There is one passage in the sales pitch for R360, rugby union’s new breakaway league, everyone ought to be able to agree on. “Clubs around the world are feeling the strain, and are being propped up by the international game,” the proposal goes, and it is true there is not a single team in the Premiership making a profit,seven of the 10 owe more than they own. Worldwide, at least 12 professional sides have gone out of business in recent years. It is just a shame about the rest of it, which has more holes than Newcastle’s defence.
R360 is brought to us by the team ofMike Tindall, Stuart Hooper, whose management career at Bath was one seven-year lesson in the Peter Principle that organisation’s tend to promote people to the point of their incompetence, player agent Mark Spoors and John Loffhagen, who had a 13-month spell as the chief legal adviser for LIV golf. Their idea is to create two new superclub competitions, one between eight male sides, one between four female sides, which would sit above the club structure. They would compete in a 16-match season in two windows from April to June and then August to September, with rounds taking place in a different city each week.
The words are cheap, but what they are promising sounds very expensive. They say they want to hire the 360 best players in the world on double their salaries, mention São Paulo, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles as potential venues and plan to run “a week of live events”, including gigs before every game. Investors from the Premier League, F1 and NFL are said to have “expressed interest”, and “dozens” of players have apparently signed letters of intent. All of which will be good for nothing but hamster bedding unless the organisers can fulfil their end of the deal and raise all the necessary capital by September.
There is (there always is) a lot of ready talk about emulating the runaway success of the Indian Premier League, which is built on the support of the largest single-sport market on the planet, and LIV golf, a competition launched by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as a screw-you to the PGA Tour after they refused to allow their players to compete in the existing tournaments. It is amazing what you can do when you have a billion fans with no worthwhile domestic competition to watch or the backing of a trillion-dollar petrochemical fund run by a man with a grudge.
What rugby does have, according toa Nielsen report from 2021, is 800m supporters worldwide. That is 800m supporters who like the game more or less the way it is and don’t necessarily want to tune in to a match between two newly minted teams designed by committee, see their favourite players creamed off from club rugby by a rival competition or ruled out of the next Test because they are playing in a domestic game that clashes with southern hemisphere internationals scheduled to take place in the August-September window.
That is if anyone who makes the hop across to the new competition is even allowed to carry on playing for their country. Right now, anyone who signs up would probably be ineligible to play for England unless the “exceptional circumstances” clause was triggered. That won’t happen unless World Rugby votes in favour of the enterprise and that won’t happen unless the unions are on board and all the anti-doping and insurance regulation issues are resolved (all of which, you can be sure, would happen surprisingly quickly if R360 can persuade PIF to spend a few of their spare billions on all this).
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Unless that happens, it seems the large part of the money is supposed to come from, well, us, the paying public. Last May,Tindall talked it all throughwith his former Gloucester teammate Mark Foster, who went on to become an executive at LIV, on an episode of his podcast, The Good, the Bad and the Rugby. Tindall’s main complaint is that rugby is not extracting enough money from its fans. Foster explains that a new business model could conceivably involve charging £75 a ticket, and “£100 a day easy on food and beverages” so by the time you have bought your new team jersey “everyone there is spending three-to-five hundred pounds” at the match.
It’s worth a listen, not least because they say so much right about what is wrong with the game. Tindall absolutely has a point when he says that piecemeal change, when repeated tweaks are made to the existing game, have not worked and that something more radical thanthe Club World Cupis needed. But he has a long way to go, and a lot of money to find, to begin to persuade anyone this is it. You do not need to be a medical expert to know someone is sick, but it sure helps to be one when you’re trying to find a cure.