Inside the plan to relaunch professional rugby
Chief executive of Premiership Rugby Limited Simon Massie-Taylor outlines his vision for fixing the Premiership and beyond
By Charlie Morgan, Senior Rugby Writer 12 December 2022 • 3:00pm
The chief executive of Premiership Rugby Limited (PRL) has outlined his strategy to relaunch professional rugby union in England ahead of the 2024-25 season.
Simon Massie-Taylor admitted that the system has been “stress-tested and broken” by the fate of Wasps and Worcester Warriors, and he believes there is “momentum and desire” to fix things. In the short to medium-term, he will focus on four tenets in order to do so:
Finalising the new competition structure while devoting special attention to the second tier
Establishing a financial monitoring panel with an independent chair
Introducing a sporting commission for quicker decisions with a salary cap formula
Working towards commercial growth with a greater sense of collaboration.
Massie-Taylor embarked on his current role in January and will never forget his first year, which has featured a trip to Parliament to face an awkward grilling from MPs over events that led to the demise of both Wasps and Worcester.
Out of the wreckage, though, he intends to deliver “material progress”. Not least because the professional game agreement (PGA) is to be renewed for 2024-25, the time to strike is now.
League structure and the second tier
Though some of his predecessors have seemed allergic to the second tier, Massie-Taylor spent his first summer in the job gathering opinions to develop an understanding of how important it was to the sport’s ecosystem.
In the next couple of months, PRL want to decide on the league structure for 2024-25, perhaps with the top tier down to 10 teams, and “work backwards” to ascertain what next season should look like. Massie-Taylor feels that clubs are “pretty aligned” and there are “not a huge number of battles to fight”.
He states, though, that the “gap is too big” between the Championship and the Premiership and “the funding isn’t there” for the former. But strengthening the environment has become all the more important “given that we’re likely to have two former Premiership teams in the Championship next season [Wasps and Worcester] and we want those clubs to return”.
Relegation would appear to be due a return, then, because there is a “strong willingness” to align the Premiership and the Championship. To borrow another successful strain of the French system, broadcasting negotiations could be key.
“When we talk with broadcasters about the next cycle, we are going to be very conscious of aligning the whole game,” Massie-Taylor continues. “Clearly, there is no narrative around the Championship. It is being live-streamed a few times but no one is telling the story fully. If you want a regional footprint in professional rugby, you want to speak not of 10 or 12 teams but of 20 or 24.
“The [timing of the] broadcast agreement falls in line with the new league format in 24-25. We would start those conversations soon. We need to think of this as a relaunch, generally, of professional rugby come the 24-25 season. What exactly that looks like, how it’s marketed and what the story is, that’s the bit we are working on generally at the moment.”
Financial monitoring
An overarching aim for Massie-Taylor is to “attract the next generation of people investing in clubs” and to “generate investor confidence” in the Premiership. That said, he was encouraged by the people that “came out of the woodwork” to register interest in Wasps and Worcester.
Feedback from those parties, Massie-Taylor explains, highlighted “governance and financial control” across the competition as crucial priorities. “If you can tick those boxes, then people are actually going to invest,” he says.
As a response, the Premiership want to assemble a financial monitoring panel by this summer and are recruiting an independent chair. This body will report to the PRL board and be accountable to the Rugby Football Union (RFU). Its chair will possess a strong background in financial regulation but “will not copy and paste something that does not work”. Massie-Taylor wants them to “listen, understand and respond to the situation we are in at the moment”.
Alongside transparency, proactivity and discipline will be important watch-words as the Premiership aims to emulate the French model, whereby clubs outline budgets and provide guarantees ahead of a new season, to incentivise sustainability.
Then again, Massie-Taylor is also mindful that this will take time because “liquidity issues” are rife. “If we were to impose the French system on us now it would expose quite a lot,” he says. “This is almost day one of boot camp and we’re trying to get a fully-fit set of soldiers.”
Other governance reforms will sit with the RFU, including an owners’ and directors’ test. Massie-Taylor suggests that this will have to be “continual”, rather than a “moment in time” assessment, with company structures also up for scrutiny: “For example, we would need to have assurances that the stadium can’t be hived off.” He would also want insolvency regulations to be given “more teeth”.
The cluttered and curious bureaucracy of the Premiership will be tackled, or mitigated, by a sporting commission for non-commercial decisions related to scheduling or league structure. An independent chair will be appointed and the voices of players or recently-retired ex-players will be incorporated.
“You’d avoid the natural conflict that exists in our system at the moment and avoid the complicated voting structures where you need majorities or super-majorities,” Massie-Taylor says.
At the moment, there is a belief that the salary cap is “quite arbitrary” and could instead be linked to a formula where clubs can only spend a certain percentage of their revenue. The sporting commission would be able to change aspects of that legislation, such as the existence of ‘exempt players’, popularly known as marquee players, to react to market forces.
Bearing in mind the number of players moving to France, Massie-Taylor concedes that there is “a tension in the system” between the desire to “be competitive in Europe” and engender the “best league to come and play in” while being “sensible” over short-term financial challenges under a reduced salary cap.
The cap ceiling is due to rise again in 2024-25, but Steve Borthwick, the Leicester Tigers head coach primed to succeed Eddie Jones with England, sounded very deliberate last month when he indicated that clubs should be better compensated for developing internationals.
Growth through collaboration
Few would argue with Massie-Taylor’s assertion that “the product is in a good state” as far as the on-field entertainment served up by Premiership fixtures. Off-field cooperation can improve the infrastructure around that.
Massie-Taylor reveals that he intends the next PGA to contain a joint marketing agreement between PRL and the RFU. “That’s for England, the clubs and the community game to tell the story together,” he says. “At the moment, it’s a very siloed narrative.”
Harlequins are earmarked as a club that is into a rhythm when it comes to attracting impressive attendances, with Gloucester close behind. Massie-Taylor also heralds Premiership coverage on ITV, the same station that shows the Six Nations and the Rugby World Cup, as a “big step”.
On another level, PRL now shares an office in Victoria, London, with staff from Six Nations and United Rugby Championship. It all adds up to a sense that, finally, major stakeholders are beginning to pull in the same direction.
“It’s not just because of the crisis we’ve faced,” Massie-Taylor adds. “It’s everything from the PGA being [up for renewal] now, the commercial cycles being now but also the right people being in place.
“There is a general feeling of collaboration, both within the club environment with some excellent chief executives, with the relationship between the RFU, PRL and RPA [the Rugby Players’ Association] in a good spot to get things happening. There is momentum and desire and what comes with that is a responsibility to get things right.”
Always a Wasp
Topic: Premiership Rugby to 'relaunch' for 2024-25 after demise of Wasps & Worcester (Read 2064 times)