THE apprehension surrounding the unveiling of the £260m PGP (Professional Game Partnership) stretches to all corners of the game in England, and with good reason.
However, when the RFU/Premiership unveils its “master plan” for the next eight years on Wednesday it will not highlight that the RFU has allocated almost all its funding to the 10 Premiership clubs, leaving the rest of the game, from the Championship down to the smallest community clubs, caught between a rock and a hard place financially.
Nor will it dwell on the £70m windfall to the Premiership’s 27 per cent shareholders, CVC, from the RFU’s depleted coffers.
Instead, it will trumpet the benefits of the 25 elite England hybrid contracts that the PGP deal will finance at an annual cost of around £4m.
The only obstacle – and it is boulder-sized – is that the England national team and the Premiership clubs have to find a way of aligning despite a maze of different, and frequently clashing, targets.
The most likely areas of disagreement range from differences over medical/rehabilitation plans for injured players, to wanting players in different positions, to friction over match availability, conditioning and rest calendars, nutrition, media exposure, etc.
The plan is that if there is disagreement between England head coach Steve Borthwick and his Premiership counterparts, there will be a board – yet another! – which appoints an independent arbitrator to provide a ruling.
The necessity to make such an appointment does not bode well for the spirit of cooperation required to make the hybrid contracts succeed.
Whether the rest of the PGP fosters a spirit of cooperation in the English game at large is also questionable, given that its main beneficiaries, the 10 Premiership clubs, are such a small segment of it.
