Welsh rugby is set for a significant shake-up with a 10-team league, sitting between the regional and semi-professional game, expected to get given the go ahead for the 2024/25 season.
The Welsh Rugby Union has been in talks with its key stakeholders for months in a bid to find a way to bridge the gap between the semi-professional game and the professional game.
Originally, the plan was to have an elite eight-team league but they have reached a compromise of 10 clubs. Crucially, this new competition will be under the control of the Professional Game Board, not the Community Game board.
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The league will likely include the majority of clubs in the Welsh Premiership who will have to apply for a licence to participate in this competition. WalesOnline understands each club will receive £110,000 of funding from the WRU but they will have to prove they have a business model to match it.
Each club will have to partner up with a region with Cardiff, Dragons, Ospreys and Scarlets deciding, in conjunction with the WRU, what sides are selected. If there wasn't a link up with a region it would turn into a multi-purpose competition which is where many claim the Welsh Premiership has failed with some clubs' focus purely on winning and others on developing players.
The purpose of this new competition is to play regional players of varying standards, from academy level to fully professional. There will also be a salary cap and a pyramid system in terms of paying players.
There are many who insist there should be even fewer sides, with eight considered the optimal number, but they have agreed on 10 for now after some clubs claimed they couldn't survive on the number of games an eight-team league would produce. Its purpose is to condense the talent pool, with the regions using it as a consistent and fully-resourced development tool.
We have also been told the possibility of a cross-border competition is being explored but that is in its infancy.
This competition will have a huge knock-on effect on the community game, especially the Welsh Premiership. With most of its clubs moving up into the PRB-run competition the Welsh Premiership will remain under the control of the CGB as the pinnacle of the community game. The Premiership will be a 14-team league, and given 10 sides will have been pulled out of it, most clubs in the second-tier Championship will get promoted. This will be like a domino effect at every level of the community game.
"We need a vehicle to develop the highest potential rugby players to bridge the gap between the academies, the regional, and international game," WRU interim Performance Director Huw Bevan told WalesOnline this week when asked about plans to bridge the professional and semi-professional game.
"There's been an enormous amount of work done with regards to that. It has been another collaborative project between the WRU, the WRU's community department, the performance department, the regions, and the Premiership clubs themselves.
"We are pretty close. It's not over the line yet although we are pretty close to delivering something which will deliver what our primary purpose is, which is something where our high performance players get an opportunity to compete at an intensity that is going to prepare them for the next step. This will sit between the top end of the community game and the United Rugby Championship.
"Whatever the format of our new competition is, North Wales is going to be an integral part of it. This is a hotbed of rugby activity in Wales especially in the Women’s and Girls game and I can't stress enough how important the WRU's hugely positive relationship with Conwy council is."
There is still some red tape to get through, and there is a precedent in Welsh rugby of things falling through at the last minute, but WalesOnline have been told it is very likely to get given the green light in the coming weeks.
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