The boss of Northampton believes England’s top clubs play more exciting rugby than the national team and has urged new fans to come and see for themselves.
The battle is on for hearts, minds and bums on seats as union attempts to recover from the darkest period in its history.
Two Premiership clubs have gone bust, rugby’s top brass have just been savaged by a parliamentary committee and England are tanking on the field.
“We have to have a game that’s sustainable, a system that lets clubs survive and then thrive,” said Northampton chief executive Mark Darbon.
Wasps and Worcester have folded and only four Premiership clubs are attracting attendances above pre-pandemic levels.
Northampton is one of them, this week announcing a turnover of £20.8m for the 2021/22 financial year, their highest ever revenue.
Yet the forward-thinking Darbon is not about to get carried away, nor to pretend that without the pandemic Premiership rugby would be in rude health.
“The season before the aggregate loss across Premiership clubs was £45 million or so,” he said. “This model has not been fully firing for a while. We need to address that.
“There are apparently nine million rugby fans in this country. When England are playing in the Six Nations and it’s on terrestrial TV the audiences are massive.
“We only capture a small proportion of that at league level so we’ve got to attract to the Premiership more of those casual rugby fans, steal some of that audience.”
Now is the time to make that pitch given the lack of entertainment for four full houses watching England last month.
“I’m slightly biased here but I think club rugby offers something brilliant - fantastic rugby on your doorstep,” said Darbon, who attended the New Zealand game.
“You buy a ticket for £150, you sit a long way back, it takes you two and a half hours to get out of Twickenham and the rugby I don’t think is anywhere near as exciting as the brand we’re playing here at Saints and the rugby a number of other clubs are playing around the league too.”
How club rugby makes itself sustainable is the million dollar question. Reducing the cost base is one element, which Saints have done with almost 70 per cent of their squad now home-grown.
Another is making a far better fist of selling the product - learning from F1’s Drive to Survive and football’s Welcome to Wrexham to make rugby appeal to a wider audience.
The latter, a Netflix docu-series charting the purchase of the Welsh football club by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, has had a transformative effect.
Their £2 million investment led to a £2.6m Netflix deal, season ticket sales tripling, Wrexham’s social accounts exploding, four kit sponsorship deals and a team on top of the National League.
“How can we be more inventive in rugby to tell some of the great stories we have?” said Darbon. “That’s the challenge now. For us all.”
