Inside the RFU’s war with Championship rugby
The RFU’s plans have been met with huge opposition “Are you watching Bill Sweeney?” was the question tweeted by Coventry RFC to the Rugby Football Union’s chief executive straight after the Midlands club had attracted a stadium-record 5,047 attendance at the Butts Park Arena for their Championship derby with Nottingham last Sunday.
In five words, the sneering taunt summed up the argument raging among a section of England’s most famous and long established clubs.
Sweeney, the £684,000-a-year head honcho at Twickenham, has decided to settle it once and for all, as part of a raft of decisions to made on the game in England in 2024 and beyond.
Coventry as a club, city and region are neatly symbolic of the issues at hand.
The club was a power in rugby’s amateur days, fielding England players galore, and they were placed in the top division when formal leagues began in 1987. But “Cov” was eliminated in the first season and never returned.
Playing in the Second Division Championship, they now receive a small amount of RFU central funding, and if they develop top players, they see them go to Premiership clubs, a semi-autonomous league heavily funded by the RFU – largely because that’s where the english people is players and academies based.
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What should be the role of the league under the Premier League? Will this 5,047-strong Coventry squad prove there is a market for a professional second tier, and if so, how should it be formed? i has seen the RFU’s 16-page “growth strategy” for “Tier Two”.
It includes an estimate drawn partly from market research that the Championship has “a total potential market and audience of… two million adults in England”.
The strategy includes many a solid suggestion alongside other claims that are more ambiguous.
There is a timescale for growth of eight years, and i understands the RFU’s contribution would be in the low tens of millions of pounds, as they wish only to support but not replace the willingness of clubs and their backers to invest. There would be up to 14 teams in the new Tier Two, and where the RFU and the 11 clubs currently in the Championship have fallen out is how to find them.
The RFU intend to request “expressions of interest” in January, launch a selection process in February, and confirm the selected clubs in June.
They expect to hear from clubs, universities and institutions, and the RFU’s director of performance rugby Conor O’Shea says the expressions of interest should be open to all, to make “the best, most sustainable league”.
The 11 Championship clubs meanwhile want it to be first-past-the-post from their league and those below.
How much a participating team would have to spend will be partly determined by the minimum operating standards that the RFU say the Championship clubs are helping to set.
The RFU say the existing 11 will have first dibs, and they could be joined by the top three teams from the third division (National One) to make 14 for the inaugural year in 2025.
But it is clear the RFU expect some of the 11 to duck out, and settle for the National Leagues, so the new league would require others to fill it. Or it might not happen at all – which looks like brinkmanship by Sweeney and company. The Championship clubs see the tender process as allowing the likes of Wasps back in, having not earned their place on the field.
. They made a renewed rejection of the tender process in a statement last Friday, and have promised a contrary proposal in January. But perhaps those outside a particular club are more fascinated by the argument between a managed system and sporting meritocracy.
English club rugby is based on ownership – own your club (either as a majority benefactor or member), own your country (if you can) and own your players.
This is most evident in the dominant league, the Premiership, which has 10 shareholder clubs – up from 13 under Wasps, London Irish and Worcester’s management last season – plus venture capitalists CVC, which has a commercial interest.
Over time, a chasm in central funding has developed between the Premier League and the rest, which in turn has created obstacles to clearing all the clubs aspiring to the top – which basically means a group of star players in England and elsewhere.
The European Cup and scheduled Club World Cups pit the best teams from other countries against each other and appear on television every week.
But a 10-team Premiership does not meet all the elements of player development and geographical distribution that the RFU is expected to deliver – and they have a board. Will RFU level two help square that circle? Can we somehow start an era
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