Painful budget cuts are for greater good
The Rugby Players' Association (RPA), has said that up to 80 Premiership players have been left without contracts as a result of the salary cap cut. For the players affected it's horrible, as what are already short careers in professional sport are being cut even shorter, but we should keep a sense of perspective about this.
Elite sport is a tough and unforgiving business, and for every player who earns a Premiership contract, there are plenty of others who had to come to terms with the fact that they just weren't quite good enough. Now, sadly, some mid-ranking players – call them journeymen, squad players, or whatever – are finding that there's a kind of cost/benefit analysis taking place.
The pot is finite, and the clubs are having to be smarter than ever before about how they spend their money. Fans often have an unrealistic view of how much players earn, but only the top internationals, and that historical anomaly, the marquee player, earn the really big money. Lower down the food chain, squad players are likely to be on salaries that are on a par with middle-managers in big compa- nies, and young players moving up from the Academies can be on much less than that. The clubs are being squeezed, and any player with a dodgy injury history, or one who has been there for a while without ever establishing himself as an automatic starter, is likely to be under threat. If there is an Academy player coming through in their position, then things are even tougher.
For those affected it's deeply personal, and every fan will have sympathy for the position in which they find themselves, but there is a greater good involved in this.
Wasps' problems with failing to repay their £35m bond are well-known, Worcester have been hit with a winding-up order from HMRC, and I very much doubt that any Premiership club is flush with cash at the present time. What's absolutely vital is that there continue to be 13 clubs in the league next season, and 14 the season after, as that's how the finances start to get stabilised.
A tightly-controlled salary cap is vital if that is to happen, and any move to increase the cap, driven by those clubs with wealthy owners must be resisted. My fear is that some clubs have an agenda, and might prefer some sort of British and Irish, or European super league – that would be the death knell for the tribal English rugby that we love, and would be yet another poke in the eye for fans.
Without in any way trivialising the issue, there's a harsh adage that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, and I'm afraid that's what we're seeing in English rugby right now.
There's a major restructuring going on, and casualties are sadly inevitable. The reality is that the Premiership got itself into a position where living beyond their means became the norm for clubs, and salary inflation got out of hand. It took a pandemic to get the message through, and even then some owners resisted taking the cap to a manageable level.
If the clubs – every club, not just the rich ones – can successfully get through this period of retrenchment, then growth might be possible, but for now the reality is that some players are going to be squeezed out of the game.
