Rugby union is not the only sport struggling to navigate a fast-changing world but this has been an eventful week by anyone’s standards. From proposals which would cut off Pacific Islands rugby at the knees to the world’s leading players questioning the priorities of those in high places, the professional game’s tectonic plates are shifting on a daily basis.
No wonder the mobile phone belonging to Nigel Melville, the Rugby Football Union’s acting chief executive, has been in meltdown. When he completes his handover to Bill Sweeney, the latter will need a strong constitution and a super-sized in-tray. The future of the international game, the domestic promotion and relegation argument, picking the next England coach, improving the union’s finances – even Hercules would be seeking a lie-down in a darkened room.
On Thursday, for example, Melville and the RFU’s chairman, Andy Cosslett, were in Exeter to promote England’s game against Italy next Saturday in the women’s Six Nations, having spent the previous day with Cornwall rugby officials and paying a visit to Perranporth RFC, a level-10 club. On Thursday morning there was a meeting with the Exeter chairman, Tony Rowe, to chew over the future structure of the domestic game, in between fielding calls from World Rugby’s chairman, Sir Bill Beaumont, to dissect – yet again – the global state of the union.
None of it is proving smooth or sedate sailing. Melville does not mince his words about the beefed-up Premiership A League – now retitled the Shield – which Rowe firmly supports. “The Premiership has created their own second tier which, in my view, has failed,” he says, flatly. Rowe argues precisely the opposite. “He would say that. I don’t think the Championship works. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”
And therein lies rugby’s never-ending club versus country dilemma. It is similarly tense in Wales’s regions, where the future of Ospreys is under discussion. In England, Melville acknowledges, unanimous agreement on the best way forward is reliably hard to find. “What I’m finding is that we haven’t got a linear pathway, we’ve got a pathway that’s emerged over a period of years without a plan,” he says. “We built a house and we keep on sticking a room on here and there.”
The big questions with which he is wrestling are the product of years of fudged compromise. “Have we got too many professional players? Possibly. Do we need the Premiership Cup? Do we need the A league? Do we need the Championship and the A league? Possibly not. We need one or the other.” And the bigger picture? “We need to pull the whole together. I don’t like this ‘one part of the game is more important than the other’. The whole game is important, for different reasons at different levels.”
Which inevitably raises the thorny subject of Premiership ring-fencing. Melville has previously described this as “wishful thinking” and remains adamant that promotion and relegation will stay in place this season. This is clearly uncomfortable for bottom-placed Newcastle, facing a must-win fixture with Worcester on Sunday, but the regulations were clear in August. There will be no alteration for the 2019-20 season either unless talks bear sufficient fruit in time to be ratified by the RFU council in June.
Melville’s preference would be for the Championship to become the best proving ground for young English players, rather than the A League, saving Premiership sides a chunk of their wage bill and ensuring the underfunded Championship does not wither on the vine. In his view, just talking about ring-fencing in isolation “isn’t going to solve anything”. At times he almost sounds like a chiropractor – “My focus is the alignment of rugby in England” – trying to treat multiple kinks in a long-suffering patient’s spine.
Rowe, though, has a very different vision. A natural-born businessman, he reckons the CVC deal, by which 27% of Premiership Rugby has been sold for £200m, is an absolute game-changer. While Exeter’s rise may remain an inspiration to every promoted club, he thinks the days of anyone emulating the Chiefs are now gone. “What people have got to understand is that money is driving rugby union in England,” Rowe says, bluntly. “Every Premiership club [following the CVC deal] is now worth in excess of £50m. All of a sudden the thing has ring-fenced itself.
“For anyone who wants to come into the Premiership now it’s going to cost them at least £50m to buy into that pot. Then they’ll need a ground. If you start from scratch that’s going to cost you £25m-30m. At Exeter we would like to see a route for any ambitious club that has the facilities on and off the pitch. We would not support a club that almost makes itself bankrupt by chasing a dream. I say to those chairmen: ‘Stop dreaming.’ Professional sport at our level is about reality: you need money and the right facilities.”
It is effectively English rugby’s version of Brexit: a sack of conflicting ideologies, financial imperatives and societal pressures. Melville, about to revert to his role as the RFU’s director of professional rugby, remains optimistic the interwoven issues of competition integrity, player welfare, player development and the sustainability of professional clubs can all be solved.
Rowe, though, senses an endgame is approaching. “I think the CVC deal will be a big sea change – though I haven’t seen a brass farthing yet. The Championship as it is is grossly underfunded and it can’t survive. I also think you’ll see the A League remain, maybe in the form of a major and a minor league. The Premiership, which is about to receive more funding, will survive and get stronger.”
Will he be proved right? The next few weeks of negotiations will certainly be interesting; once the Six Nations is over and the CVC money materialises, there really could be some lively debates on a variety of fronts. For now, even the Jones succession plan is on the back burner.
“It’ll be after the World Cup,” Melville says. “We’re not even talking about it before the World Cup, because we’ve already got a coach contracted for two more years. We don’t need that distraction.”
Rarely, if ever, have rugby’s administrators been busier.