R360 appears to be many things. A predator, a disrupter, a sporting corporate raider. And possibly a liberator and agent of change.
Money talks and players around the world are listening.
This week, Australian media reported that a high-profile Rugby League player, Zac Lomax, was close to signing with R360 for an estimated €1.7 million. Several other world-class league players are also rumoured to have been offered staggering sums to join the new organisation.
Ireland’s November squad: valuable rotation or more of the same?
The tactics of R360 are straight out of the playbook written by the late Australian media magnate Kerry Packer. The majority of rugby supporters were not born when Packer, the owner of TV station Channel Nine, created World Series Cricket (WSC). WSC was such a runaway success that it completely rewired the status quo in the cricket world of the 1970s.
READ MORE
In the year before the launch of WSC, Packer’s representatives had contracted the best players in the world by offering them massive amounts of money. The strategy was based on a simple principle that Packer once voiced to a room full of shareholders who were reluctant to sell their company. He famously told them: “There is a little bit of the whore in all of us. Gentlemen, what is your price?” He walked out of the room owning the company.
Packer proved that in sporting revolutions, whoever has the most money wins. If R360 has the financial clout that it claims to have, then unions around the world have much to be concerned about.
The current state of rugby has many similarities to the dysfunctional environment that opened the door to the WSC in the late 1970s and the rugby wars of 1995. Compared to golf, soccer, NFL, NBA, tennis and Formula One, rugby’s leading players are being paid a fraction of the money they generate.
Added to this is the chaotic scheduling of the global rugby calendar, with player welfare being low on the list of priorities. The refusal of the French Top 14 and English Premiership clubs to reduce the number of games in their domestic competitions and align with a universally agreed upon calendar for both hemispheres remains a problem World Rugby appears incapable of solving.
For decades, players and coaches have been calling for reform that currently forces referees to award upwards of 25 penalties per match. We still see the outcome of games being determined by questionable technical penalties. This is partly caused by the system that evaluates our referees’ performances. Referees are marked down if they fail to penalise minor technical infringements. They are not given any credit for the quality of the match they produce. So in turn, our officials take no responsibility for how their adjudication influences the flow and quality of the game they referee.
All of these problems – and many more – combine to produce matches with ball-in-play times as low as 28 minutes. We have a situation that continues to frustrate and alienate many supporters of the game.
What makes this scenario even more exasperating is that the world’s leading teams are producing spectacular, engrossing rugby. We just need more of it. Twenty-eight minutes of play from an 80-minute match is an intolerable absurdity.
This has created an environment fertile for insurrection. Even some leaders within our game are expressing similar sentiments.
Phil Waugh, Rugby Australia’s chief executive, was quoted this week as saying: “I think there’s an appreciation that the game needs some disruption. I think it’s been a big frustration for spectators, certainly in our market, around the way the game is officiated and some of the restrictions around laws and how we make the game more entertaining. I think there’s definitely been an appetite to disrupt and we’re seeing that come through R360.”
Several years ago I wrote that rugby was ripe for a rival competition and an internal revolution if there was a consortium with pockets deep enough to power a global competition. Those observations were laughed at. Today, not many inside rugby’s leading unions are laughing.
The moral aspects of money sourced from Saudi Arabia remains highly contentious. Not in doubt, though, is the sheer amount of money available.
The world’s leading rugby nations have threatened that any of their players who join R360 will not be selected for their national teams. Ironically, many players from the Pacific Islands already have club contracts in France and England that unofficially stop them from playing for their national team.
Peter V’landys, chairman of the Australian Rugby League Commission, this week threatened players and their agents who sign with R360 with a 10 year ban. While the legality of that threat is already being questioned by the Rugby League Players Association, it is a sign that Australian Rugby League is in panic mode.
The reaction from Mark Spoors, joint chief executive of R360, was measured.
“Recent announcements, sadly, have been anticipated,” he said. “History shows that when athletes are offered free choices and given fresh opportunities for them and their families, threats to those sportsmen and women follow.”
R360 will divide the rugby community. When league split from union in Australia, lifelong friendships were broken, fathers were alienated from sons, brothers never spoke again. Similar fractures to long-term relationships occurred during the rugby wars of 1995.
The question that cannot be answered today is: will the disruption and pain of revolution be worth enduring? R360 could vastly improve the game. WSC revolutionised cricket in a good way. Only time will tell if R360 will do the same for our sport.
If R360 does get off the ground, the administrators who refused to reform the game’s laws and allow 80 minutes of entertainment will have to shoulder the blame.
Since the last revolution that ushered in professionalism in 1995, rugby has not been just a sport. The leaders of our game have spent the last 30 years failing to grasp that, at its elite end, rugby is in the business of entertainment.
The creation of R360 has finally brought that reality crashing into boardrooms at the highest echelons of the sport.
