Premiership Rugby is a mess

Go back ten years or so, and it was a regular feature for players from around the world to sign for Premiership clubs saying it was the best league in the world. I can’t recall anybody saying that for quite some time now, but do feel free to point me in the direction of any such comments if there have been any recently. Since those glory days it has been gradually devalued, and now it is actually falling apart. Worcester have gone, even if the formality of the death certificate hasn’t actually been signed yet. Wasps are now making all the same noises that Worcester were making six weeks ago, and I cannot see how they can possibly survive. Now London Irish have joined in the chorus of “Everything is just fine, honest, we are just putting the finishing touches to our finances, or ahem, lack of them.” What a sorry mess.

The wheels started to come off a long time ago, and it all falls at the feet of those who run PRL for their utter lack of vision & any attempts to police the league. The salary cap started to creep up and up, as the super-rich clashed egos, each wanting their club to win the silverware so they could have their grinning faces photographed next to the trophies. The gap between rich & poor began to widen, and the one factor that made the league so competitive and watchable, started to be fatally eroded.

The league used to be exciting to be a part of. Any club could beat any other. New clubs could burst into the league from the Championship and take on the biggest teams. It was heavy duty stuff, exciting to watch, and world class. Teams were fairly evenly matched, or at least the smaller clubs still stood a chance of beating the bigger clubs, so every game was intense, even if at the end of each season it was still likely to be the usual suspects at the top, and the usual suspects at the bottom. There was always the sense that with a favourable wind, any team could finish top four.

But money talks, and within the cosy club that is PRL, money talks louder than anything else. The big spenders wanted to spend even more, so PRL in a pathetic display of weakness, caved in. The salary cap went up and up until it became simply out of reach of many clubs, and then the farce of marquee players began. Now the super-rich could buy the best players in the world and just laugh at the salary cap. This wasn’t enough however, and in 2015, clubs were allowed two marquee players.

This move was whitewashed as being essential for clubs to compete in Europe, but 1). That is outside the remit of PRL, their primary role is to manage the Premiership, not Europe, and 2). That is complete bollocks. It was just a mechanism for the rich clubs to further outspend each other, which benefits the league as a whole not one jot, and it widened the gap between the bigger and smaller clubs, thus destroying the one thing that made the league exciting and so addictively watchable – the ability of a David to beat Goliath on any given weekend, in any game. In essence, the marquee players just became a further increase in the salary cap for those able to afford it, and dangerously, also for those not able to afford it.

As if that wasn’t damaging enough, the loss of control over club budgets began the process that is now killing so many clubs, and makes a mockery of the league. Clubs who could afford to spend to the limit did so with abandon, but so did some clubs who couldn’t afford to spend to the limit. Recent events at Worcester are shrouded in financial obfuscation on a level that makes your head hurt, but even if the club has not been asset stripped by a couple of crooks as many allege, it has still been losing colossal amounts of money, year after year, with a squad that even a cursory look at their finances proves they simply cannot afford.

The Premiership Rugby Money Tree.

The ultimate victims of the abandonment of any pretence at financial responsibility by PRL however has to be Wasps. Most of us could see way back in 2015 when they moved to Coventry, ditched their London brand, and indulged in an orgy of spending on a stadium and a squad to rival the best, that it would end in disaster. They have reportedly lost £10m per year in a bid for Premiership success, with no sign that this madness will ever be brought under control. Now the money has run out, gone. They cannot pay HMRC, they cannot pay back the bonds that they should have repaid months ago, yet they will trot out an impressive team to play Saints on Sunday as if everything is fine and dandy.

Surely this is cheating on a grand scale. Clubs who cannot afford to spend such a vast amount each year on players, coaches, and everything else that goes to make one team stronger than another, are being spanked by a team that shouldn’t be allowed to exist at that level. Saracens were quite righty punished for overspending, and everybody booed and jeered as they were sent down into Purgatory for a year, but are Wasps really any different? It amounts to the same thing, unfairly creating a stronger team than others can offer in response.

