Halliday: I’m proud of united approach

SIMON Halliday has left his role as chairman of the Championship Clubs' board both proud and frustrated by his 12 months in the role.

The former England international has fought tooth and nail to give the Championship a voice and put the league in a position where it has been able to fight back against the Premiership cartel and RFU indifference.

The RFU Council vote in June that approved a promotion/relegation deal with the Premiership while also agreeing to the creation of a new and independently chaired Tier 2 governance board were major steps forward.

But, as Halliday is the first to admit, so much still needs to be done, with the Championship, RFU and Premiership Rugby yet to agree on some important points around the key issues of promotion and relegation and funding.

At times, Halliday and Nottingham chairman Alistair Bow have been met with a wall of silence, with emails to RFU management going unanswered.

While Halliday and Bow are not walking away from the fight, they will still be actively involved through their clubs, Ealing Trail-finders and Nottingham, the CEOs of Coventry and Nottingham, Nick Johnston and Simon Beatham, have become the main custodians of the Championship's future.

Johnston and Beatham will join former Leicester CEO Simon Cohen as the Championship's representatives on the Tier 2 board, which also includes three RFU reps and an independent chairman.

“I've led an aggressive action to make the RFU stand up to its responsibilities and bring unity to clubs that hadn't been there before. We have got those clubs to a point where they manage their own destiny,” Halliday told The Rugby Paper.

“That being said, we've been extremely unhappy with the pace of negotiations. We have to have a credible promotion and relegation system, and the board urgently needs to get that resolved with the RFU and Premiership Rugby.

“Neither me or Alistair are going to be stepping down from the unfinished business piece of this. I will retain a strategic relationship with Ealing Trail-finders, which is also important given what I have just said about promotion and relegation.

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Halliday: We united to support Championship

“In all my years of involvement at the very top with the RFU, Club England, director of two professional clubs, chairman of Europe, I have found this the most confusing and perplexing issue, that English rugby doesn't properly recognise the value of all these clubs. To try and persuade the RFU of our value in the game as a group of clubs and as a league has been well-nigh impossible.

“I genuinely believe that the RFU senior management believe there simply wasn't room outside of this 10 (Premiership clubs), what was 13 and became 10. And they thought that this would be the way forward, everyone else would stay amateur, and this would be enough for the professional game in this country.

“There are people at the top in club world who say this is true as well, they look at Ireland, they look at Scotland and they look at Wales. But we are a country of 70 million with 200 rugby clubs like France, so I said hold on it can't be that straightforward. When I came into Ealing two years ago I didn't know anything, I just knew they had failed to get through. When they told me that they had had hardly had any relationship with the RFU and the Premiership over the period of time they were trying to get promoted I couldn't believe it.

“So coming in as chairman part of the role was to actually just bring the value of what we had to people's attention against the backdrop of continued cuts to funding.

“We are at a very low ebb even now, we are scrapping over very small amounts of money at a time when £264 million has been allocated to the top 10 clubs so that battle is not over. But I chose this time to move it on from a battle to get air time, to get some sort of recognition, and we do now have that recognition, we are responding to that by putting people in place who can really deliver the next level of this.”

It is hoped that Johnston and Beatham will be the dream ticket to deliver on the mandate given to them by the RFU Council to ensure a promotion play-off takes place at the end of the 2024/25 season, and other items on their wish list such as an agreement over funding for both the promoted and relegated club are ticked off.

Repaying Covid loans, to the tune of £5.5million, is another item that needs to be addressed.

“We haven't sorted out the DCMS (Department for Culture, Media and Sport) position, where we have been left on our own, so we have still got that to do and the RFU have completely ignored us on that, and we are not going to let that go, we are going to sort that out,” said Halliday. “We

have got to get the promotion and relegation details nailed down. The flexibility of the four-year runway (that allows clubs to build up their ground capacity to 10,000 over four years), the amount of money a club would receive if they do go up, and what happens to the relegated club in terms of the level playing field (the parachute payment). We are not going to allow a club to go down into our league and have a disproportionate advantage, the board won't allow it because it is not in the best interests of our league.

“We will continue to fight for this because at least we have a governance which will allow the clubs, together with the RFU, to deliver this league as they should.

“We are confident that lobbying into the Council and elsewhere will allow a number of clubs to contest promotion this year. If you are going to have a play-off system instead of one up, one down, a play-off has got to happen.”

Halliday continued: “I am really proud that we now have a governance group that will allow us to drive this league forward, I think that is a credit to everyone who stood united around that, over a period of months, when we were under inordinate pressure, a lot of negative press was coming out, there was a lot of briefing against us from the RFU and others, and we ignored it because we knew this was the right thing to do.

“My stepping down from a role that no longer exists was always going to happen, but I am not by any stretch going to remove myself from the key battles, it is just going to come from a different angle. I owe Ealing some time and some commitment because of what I have done in the last 12 months, on their behalf, is put my time into the chairman role.”

As Halliday says, the Championship has stood united more so than ever before. Self-interest has largely been put to one side as clubs recognised the power of the collective. However, the exclusion of two of its clubs – newly-promoted Chinnor and last year's bottom team Cambridge – from next season's Premiership Cup is a blot on that record.

“We've had to put up with a lot and there was a recognition I suppose that a 22-team competition didn't work in the windows that were left for the season,” admitted Halliday.

“I feel desperately sorry for Chinnor and Cambridge in this because we have welcomed them into the league and its grim they are not going to get that opportunity. But we'll try and help them through that. It's a collective, it's not a league of the have and the have nots.”

Halliday confirmed that talks are also taking place about cutting the Premiership Cup again, with the 2025/26 competition potentially running with 16 teams, including the 10 from the Premiership and the top six in the Championship.

The remaining six or eight Championship clubs – depending on the size of the league – could end up playing the 10 teams in the new Welsh Super Rygbi Cymru league, which launches this year, in a new Anglo-Welsh Cup competition.

“The following season there is planned to be a 16team tournament with the balance of the clubs looking for another cup – an Anglo-Welsh tournament has been talked about, at a preliminary stage, and the clubs in the new Welsh competition are very keen,” he revealed.

“This year was always going to be a transitional year but we weren't going to allow it to be a year of nothing, so you could argue in our league this year the fight for being in the top six will catapult you into next year's streamlined Premiership Cup.”