The Saracens chairman, Nigel Wray, reflected in his programme notes for the Premiership match against Harlequins at the Olympic Stadium last weekend that he had been involved in professional rugby since its inception in 1995.
“We are still facing the same problems we were 23 years ago,” he wrote. “England and the Premiership clubs are both trying to play at the same time on many occasions throughout the season. There has been 23 years of massive investment by the clubs to take the game where it is today and I believe that the next 10 years will see the club game again grow massively, though it is difficult if you are trying to build Premier rugby into a worldwide brand and you keep giving your best players to someone else.”
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Wray did not mention relegation, which since the start of the Premiership in 1997 has been debated, as it was in the 10 years after the league system was set up in 1987. The old Courage league started with 12 clubs, went up to 13 for three seasons, then down to 10 for three and back to 12 in 1996.
It stayed at 12 for the first season of the Premiership before being increased to 14 the following season. That number lasted one campaign: London Scottish and Richmond went bust and other professional incarnations were sucked into London Irish. The Premiership has remained a 12-club tournament since: although there have been moves to increase it to 14, as a means of ending, or suspending, promotion and relegation, the prospect of spreading central income more thinly kept hands down.
Relegation has become a live issue again as Premiership Rugby plots its course from the 2019 World Cup when the season in Europe will change, starting and ending a month later in October and June. The clubs see the alteration to the calendar as an opportunity to strengthen their position.
They tried, through the Rugby Football Union, to get the two fallow weekends in the Six Nations dropped so the tournament was played in one go, but failed. They have also pushed, again via the RFU, for the length of a Lions tour to be cut, but if that happens it will only be because of a concern that South Africa and Australia do not have the strength to sustain seven non‑Test fixtures with so many of their players abroad.
They have talked about extending the season, continuing to start in September but going through until the end of June, which prompted outrage from players and the threat of a strike. The clubs want to minimise the clashes with international matches on league weekends and so be able to field their strongest sides more often, adding to the training and playing regimes of international players.
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When the clubs were negotiating the first elite player agreement with the RFU, which was signed in 2006, the union offered the carrot of an end to relegation. The Premiership turned it down: the generous parachute payment to the relegated club, as long as it was an established shareholder rather than an occasional visitor like Rotherham, in effect turned it into a 13-club league.
The RFU’s decision to have the top four in the Championship play off to determine the champions could be seen as a response to that; it certainly delayed Bristol’s return and provided the means for Exeter to rise. That system ended last summer, but the Premiership now wants an end to relegation, at least for a fixed period.
The tournament has grown to the point where there are very few Championship clubs who have either the facilities or the financial means to make the leap. The second tier is not funded adequately, as it is in France. Clubs who appeared occasionally in the top flight in the past will not be repeating the experience: London Welsh have reverted to an amateur club, Rotherham are marooned at the bottom of the Championship, a division in which Bedford, Richmond and London Scottish are content to remain.
Only two teams have challenged meaningfully for this season’s Championship: the leaders Bristol and Ealing Trailfinders, who trail by 13 points with four matches left. If Bristol are promoted at the expense of London Irish, the Premiership will be made up of clubs who all have primacy of tenure at their grounds.
They will all be able to grow financially in a way Irish, who rent Reading Football Club’s stadium and so generate no income from it outside match days, cannot. The clubs have to persuade the RFU to back them over relegation because it is part of the elite player agreement and can only be changed bilaterally.
It gives the union the chance to push for more rest periods for the England squad: without the spectre of relegation, some clubs will be drifting towards the end of a season, like Harlequins and Northampton, who supplied seven players to this year’s Six Nations campaign. It may even prompt a discussion about style of play and an emphasis on skill.
The agreement has worked in the last 12 years in the sense that the scars of the decade before, when threats of court action were commonplace, have not reopened; but the two sides are coming at it from opposite directions and compromise will only hold them together for so long.
Wray said he could see a time when rugby union became like football with supporters more interested in their clubs than their national side. The clubs have played a clever tactical game, which one day may translate to the pitch, over the last 12 years, accruing power and a measure of independence. The next step involves having an influence on the international game.
The RFU needs to show resolve over relegation, although having been party to a grossly underfunded Championship, it induced ring-fencing. The clubs point out, rightly, how much they have done for the game in 23 years in terms of investment, profile and facilities, but their focus should be on the field and making the Premiership a tournament for players so that more of the newcomers who are tempted to watch a game at venues such as the Olympic Stadium or St James’s Park become regulars.
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