The Victims of Success ?

Come on you Royals!
By Griff
January 12 2006

At time of writing our co-tennants Reading FC are sitting pretty at the top of the Coca Cola Football League Championship (Division 2 in old money). They have 69 points from 28 games, their closest rivals, Sheffield United have 62 and the rest trail by at least 18 points.

It's looking very good for the Royals to gain promotion into the Football Premiership. How would this affect London Irish ?

First let me state this for the Royals' supporters. I'm not saying they're definitely up, we all know how fickle sport can be and that larger margins have been squandered. I think most of the Irish support is pleased for Reading and hope they can go all the way. This article has been put together to answer the many people who have either posted or posed questions about the issue of sharing a ground with a promoted club.

The first question is always, "Can a rugby side share a stadium with a Barclays Premiership Football Club ?"

Short answer, yes. I had to do a lot of digging to find something written down and eventually got to the Premiership Rules and Regulations. It's an Adobe Acrobat (pdf) file available to registered users on the Barclays Premiership site and it's quite long (180 pages) but the relevant section is (I'm told by the nice people at the BP website) I4:

"Ground Sharing
4. No Club shall have or enter into a ground-sharing agreement unless the agreement contains a legally enforceable provision to the effect that the playing of the Club’s League Matches shall always take precedence over the activities of the other party to the agreement."

Fairly clear then, as long as Reading have (everyone's favourite phrase) "Primacy of Tenure" then our ground-share agreement won't affect their eligibilty to enter the top-flight. We all know they have and that's not likely to change so we should be fine.

There have been rumours flying about that the BP's attitude to ground-sharing was changing but I can't find any record of it (except unattributed hearsay on a load of public fora) and they lovely people on the BP website who pointed me to the current regulations didn't mention it.

Second question, "I've heard that the Madejski can have an upper tier added, is this true?"

This is completely true. The MadStad's foundations were built to support a larger structure and the design specifically included the ability to add another tier. It's unclear as to whether this is on all four stands but it would mean a bigger stadium for the big matches.

John Madejski was reported earlier this week to have said that he would "consider" adding a tier to the East stand if Reading survived their first season in the BP so this development wouldn't happen until at least 2007. Luckily the football and rugby off-seasons pretty much collide so the impact would be limited.

Another consideration would be that, I think most people are aware, the current MadStad ticket office has a few problems. On the rare occasion I've had to ring in there has been an awful lot of waiting about in queues to talk to someone. If RFC went up the demand for tickets would be much higher and the current system would simply not keep up. I'm sure both RFC and Irish are working hard to resolve these problems, they'll need to get it right to avoid a lot of unhappy customers.