Muddled expansion plans are latest example of elite’s disjointed thinking
Owen Slot
Chief Rugby Correspondent
Tuesday January 19 2021, 12.01am, The Times
It was with some surprise that we reported in these pages yesterday that the Gallagher Premiership is considering expanding from its current status as a 12-team league to one of 14. Yes, at a point in time when the money is running out, when Covid-19’s daily influence is burrowing a bigger hole into the finance of sport and “belt-tightening” is the cliché scraping into every conversation, rugby has decided to grow.
It might be counterintuitive, but let’s go with it anyway. Put it another way: if you are the Premiership and you wanted to expand the league, where would you expand to?
You could start your research with Exeter Chiefs and ask what made them the last great expansion success. Part of the answer would be the geography: the fact that Devon was a rugby hotbed and there was no competing Premiership club for miles.
Or you could look at Wasps, a London club whose nomadic search for a home and a fanbase took them from Sudbury to Loftus Road and then High Wycombe before their own project analysis showed them that the place their roots would find the most favourable earth was actually Coventry.
Thus informed, your rugby heatmap would probably indicate that the place Premiership rugby should next look to drop anchor is Sevenoaks in Kent. Or Cornwall, where there is already an ambitious project under way. Or, of course, Yorkshire, though that has been tried and failed.
The answer that no one would come up with is Ealing in west London. Ealing is six miles from Harlequins and three from London Irish’s brand new home in Brentford. This is a rugby congestion zone. It is six years since Ealing secured their promotion to the Greene King IPA Championship, yet their average crowd is about 800 and to play in the Premiership, they would need to move to a bigger ground, which would probably be Loftus Road and that would mean they were starting an experiment that Wasps moved on from 19 years ago.
The Premiership wants to be big, noisy, exciting. It also cringes at the last time London Welsh went up with their teeny crowds (which were three times bigger than Ealing get now) and knows that Ealing could be another embarrassment.
This is not intended to be insulting to Ealing, who are building really solid foundations. A few years back, they were frequently dismissed as fly-by-night wannabes bankrolled by owner Mike Gooley, the founder of the Trailfinders travel business, who would come crashing down once Gooley’s benefaction had been exhausted.
That mud no longer sticks. They have a new(ish) academy in place that is twinned with Brunel University. They are advertising for a women’s team head coach and for a personal development and transition manager. They are serious.
Finally, too, it seems the wheels are moving in their favour. The Premiership clubs have all but agreed that there will be no relegation this season and that they will expand to a 13-team league after the likely promotion of Saracens next season. That has long been on the cards.
What has not, though, is the potential to go from 13 on to 14. This is clearly feasible: if you go up to a 13-team league, then you have immediately added four more weekends and you require no further weeks in the calendar to then increase to 14.
So here are two versions of the new-look Premiership: the 13-team league, where every team gets two blank weekends, which would clearly be better for welfare, or the 14-team league which, it turns out, may be best for each team’s pocket.
This is the nub of it. If Ealing want to be fully-fledged equal shareholders in the Premiership, then it will probably cost Gooley £20 million.
As defined by CVC’s evaluation, £20 million is the value of a 14th share and the clubs will insist that Gooley has to buy his way in. So here is why Ealing may finally get to the Premiership: because every other Premiership club will suddenly be £1.5 million better off.
Conversely, here is the reason why Ealing may still never go up. In order to be allowed to play in the Premiership, there is a list of minimum standards criteria that a club is obliged to meet — like floodlights, stadium capacity and medical facilities. The clubs, though, are now considering adding another: an average minimum crowd size. That could keep Ealing out for good.
Meanwhile, the absolute priority is to get Saracens back in. England need Saracens back in so that their star players — Owen Farrell et al — can be playing Premiership rugby again. The other clubs actually do want Saracens back too because, simply, the competition is so much more worse without them.
The trouble here is that, because of Covid-19, the Championship competition cannot start. Saracens, Ealing and Doncaster Knights are able to play their own mini-competition because they have paid for their own testing regimes. Other clubs can’t afford to bring their players back off furlough, let alone pay for testing.
Even though there are promises of a government winter survival package, the Championship clubs still haven’t heard how big it will be or when they will get it. It is less than six weeks until the proposed season starts, yet some clubs have actually stopped training due to Covid. Others have large numbers of players not training because they are on furlough.
Indeed, they believe they would lose more money by bringing their players back off furlough and starting to play again with no income from the gate — and they do not see the sense in that when, really, this whole exercise is about a promotion battle which only Saracens are capable of winning.
The sensible solution would be for the five full-time clubs — Saracens, Ealing, Doncaster, Cornish Pirates and Jersey Reds — to stage a small competition between themselves and for the other seven to lay dormant until next season.
However, sensible solutions are hard to come by right now. That is in large part due to Covid-19 which has made rugby’s myriad issues ever more twisted. However, we are also swiftly forgetting another of rugby’s great truisms: all for one and one for all, you are always stronger the better you work together.
The kind of teamwork that we admire on the pitch has rarely worked in the boardrooms of professional rugby. An inability to think collectively has long held back the Premiership; this is now being accentuated by the pandemic which has turned self-interest into a fight for survival.
With a long-term vision and a proper expansion plan, there would never be a place for Ealing in a closed-off Premiership.
Somehow, that is where the game has got to.
Always a Wasp
Topic: Muddled expansion plans are latest example of elite’s disjointed thinking (Read 1810 times)