it to continue in England‘s so-called elite league. So, how did the club Cecil Duckworth built with such dedication become ‘unlucky 13’? And how many more Premiership clubs could follow them into administration this season?
It is not a known quantity yet, but with Wasps already giving notice of their intention to appoint administrators, and London Irish and Newcastle both stating in their annual accounts uncertainty about their ability “to continue as a going concern”, fears of a Premiership domino-effect cannot be dismissed.
The next question the Premiership owners/chairmen and their RFU acolytes could face is whether a nine-team league is financially sustainable. Gloucester‘s statement that this weekend’s cancelled home fixture against Worcester will cost them £400,000 suggests strongly that two further suspensions will make the league untenable.
Yet, when it came to Worcester’s suspension this week, there was amnesia throughout the corridors of the RFU and Premiership administrations. No-one was taking any accountability for failing to detect the glaring flaws in the credentials of the owners who have crashed Worcester, let alone for ignoring the £500m debt avalanche threatening to bury English club rugby’s flagship league.
Bill Sweeney, RFU chief executive since early 2019, made it sound as if Worcester had been the victims of a natural disaster rather than a manmade financial implosion. He abrogated any RFU responsibility, saying that he hopes a buyer can be secured to allow Worcester’s return to professional league rugby.
Sweeney added: “It is so important we continue to work with Premiership Rugby to improve the structure, governance, and business model of rugby union in England.” What? Sweeney claiming that he has made a start in any of those areas is laughable – especially if he lists cutting Championship funding to the bone as one of his big improvements.
One of Sweeney’s responsibilities was to ensure that individuals such as Worcester’s last owners, Jason Whittingham and Colin Goldring, passed the RFU’s ‘fit and proper person test’ to run a Premiership club. Was due diligence done on checking the financial history of two people who, according to local MPs, have been guilty of “appalling mismanagement”, which includes dividing the club’s assets between multiple shell companies while presiding over a £25m debt.
Among those who missed the Worcester warning signs was Simon Massie-Taylor, Premiership Rugby’s chief executive, culminating in his mind-boggling request last week for clubs to share their accounts with their own administrative body.
As a confession of an administrative arm not being fit for purpose it took the biscuit, especially as all the club accounts, and those of Premiership Rugby, are freely available from Companies House, backdated. They can be accessed easily, and most of the information Massie-Taylor required has been available for years.
It is not being unkind to suggest that after being the RFU’s chief commercial and marketing officer for five years before taking the top job at Premiership Rugby last October, Massie-Taylor should have been well appraised of all the salient points regarding the finances of Premiership clubs, including the debts they have racked-up.
Worcester’s own ineptitude in allowing Goldring and Whittingham to take ownership of the club is also inexcusable, as is the failure of other Premiership owners to detect their potential to damage the league’s reputation.
Ever since the P share structure raised its ugly head in the Premiership as a ring-fencing weapon I have opposed it. The concept was imported from Formula 1 by the late former Gloucester owner, Tom Walkinshaw, and has been a blight on the game.
First, it gave each P share club a far bigger slice of central funding – whether broadcast or RFU money – and left promoted clubs handicapped by being given half their revenue, and sometimes less than that.
It was also used as a cartel-like mechanism to guarantee any P share club relegated to the Championship the same level of funding it had in the Premiership. This almost guaranteed an immediate bounceback to the top tier the following season because they had infinitely stronger squads than their poorer Championship opponents.
It essentially set up a Premiership closed shop, which in the last decade has put a block on expansion and ambition in the English league structure. The RFU has acquiesced in the Premiership desire to create a ring-fenced league, eventually reneging on its core principle of promotion-relegation by suspending it in February 2021. In the process, it laid the groundwork for the owners’ objective of creating an American-style franchise system.
The unsuitability of either the Premiership owners, or the current RFU administration, to run such a system has been laid bare by their organisational ineptitude since the ruinous £225m eight-year PGA funding agreement signed in 2016.
The agreement saw the RFU commit the majority of its financial resources to bankrolling the Premiership in return for improved access to England players, even though it left the Championship and the community club game stripped of funds.
This shift in policy predated the Covid pandemic by three years, and between August 2016 and April 2017, The Rugby Paper ran two interviews with Simon Cohen, in which the former Leicester chief executive predicted that Premiership finances would “fall off a cliff ” unless there was a brake on rocketing player wage bills. Worcester’s sorry decline, and the severity of the financial storm other Premiership clubs face, has proved Cohen’s predictive accuracy.
If the club game in England is to rebuild effectively it has to acknowledge its failings in order to put them right – and at the moment the RFU, Premiership Rugby, and the Premiership club owners, are doing the game a huge disservice by refusing to take responsibility.
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