SO as the new season starts for the top tiers there is now a route between Championship and Premiership via a playoff, but the financial dice remain heavily loaded in favour of the highly privileged PRL clubs.
Despite their privileges, including a contractual claim to a lion’s share of RFU funding, however, they have all been spending more than they are taking in. Yet they have just raised their salary cap figure. By retaining their monopoly over England players, they are exerting upward pressure on their budgets, while limiting the extent to which top English players can boost their earnings by tapping into the bigger wages widely paid by French clubs.
At the same time, by importing South African international players, they are effectively subsidising the World Champions. This situation is sustainable only via continued dependence on a few, wealthy club owners.
Another concern recently voiced in some quarters is the absence of an effective pathway for top junior players (England U20s). This could be solved by the creation of an effective competition for the PRL clubs’ Academies in parallel with the Premiership itself. This, though, would undoubtedly be administratively more complicated and, probably, much more expensive for the clubs than the current system of dual registration of Academy players with Championship and National League clubs.
This arrangement, does, I believe, bring benefits for the players in terms of accelerated opportunities to play men’s rugby but there is a potentially highly distorting effect on the competitiveness of the recipient clubs of unlimited recourse to this scheme. Dings Crusaders’ heavy defeat at Moseley, followed by the big win over Plymouth Albion (two clubs touted as being promotion contenders) illustrates the dangers perfectly. Dings made nine personnel changes between the two games, eight of them “Bear Cubs”.
This could have a random and unfair impact on league positions, as such players are made available and withdrawn. If, therefore, this system is to endure, more controls on its application will need to be agreed.
Much as we might wish that the PRL clubs did not hold the sway they do by virtue of their control over player contracts, it is a fact of life and, for the foreseeable future, we can look only to try and moderate the negative impacts on the rest of the game – while cracking on and doing the best we can to foster rugby on a sustainable basis at our own clubs and in our neighbourhhoods.
