The Rugby Football Union has proposed expanding the Premiership to 16 teams – split into two conferences – to resolve the continuing debate over promotion and relegation.
Nigel Melville, the interim RFU chief executive, believes a move towards an American model, dividing the league along geographical boundaries, would answer the long-standing issue of whether to ringfence the Premiership. He also believes doing away with the Premiership Rugby Cup – largely a development competition – and reducing the number of professional players in England would be of long-term benefit.
Jordan Larmour’s try for champions Leinster is a bad break for Bath
“If you expand, you have to go into a conference structure. You would go to 14 or 16 teams. Two eights would give you a true geographic spread,” he said. “Two eights would play home and away, then go into quarters, then go into semis. Then you could justify a proper conference structure with playoffs and fewer games. Do we really need the [Premiership Rugby] Cup? Is it that important?
“If you look at the NFL, they don’t have a cup competition. They focus on their core business. We’ve got nearly 1,200 professional players in the country and maybe the reason is that we’ve got so many competitions going on with elite players. That’s money going out of the game. It’s not going into infrastructure. Maybe we get down to 1,000 or 800 players.”
The Premiership clubs have recently refocused their efforts to ringfence the league, with so many established teams in danger of going down this season. The age-old problem remains, however – there are 13 shareholders (the current Premiership plus London Irish) – but such is the fear among sides such as Bath, Leicester and Northampton of going down that they have considered a push for ringfencing the league at 13.
This would stifle the ambitions of the handful of Championship clubs who want to join the top flight – namely Ealing, Yorkshire Carnegie, Doncaster, Coventry and Cornish Pirates – but Melville’s proposed model would address that issue partially. It would also mean the Premiership clubs would have to divide their shares by 16, rather than 13 as they do now, but with CVC’s £240m impending investment that would be less of stumbling block for the owners.
“You can put things on the agenda,” he said. “You can have those conversations about these issues. With the Premiership we have these chats all the time. The CVC investment could be interesting, and you could start to float ideas – can we do some things better, or differently? You’d have to divide the money by 16, which makes a difference. Sometimes less is more. It’s always about now [for the clubs], or about next week, especially with the league at the moment. But strategic thinking is about looking at the bigger picture and I think we need to do that.”