Promotion and relegation between the Premiership and Championship has been restored from next season after the Championship clubs secured significant concessions from the RFU at Twickenham after intense discussions on Thursday and Friday.
It will be decided by a home and away play-off between the Championship winners and the bottom Premiership club, and brings to an end a four-year moratorium in which the top league was effectively ring-fenced by the RFU.
This is a critical moment for the game in England, because it opens the doors to clubs with aspiration and ambition throughout the game to progress, thanks to the restoration of a meritocratic league structure.
It involves the RFU agreeing to loosen the restrictive Premiership minimum standards criteria on ground capacity. Until this season these stipulated that to be promoted a club must have a 5,000 capacity with planning permission to increase to 10,001 within a year.
The Rugby Paper understands the new agreement allows a promoted Championship team a minimum capacity of 5,000, both standing and seated, for two seasons after joining the Premiership. This would lead to an expansion of 7,500 in the third year, and 10,001 in the fourth.
The Championship argued successfully that a progressive stadium plan was a far better model than exposing promoted clubs to the risks of considerable infrastructure investment after a period in which three Premiership clubs, and one in the Championship, have been forced into receivership.
Simon Halliday, the Championship chairman who led their negotiating team, told The Rugby Paper: “What we wanted was a significant concession on promotion-relegation, or there was no basis to go forward. I’m after what our clubs need, and that is what we achieved.”
“We are very conscious that this is the starting point. It is about opening the door first, and then seeing how far you can go. There are other battles to come, but what I want our clubs to do now is step up as one voice and collectively to build this.”
On the handicaps of a continued funding deficit for promoted Championship clubs, and parachute payments for relegated Premiership clubs, Halliday said: “It’s not perfect but now we have to engage, and if we are blocked at various turns we’ll have to unblock it.”
He commented: “The Championship clubs have got the voice they wanted, but never had. We’ve unblocked the big piece, and now we need to keep going. There is so much talent in this division, which is why the thought that we were going to be left to one side is so hard to understand.
However, the resilience of our clubs has given us, and the clubs below us, hope and aspiration, which is so important.”
Halliday added: “Now our clubs – and every club – can realistically dream of promotion to the Premiership. There is now a genuine path for ambitious clubs to rise, the top tier is reconnected to the rest of English rugby, and we can use our commercial potential to fund the growth of rugby sorely needs at our level.”
Halliday also pointed to the benefits the new agreement will have for the player pathway between English rugby’s top two leagues, with the need for this highlighted by the England U20s midweek defeat by Georgia.
“There is a mechanism for Championship clubs to access £1m in funding to develop young pathway players, and this can only be beneficial for English rugby because too many of them play hardly any matches.”
After a difficult, often intractable negotiating process between the Championship and the RFU lasting almost a year and a half, the brinkmanship went to the last 24 hours before an RFU Council meeting on Friday rubber-stamped the controversial eight-year £264m PGP agreement with the Premiership clubs.
On Thursday, when the Championship board representatives and those from the RFU/Premiership met there was still deadlock. However, faced with the threat of non-cooperation from the Championship clubs, concessions were finally made which resulted in the RFU lifting the ring-fence moratorium it imposed in 2021.
An RFU statement said that the RFU Council had, “approved the mechanism for promotion and relegation”. It continued: “The objective is to create a second tier that supports the English system by developing young English talent, while supporting the clubs to become financially sustainable by growing local audiences and increasing the value of the league.”
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