In a perfect world the countdown to a new season would be all about the rugby. Can Northampton Saints and Glasgow Warriors successfully defend their hard-earned respective Premiership and United Rugby Championship titles? If not, who will be their biggest threats? And which individuals have the ability to exchange relative anonymity for a place in Andy Farrell’s British & Irish Lions squad next summer?
The weather is half-decent, the pitches firm, the scent of freshly cut grass and embrocation reliably evocative. There is just one sizeable drawback, as every professional club executive can testify. Primarily, it is all about the price tag and whether or not the sums stack up. Out in the real world it is less a case of smelling the Deep Heat than absorbing the financial pain.
If anyone needed proof it came late last week. An eve-of-season board meeting would usually be about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s to ensure the best chance of a shiny, happy campaign. Instead, the Premiership’s power brokers have been debating whether or not a British & Irish men’s league may be a better way forward. Efforts have since been made to pour cold water on the story but there is rarely smoke in rugby without some glowing embers.
Well-placed insiders have been offering up a simple three-letter explanation: CVC. In normal circumstances, the private equity company that splashed so much cash for the privilege of investing in rugby union six years ago would now be poised to check out. It did not get involved to chat endlessly about scrums and mauls; the chief priority is a significant return on that investment. As things stand, that has yet to materialise.
Recently, even the supposed pinnacle of the club game, the Champions Cup, has failed to tempt England’s most established broadcasters. Good luck to Premier Sports but awarding it the rights does not obviously solve the competition’s steady slippage in profile. And what happens if Sky, TNT Sports, Discovery and the terrestrial channels decide they can do without the expense of cross-border club rugby indefinitely? Little wonder the Premiership’s next television contract, once TNT’s deal expires in 2026, is already concentrating minds.
There is one twinkling solution in clear view. A bespoke rugby channel, broadcasting all the best club games worldwide, with millions of subscribers keen to register. CVC, which has stakes in the Premiership and the URC, would be ignoring the marketing elephant in the room if it did not at least float the idea of a simplified offering. “Sign up for the best league in the world” – even more competitive on a weekly basis than the Top 14 – would be a useful tagline.
All of which fuels the British & Irish League speculation. Twenty-five years ago, in the earliest days of professionalism, it would have made even more sense. Work together to stabilise the player wage “arms race”, dovetail the fixture list with the Five/Six Nations and save several decades of angst? Hurrah! These days things are far more logistically tangled and complex.
Let’s be brutally frank. Would any resultant “Super League” be a massive improvement or shift the dial in terms of its financial uplift? Compared with the increasingly buoyant and eye-catching Top 14, Newcastle v Dragons or Connacht v Sale on a Friday night would hardly be a game-changer. A conference set-up works in American sport but would it capture neutral imaginations here? And what about the South Africans and the Italians, both of whom are being sworn in as full voting partners of the URC next year?
Speaking to representatives of both leagues this week, there is certainly little sense of breathless excitement or talk of a magic bullet. Unless, maybe, the various national unions could all be persuaded that the still-lucrative Six Nations – particularly in the event of the old European Cup faltering – would be stronger as a result. Then, maybe, there could be a virtuous circle: the fixture list would dovetail more effectively, the best players would play in bigger and better club games and those who only watch the international game could be more easily enticed.
For that to happen, though, a deft scalpel will have to be applied to both existing leagues. If the broadcasters are ever going to be persuaded to pay top dollar again in an uncertain market, they will want to be showcasing the best players on the Continent, not also-ran sides full of journeymen. Some of the scenarios being discussed would also involve eight English sides. In that event, which two would drop out? On that subject, how many competitive men’s professional sides can Wales sustain?
Enough. History has long since taught us that self-interest is rugby officialdom’s guiding light. This instantly renders the idea of an Anglo-Welsh league – which would benefit relatively few and dilute everyone’s share of the central pie – a non-starter for the English and makes a British & Irish league similarly unlikely for the foreseeable future.
Admittedly, there has been some tentative interest from Ireland but, ultimately, the lessons of rugby’s past echo loudest. Without an intense whiff of historic rivalry and, ideally, fervent away support, no amount of televisual magic will generate the same emotional pull. Which is why, as the Prem and the URC prepare to kick off on Friday night with Bath hosting Northampton in a repeat of last season’s final and Edinburgh entertaining their old rivals Leinster, we should all be extremely careful what we wish for. – Guardian
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