Welsh rugby ‘laughing stock’ and should reduce to three teams – says former WRU chief David Moffett
Former Welsh Rugby Union chief executive David Moffett feels that Wales’ four professional teams should be replaced by three teams.
Moffett – who was WRU chief executive when the initial five teams were launched in 2003, further labelled Welsh rugby as a global “laughing stock” in an interview with BBC Radio Wales.
He further added that the WRU-owned Dragons region should be ditched unless they are bought out.
“There’s a saying isn’t there: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome,” he said.
In a wide-ranging interview with BBC Radio Wales, Moffett also said:
- The United Rugby Championship (URC) is not working because fans do not travel in great numbers to away games.
- Welsh teams should play in England, “but that’s never going to happen”.
- Welsh infighting must stop, with making Wales “a winning national team” the starting point.
- Three teams would mean Wales coach Wayne Pivac having “quality over quantity to choose from”.
- His original plan for regions has not worked because while WRU clubs overwhelmingly backed it, “the people that didn’t vote for it were the fans”.
- Moffett’s belief that Welsh rugby can sustain only three professional teams mirrors that of a proposal to cut a Welsh region which emerged in a report commissioned for the Professional Rugby Board (PRB).
The PRB runs the professional game in Wales, with members from the four regions and WRU sitting on the board, which has Malcolm Wall as an independent chairman.
Wales finished fifth in the 2022 Six Nations – with injuries to key players being a key factor as to why they finished the tournament so poorly.
Perhaps the bigger issue is that none of the Welsh regions have made an impact on the European competitions.
In the newly-formed URC, the four Welsh teams would finish in positions that would not warrant a place in next season’s Heineken Champions Cup. However, one region will be given special dispensation to limp on-board to the Champions Cup despite not qualifying for it.
Moffett said Welsh rugby “is at war with itself continuously” and questioned the WRU board and leading figures’ ability to improve the game’s fortunes at international and domestic level.
“I don’t know what the board and executives have by way of key performance indicators, but obviously they are not fit for purpose because if they were you would have seen in the last 10 to 15 years an improvement in the Welsh rugby set-up – in fact, it’s going backwards,” he said.
Moffett added: “I’ve said for some time that regional rugby and the concept that I put in place has not worked, mainly because the Welsh believe that they’ve got a mortgage on parochialism, and that parochialism can work for you or in this case against you.
“And so what do we do? We see this unedifying spectacle every year about, you know, Pontypridd should have a professional team, or that valley should be a professional team, and it goes nowhere and it affects Welsh rugby really badly.
“So for a couple of years now I’ve been suggesting it was right for the time, it’s obviously not right now, so scrap it, just have three club-based teams.
“It’s not going to make any difference to the number of people that actually support them because the regions are not being supported now anyway.”
Moffett added: “My three teams would be Llanelli, Swansea and Cardiff, but I’ll put a caveat on that – I could live with Newport instead of Swansea because they are so close to Llanelli, only on the basis that they [Dragons] became privately-owned like the other clubs and that the WRU gave up ownership.”
He added: “The WRU should not have a free pass on what they’ve done by taking over Newport [Dragons], they’ve kept the game relatively poor because of their poor financial management and something’s going to break.”
Moffett says the WRU is unable to afford four teams because “the only thing they seem to be able to do is just cut, cut and cut costs”.
He also argues Wales “don’t have enough players of sufficient quality” to sustain more than three teams.
