A new international ‘super’ league? It won’t be super for club finances and player welfare
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Owen Slot
Wednesday June 24 2020, 5.00pm, The Times
The new international competition being proposed by World Rugby could come at a cost of £118-150 million a year to French rugby.
The financial impact of the new World Rugby model was assessed in a report by Kearney, the consultancy firm, which was commissioned by the French clubs.
The Premiership clubs in England are concerned that their own financial model would be hit in the same way and yesterday put out to tender a brief for an agency to test the impact on themselves.
The new competition, which is the brainchild of a World Rugby working group, was presented to the clubs on June 15. The proposed biennial competition intends to repackage the traditional rounds of international “friendly” matches into a more marketable end-of-year event with the top six world teams competing in a “super league”, with a world second and third division then competing simultaneously.
The new “super league” would have the top three nations from the northern hemisphere competing with the top three from the south. In proposals seen by the clubs, the northern three would play each of the southern three home and then away. There is also a proposal for a grand final at the end of it all.
The controversial aspect of the proposal is the desire for the annual July international window to be moved to October. This would make October-November a larger window in which the end of year leagues could be played out.
The working group has therefore come up with two options for re-arranging the club season, with the club season running from December to July, or even starting as late as March.
It is this aspect of the model that looks set to be disputed. The clubs were given no figures stating a business case for this new proposal. The English clubs are therefore holding fire until they have completed their financial modelling. However, they have already been working closely with the French clubs, whose position is clear.
The document produced by Kearney for the French clubs weighs up the impact of the proposed calendar change on the clubs’ different revenue streams and forecasts a drop of 30 to 40 per cent.
It says: “This proposal aims at optimising the schedule of international competitions at the expense of European professional clubs. It would significantly jeopardise professional rugby clubs’ business model by cutting down season duration and by changing current seasonality with a shift to summer period which is economically less attractive.”
Though this might appear like a disputatious start to another round of global calendar negotiations, it is not impossible to envisage the “super league” gaining traction. Clearly, compromises would need to be made and two of those are already clear.
First, the Six Nations would slim down from a seven-week event to six, with just the one rest weekend in the middle rather than two. The Six Nations have long defended that second rest weekend, but are now prepared to concede ground.
Secondly, the European Champions Cup would also slim down, from nine weekends to eight.
Those are the more straightforward compromises. There is likely to be more of a wrestling match over the new October-November international window; the French and English clubs are unlikely to give ground on this.
The Kearney document nevertheless presents a counter-proposal which would allow both for World Rugby to keep its new “super league” competition and for the clubs to stick to their old calendar.
This format would see the European club leagues running from September to June. As the Kearney document says, this would be consistent with the San Francisco agreement which was reached in 2017, the last time that all the stakeholders were involved in a similarly extended calendar debate. The Kearney model has international summer tours remaining in the July window. This July window could become the first, southern hemisphere half of the new “super league” which would then be completed in Europe in November.
In other words, World Rugby would have to accept that its new competition would be split into two parts rather than run as one.
Even then, though, the new “super league” has to address the issue of player welfare. In an October-November window, the demands on the players are extremely high. If England, for instance, was to qualify for the “super league”, then it is quite likely that Owen Farrell et al would be playing twice against each of New Zealand, South Africa and Australia in the space of seven or eight weeks. That is a harder schedule than a World Cup.
Even if the “super league” format is split into two halves, in July and November, it is still extraordinarily demanding.
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