Much more serious than being unfair however, is that this overspending is pushing other clubs to try to keep up, so they get caught up in the spending binge too. London Irish are the latest to announce that all is well, they just need to borrow more money to stay afloat, nothing wrong, honest guv. What will PRL do if the worst happens and they lose all three of those troubled clubs from the league? How will that affect income across the remaining clubs? If fully professional rugby isn’t viable now, it certainly won’t be viable if so much smaller.

PRL are heading for a desperate situation, and doing nothing is no longer an option. No longer can they arrogantly set massive hurdles to prohibit promotion into their precious league, and try to charge the promoted club an exorbitant amount for the P shares that the club will need to survive. Viciously sinking the promoted club into unsustainable debt before they even play a game, as they tried to do to Ealing, shows just how removed from reality the people who run professional rugby in England are. That reality, is that now they may desperately need more than one club to fill gaps in the league, so those obstacles will have to go, as many of us have been saying for years.

So what can be done? Well firstly, get rid of all the people who have allowed this mess to be created, and replace them with people who understand the finances and structure of competitive sport. Give them one clear focus; to make Premiership Rugby a first class and sustainable league. No nonsense about competing in Europe, no smoke screens of needing to pay a few players massive amounts of money, supposedly for the good of the game. Get rid of the ridiculous marquee player loophole, take the trouble to find out what the salary cap should realistically be for all clubs in the league to be sustainable, and make all clubs deliver a sustainable business plan every year that actually stands up to scrutiny.

Some clubs will squeal like stuck pigs, saying they cannot compete in Europe. Well tough doo doos. That isn’t the responsibility of PRL. If the European big boys competition is financially out of control, that is for them to sort out, not PRL. Rugby finances are not just tough in England right now, but also in Scotland and Wales, and if the European league becomes so imbalanced that it no longer works, that is something they will have to sort out themselves. Nobody will want to watch rich French clubs walking all over everybody else year after year, so natural market forces will kill it off unless the people who run that competition take action to make it competitive again. Whatever happens in the rest of Europe is not the responsibility of PRL. They need to focus on sorting out their own league, and nothing else.

What actually happens when the salary cap is reduced? If you listen to the nonsense talked by those who constantly lobby to be able to spend more and more each year, you would think the game would collapse, but that is utter nonsense. The game survived quite well for over a century without players being paid at all, so clearly this is tosh. No, what actually happens is that a very small number of players stop being paid a very large amount of money. The vast majority of club players remain unaffected by the games of rich men. Clubs need a solid core of good squad players, so they will continue to be employed to do what they are good at, and some studies have shown that reducing the salary cap removes a few superstars, but actually benefits good squad players, the ones who are the backbone of any club, whether the superstars are there or not. These are the genuinely undervalued players, caught between the younger or fringe players, and the overpaid big name players.

Worcester Warriors have gone, lost from the Premiership, and as things stand, I doubt they can ever come back. Just take a look at the comments from their supporters regarding new ownership. Time and time again they repeat the mantra that they need somebody with deep pockets.

What?

Really?

What they need is somebody to build a sustainable club, and also a Premiership that they can return to that they can compete in, and can be promoted to without being pre-loaded with huge amounts of debt. I think I just described the league that Worcester Warriors were promoted to almost two decades ago, then known as the Zurich Premiership, and it was seen by many as the best league in the world. Now it is the Gallagher Premiership, and is a sorry parody of that league, and in steep decline. The people who have been responsible for that decline, for the fudging, the bargaining, the pampering of egos and the complete lack of focus or vision for the league as a whole, all have to go, and they need to go now.

Who should replace them? I don’t know, but I do know that not everybody in PRL is responsible for its collapse, so maybe it is up to them to propose the way forward. Whatever they end up doing, they need to do it quickly, because PRL has been rudderless for a long time now, and so far has managed to float along through calm waters, but now it has hit the rocks, and there is the very real possibility that it could sink.