'Tis the season to be jolly, but not if you own the majority shareholding in an English Premiership rugby club. For those in need of a cosy fireside game this Christmas, try this one: simply cut out the names of the top 14 clubs and invite your relatives to guess which a) will make the biggest loss this season or b) will still be in the hat come the millennium.

While they deliberate over the pudding, imagine the festive scenes across the land. The Rugby Football Union and the International Board, say, hissing at each other over the bare bones of the goose which, their legal people confirm, is in breach of contract for refusing to lay more golden eggs. Or dressing-rooms everywhere, with those renegotiated contracts lying deep and crisp and even . . .

It is a grim tableau rather than the fairytale which beckoned the top clubs when the sport went professional over three years ago. "It's no secret at least half of them are nearing financial disaster," admits Brian Baister, the RFU's management board chairman.

What the IB-RFU pantomime, with the latest act due today, demonstrates is how many important people still cannot see the wood for the haphazardly planted trees.

Take NEC Harlequins. Six wins out of the last seven league games, Zinzan Brooke at the helm and, the sponsor hopes, a name resonant around the world. But how many present that day at the Savoy in January 1996 when the link-up was announced foresaw that NEC, a company which turned over £25 billion in the financial year to March 1995, might feel the need to save a few pence in 1999 in the wake of the Far East economic crisis?

The three-year partnership - "It extends far beyond any sponsorship agreement previously imagined in the world of rugby," boasted the then chairman Roger Looker - expires this summer. Harlequins are believed to have incurred losses nudging £4 million, and negotiations to renew the NEC contract are due to start in the new year. Figure it out for yourselves.

Estimates suggest the combined debts among English Premiership One sides at the end of this financial year will be in the region of £25 million. That dumps a huge onus on the big investors still standing - Ashley Levett, Chris Wright, Nigel Wray, Andrew Brownsword - at a time when every rational fibre in their bodies must be screaming at them to walk away. There is nothing like professional rugby for sorting the millionaires from the tycoons.

"History will judge the investors, but if we get it wrong there will be no professional club rugby," said Sir John Hall at the start of the season. He and Wray, who stumped up an initial £2.5 million to get Saracens rolling, admit they would almost certainly not have got involved had they seen the real price tag. Meanwhile, rumours abound, particularly in London, that at least one of their counterparts has had enough and is poised to pull the plug.

Saracens, at least, will hope Wray's optimism survives the continuing political wrangles. "I remember buying my present house and being furious that I needed a new roof within two years," he said last year. "I wondered why the hell I'd ever bought it. Five years later I'm delighted I did. It will be the same with rugby, I'm sure."

Wray's central theme - "as individual units we won't make it, we need to think as a group" - is echoed from Premiership Two where Bristol, thanks to Malcolm Pearce's rescue act, and Worcester, arguably Cecil Duckworth RFC, are seeking to dig longer-lasting foundations.

"I've spent 20 years in sports in America. Over there you'd never have a league where six clubs were in intensive care and could go bust at any minute," insists Bristol's chief executive, Nick de Scossa.

Every club, he believes, must be asked to satisfy a rigorous set of off-field criteria before they are allowed anywhere near it. "You have to get everybody to put their money where their mouth is, in advance. That's how you sort the men from the boys."

So who will endure? De Scossa, for one, feels that market forces have only just begun to flex their muscles. "All the franchise stuff I've heard so far has been absolute cobblers. If you are going to open up a Tesco or a Sainsbury's, you look to see if there are the demographics to service that business. In the West Country, Bristol and Gloucester have got it. Bath, if you set it down as a pure business case, would be the one that suffers."

It was in Bristol last summer that the club's former benefactor Arthur Holmes issued one of the more impassioned pleas on behalf of the English club game. "There's no money to be made in professional rugby," he warned. "Once some of the owners realise that, they'll be gone like greased lightning."

It is time for all concerned to worry when more people pay to watch Ross County v Montrose than the Premiership game between London Scottish and Richmond on Saturday. "Gone are the days when people turn up to watch games on a muddy field and are offered a jacket potato and a pint of beer," cried Richmond's Levett in the gung-ho days. He may shortly have to get his wellies dirty again.