A casual viewer of English rugby might consider this season notable for the World Cup at the start of it, but the really meaty exchanges for the future of the sport in the country will take place off-stage. The Professional Game Agreement, an eight-year deal between the Rugby Football Union and Premier Rugby, is up for renewal in the summer. Negotiations are ongoing.
The whispers have it that hybrid contracts for certain England internationals will be initiated as a means of sharing the players’ salaries between club and country. This is a huge question, particularly if you are a director of rugby trying to weigh up so much uncertainty around finances, recruitment and, simply, the state of mind of your players.
The England captain, Owen Farrell, has just decided he needs a break from the international game. Another recent captain, Courtney Lawes, has retired from it for good. The players are weary – and now more and more are being lured elsewhere, because the finances of English rugby are even more exhausted.
“The RFU do have to step in if they want their best players to stay in the country,” said Lawes. “The central contract thing probably is a good idea. You need to pay the best players what they are worth, which is whatever someone is willing to pay for them. So if places like France or Japan will pay X amount for you and nobody in this country will, then it is what it is. Players are playing for such a short amount of time and it can all end at any minute, so you have to make the money you can while you are playing. While the economy is what it is in the Premiership, compared to France, why would anyone stay?”
With the demise of three Premiership clubs last season, the balance could not be finer. Partly fuelled by that, there are more English players, many of them full internationals, plying their trade abroad than ever. Lawes’s teammate at Northampton Lewis Ludlam is the subject of speculation about a move to Toulon. Which makes life more than complicated for his director of rugby, as he tries to draw up plans for recruitment and salary-cap management.
“It’s a real headache,” said Phil Dowson, Northampton’s director of rugby, “because it’s a moving target the whole time. The salary cap’s going up and down. We’re not entirely certain what that’s going to be in two, three, four years’ time. So you don’t have a long-term view of what that looks like. You don’t have one on what the England landscape looks like. All that uncertainty makes it really tricky. I’ve found it the most complex part of the job.”
All a director of rugby wants is for each variable to settle on something resembling clarity. The players will also feel able to make clearer decisions about whether they stay to play for their country or maximise their earnings elsewhere. The question of the salary cap will play into that, too, but Dowson is wary of a blind rush to raise it, provoked by largesse across the Channel.
“What we can’t have is a situation where in an arms race clubs are going bust,” said Dowson. “London Irish had a very, very good squad. For that club to be no longer around is very, very sad. If you drive the salary cap up to compete with the French, and you put pressure on these clubs, it becomes very difficult. We’ve got to try to avoid that at all costs.”
All the more pressure, then, on those around the negotiating table. Pressure to come up with the right solutions, and pressure to do so quickly.
