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Neils:
 Premiership?s proposed salary cap increase is lunacy

Salary cap is due to rise again from ?5 million to ?6.4 million next season at a time when every club is losing money
Charles Richardson
Rugby Reporter
2 April 2024 ? 7:01am


The Premiership are saying all the right things and, for the most part, doing them. They are listening. We asked for a derby weekend, off the back of France?s success with the venture, and we got it. We asked for international players to be available more readily, and we got it (perhaps more out of luck than judgement, with the sorry demise of three clubs). We asked for fantasy rugby, shot clocks, player mics, better highlights packages and more gravitas around the messaging and narrative of the league. We got them ? it is no coincidence that this block of post-Six Nations fixtures has been dubbed the ?run-In?. We also asked for a thriving second tier; we are not there yet but certainly the message from Premiership Rugby Limited is ?watch this space?.

Within the corridors of power at Premiership HQ, there is a desire to change. It cannot be overnight, but with Simon Massie-Taylor at the helm there is someone in the chief executive?s chair who is acutely aware of the problems the league has faced ? having presided over the season in which three clubs went to the wall ? but also shrewd enough to identify the league?s potential. There are still issues, it is not perfect, but there is a humility and a self-reflection at PRL which might once have been missing.

Massie-Taylor and the rest of the Premiership executive were also cognisant of the news reported by Telegraph Sport this week that last year no club in the league turned a profit, posting a cumulative loss of almost ?25 million (that is without Newcastle, who are yet to post their accounts, but if the Falcons in their current state posted a profit then owner Semore Kurdi should be handed the keys to the city).

PRL knew this was coming. In an interview with Telegraph Sport in November, Massie-Taylor admitted that his blueprint for Premiership recovery could take five years to achieve and that clubs would continue to lose money in the meantime. The honesty was refreshing even if the message was not wholly reassuring.

Massie-Taylor did also say that no club would go bust. A reassuring promise after the horrors of last season but alongside this ?A Change Is Gonna Come? narrative ? not too dissimilar from the empty pledges of ?jam tomorrow? which were so adored by Eddie Jones ? there is a gigantic elephant in the room.

What simply does not add up is the tone-deaf insistence of the Premiership teams to raise their salary cap from ?5 million to ?6.4 million next season at a time when every club is losing money. It is lunacy on an industrial scale.

The clubs in favour of the rise will claim that a deeper salary cap is essential to halt the talent drain to France and to compete more keenly in Europe. Yet this season more than a third of the clubs in the Champions Cup last 16 are English and Premiership sides have beaten Stade Francais, Toulon and Racing 92 in their own backyards, with Bath giving Toulouse a run for their money in south-west France. As we have highlighted several times, the sorry demise of three Premiership clubs had already strengthened the squads of the remaining 10 clubs this season, within the ?5 million cap.

At a time when the Premiership is attempting to renegotiate the repayments of over ?150 million-worth of Covid-19 loans, raising the salary cap is an appalling look. How can you claim to not be able to repay funds owed to the taxpayer and then increase your salary cap by ?1.4 million? It is bonkers. There has been rumour regarding PRL?s confidence of being able to persuade its clubs to return to a ?5 million cap the season after next, as a compromise to allow for an improved negotiating position on the Covid loans with the Government, but Telegraph Sport has spoken to several well-placed sources who believe this is unlikely. The obduracy of the clubs aside, flip-flopping between cap limits, especially in the realms of millions, makes long-term recruitment incredibly difficult.

All this brings us onto the newly established Sporting Commission, set up by PRL last year with a view to ?transforming and strengthening its governance?. It is chaired by Nigel Melville, who is also chairman of the Premiership Rugby Investor Board, to which the commission provides a quarterly report. Given the way the league seems intent on sleepwalking into yet another sketchy financial situation, it is fair to ask what the point is of the commission, or at the very least to question its agency over the clubs. ?As part of its remit the Sporting Commission will now rule over matters such as the season structure, Premiership Rugby regulations and player loading, amongst others,? read the announcement last year. ?The Sporting Commission will have full delegated authority from the PRL Board to decide on matters relating to sporting and regulatory issues.?

If ever there was a time for either of the two bodies that Melville runs to step up, awaken the clubs and force them to smell the coffee, it is now. PRL and the clubs must know that the optics surrounding this cap increase are dreadful; hopefully what transpires in the future is not.

Shugs:
It?s sheer lunacy. The worst idea since the 10 team league. Then again, what does the cap matter.

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