It is not long before Christmas and the Rugby Football Union’s three wise men are promising gifts. Up to 25 shiny new “enhanced” contracts for Steve Borthwick to offer to a core group of England players over whom the head coach can exert greater control from next season. A revamped Championship of up to 14 teams – to allow for the fast-track return of Wasps, London Irish and Worcester, whose commercial brands are seen as too valuable to let go of – and a player pathway system that will put an end to the stagnation of young talent.
Not before time, Bill Sweeney as chief executive, Conor O’Shea as performance director and Steve Diamond – recruited in an advisory capacity – are outlining their vision for English rugby. A “whole game solution” to a system that is broken, one under which four clubs have gone bust in the last 15 months and one that England reached the World Cup semi-finals in spite of, not because of. There is apparently a “generational” England team coming together and the aim is to be “world leading” across all departments of professional rugby. Optimism abounds.
Sweeney holds the purse strings, O’Shea is the brains of the operation and Diamond the muscle, the straight shooter in the face of the union’s endless bureaucracies. As he says: “All that’s been put in front of me has been subcommittee, subcommittee, subcommittee.” But the three are aligned in their messaging that the professional game partnership (PGP) between the RFU and Premiership Rugby (PRL), still to be finalised but set to kick in next summer, can bring about transformative change.
The enhanced contracts are the most eye-catching part of the PGP. Nearly 30 years after the boat was missed at the dawn of professionalism they are a step towards central contracts, even if a way short of the whole thing. Sweeney describes the previous eight-year agreement as about “access” and England having more of it to their players. He says the PGP is more about “control” and if that sounds Orwellian, the point is that Borthwick has greater input into things such as his players’ conditioning and medical programmes. After this year’s Six Nations he bemoaned how his players were not fit enough and how he lost all control as they went back to their clubs. These contracts are designed to address that.
From the players’ perspective, they are about security. At £160,000 a man – regardless of status in the squad – players could receive significantly more on the previous pro-rata basis of about £23,000 a match but these contracts guarantee earnings regardless of injury. They also avoid a scenario whereby a player hides a minor injury or is afraid to speak his mind for fear of losing that appearance fee. That Henry Arundell shunned the offer of one was a hammer blow but Maro Itoje and Jamie George have been persuaded to accept and the take-up thereafter is likely to be positive. That said, the current degree of uncertainty for some players and clubs with the PGP not yet signed is unhelpful.
Injuries are inevitable so Borthwick will end up using players outside the core 25, but even allowing for a handful for each match-day squad it is worth noting the RFU is expected to make significant savings compared with the previous appearance fee system. You would expect the clubs would want to be financially compensated for ceding a degree of control of their players but the RFU says that is still being worked through.
There are, however, limits to the amount of control Borthwick will have. O’Shea points to conditioning, hints at input into how many and which club matches players may appear in, and talks of centralised performance data and standardised fitness testing. But Borthwick will not, for example, be able to enforce that Harlequins play Marcus Smith at full-back. Already the limits are becoming clear if Sale’s promising prop Asher Opoku-Fordjour is taken as a case study. The RFU sees the 19-year-old as a loosehead, Sale believe he is a tighthead and it is not abundantly clear how that particular circle would be squared.
At least, as part of the RFU’s vision, he will not be spending his weekends sitting in the stands. There is a determination to address the longstanding problem of promising young players struggling for game-time. Hence the plan to cap Premiership squads at about 35 players – though that has already been met with resistance by some clubs who, for example, lean heavily on tie-ups with universities – and supplemented by 12 transitional players. Regular England A matches will also help. “Talent ID is not about spotting talent, it’s about giving talent opportunities and it’s where English rugby has failed miserably,” says O’Shea.
Player development also plays a part in the RFU’s determination to remodel the Championship, even if the desire to reinstate Wasps, Worcester and London Irish seems a more significant driving factor. The Championship clubs have strong reservations about whether the RFU and PRL really have a commitment to promotion and relegation and want the league to be a “meritocracy”, which is shorthand for not wishing to allow three clubs that went bust to be fast-tracked back into the second tier.
They also want to know how much funding they would receive – something the RFU has been unable to answer hitherto and the clubs are not exactly thrilled by what they perceive to be the union’s take-it-or-leave-it attitude. “If we get two clubs that are interested and everybody else says no, then you revert back to the status quo and you lose this opportunity,” says Sweeney. “But we’re not going to invest in something which is uninvestable.”
The tender process to take part in the remodelled second tier is set to begin in February and while the RFU is confident it will have enough interest to proceed, significant hurdles remain.
As so it becomes clear that for all that the RFU is excited by its vision, there are obvious limitations and it is relationships and goodwill between stakeholders, rather than mandates or legislation, that will bring about change. As far as England and the Premiership are concerned, the early signs are good. Borthwick was coming from a low base but anecdotally, he has already been repairing bridges that he found had been burned when he was appointed.
“Steve’s been wise since he’s been in the job,” says Diamond. “Eddie Jones came up to Sale once in however long he was there and his only question was he asked me to play Ben Curry at scrum-half!”
As far as the RFU’s relationship with the Championship clubs, however, clearly there is a way to go.
