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Major restructure of English rugby to be debated - reports
The owners of the Gallagher Premiership clubs are meeting today to discuss the £275m offer from CVC Capital Partners for a controlling stake in the competition, but that is not all that is on the agenda.
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According to a report in the Guardian today by Rob Kitson, a number of other issues are on the slate to be debated, including a reduced Champions Cup and a Ryder Cup-style competition between the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere clubs.
One suggestion is that the 20-team Champions Cup, which had previously been reduced from the 24-team Heineken Cup, be further reduced to a 16-team competition, thereby offering high-profile and elite matches in each round of the competition. In this structure, the top five teams from the Premiership, Top 14 and Guinness PRO14 would qualify for the competition each year, in addition to the previous season’s Challenge Cup winner.
Another change which has been suggested is to have the top sides in Europe and the southern hemisphere meet in June – which will, unless northern hemisphere club seasons delay their season start, be a free month after 2019, due to World Rugby’s restructuring of the season – to decide which are the best club sides in the world.
According to the Guardian, it would be a 13-fixture event, with the first hemisphere to seven wins declared the overall winner.
Of course, that will only add fixtures to the already congested calendar, something which Premiership clubs reportedly believe can be solved by clubs fielding squads of 60 players or larger moving forward. This is seen as a way of making the Premiership Shield a more competitive tournament and increasing its profile, whilst also allowing for greater squad rotation in other competitions.
Part of the goal of making the Shield more competitive is to increase the exposure the competition gets by hosting the games in parallel with the senior Premiership fixtures. For example, any weekend that a Premiership side is playing away from home in the flagship competition, their reserve side will play at home in the Shield.
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The Premiership owners seem to be going all-in on the newly rebranded Shield competition and the prospect of it becoming the official second tier to the Premiership is also being considered.
The proposal being discussed is that the 12 Premiership reserve sides, plus London Irish and the best-finishing non-promoted side from the Championship, which last season would have been Ealing Trailfinders, contest a 14-team second tier competition. If Irish or Ealing were to finish top of the pile, they would be promoted to the Premiership, but if one of the reserve sides were to emerge as champions, no side would be relegated from the Premiership that season.
At the bottom of this new second tier competition, there would be a playoff with the winner of the Championship, with the winner of the playoff spending the next season in this reimagined Shield competition.
These proposals may never see the light of day, but they illustrate well the ambition of the Premiership clubs to create a profitable and sustainable future for themselves, although many will argue that this could well come at the expense of the England national team and the lower tiers of English rugby.
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It is clear that it is not just the takeover bid from CVC being discussed today that could have significant repercussions for English rugby moving forward.
Comments on RugbyPass
I am really looking forward to Leigh Halfpenny playing his first Super rugby game for the Crusaders Playing a long side his former Welsh and Scarlets team mate Johnny McNicoll.Johnny has been playing great, back in a Crusaders jersey.The attack has strengthened big time. Also looking forward to David Havili at 10. David is a class act, it also allows Dallas McLeod to remain at 12. A good thing.
1 Go to commentsIf he had stopped insisting on playing in the backrow, instead of wing, where everyone told him he should, he would have been a Bok years ago….
11 Go to comments‘Salads don’t win scrums’ 😂 I love that.
19 Go to commentsCan’t wait for the article that talks about misogyny in Ireland. Somehow.
16 Go to commentsI would like to see a rule change, when the attacking team is held up over the try line, by allowing the defensive team to restart a goal line drop out releases the pressure for the defensive team, but what if the attacking team had to restart a tap 5m out from the defensive team it gives the attacking team to apply more pressure, there are endless options for the attacking side and it will keep the fans in suspence.
2 Go to commentsLess modern South African males predictably triggered.
16 Go to commentsMy heart is with Quins, but the head is convinced Toulouse have too much. Ntamack is back, his timing and wisdom has been missed.
1 Go to commentsWow, what a starting line up for the Sharks) Tasty up front,kremer vs Tshituka or venter …fiery ,,Lavannini ,,will he knobble etzebeth? Biggest game for belleau?
1 Go to commentsIt was rubbish to watch, Blues weren’t even present. Did what they had to do, nothing more. Should be better next week against canes.
1 Go to commentsI’ve just noticed that this match has an all-French refereeing team. Surely a game like this ought to have a neutral ref? Although looking at the BBC preview of the Saints game, Raynal is also down as reffing that - so there may be some confusion about who is reffing what.
1 Go to commentsIf Havili can play anywhere in the back line, why not first 5. #10.
11 Go to commentsThe dressing room had already left for their summer break before they ran out in Dublin that year, and that’s on the coach. Franco Smith has undoubtedly made progress, particularly their maul, developing squad players and increasing squad depth. And against a very tight budget too. That said they were too lightweight last year and got found out against both Toulon and Munster in consecutive games. Better this season so far but they’ve developed something of a slow start habit occasionally, most notably losing at home to Northampton who played them at their own game. Play offs will ultimately show whether there has been tangible progress on last year, or not…!
2 Go to commentsAustralian Rugby has been a disaster, by not incorporating learning from previous successful campaigns. QLD Reds 2011 - Waratahs 2014. Players, coaches and administrators appoint there representatives for scheduled meetings, organisation’s agreement’s assessments and correspondence. This why a unified Rugby Union under one entity works. Every Rugby nation has taken that path. Was most difficult in the Northern hemisphere with over 100 years of club rugby before the game become professional. Took a lot of humility for those unions to eventually work together.
7 Go to commentsThough Wilson’s sacking was pretty brutal, it wasn’t just down to that Leinster game; Glasgow had a lot of 2nd half collapses that season, in the URC and Europe, and only just scraped into the playoffs. Franco Smith has definitely been an improvement, some players are delivering far more than they did under Wilson.
2 Go to commentsjesus - that front 5!
1 Go to commentsShould be an absolute cracker of a game! Will be great to see DuPont & Ntamack in tandem once again🔥
1 Go to commentsBest team ever…. To have played? These guys are still pressure chokers. Came nowhere when it counted. What a joke
84 Go to commentsMusk defends anonymous terrorism, fascism, threats against individuals and children etc etc But a Rugby club account….lock ‘em up!!!
2 Go to commentsActually the era defining moment came a few years earlier. February 2002 to be precise, when Michael D Higgins as finance minister at the time introduced his sports persons tax relief bill to the dial. As the politicians of the day stated “It seems to be another daft K Club frolic born in Kildare amongst the well-paid professional jockeys with whom the Minister plays golf” and that the scheme represented “a savage uncaring vision of Ireland and one that should be condemned”. The irfu and Leinster would be nowhere near the position they are in today without this key component of the finances.
5 Go to commentsIt is crystal clear that people who make such threats on line should be tried and imprisoned. Those with responsibility in social media companies who don’t facilitate this should be convicted. In real life, I have free speech to approach someone like Reinach and verbally threaten him. I am risking a conviction or a slap but I could do it. In the old days, If someone anonymously threatened someone by letter the police would ask and use evidence from the postal system. Unlike the Post, social media companies have complete instant and legal access to the content in social media. They make money from the data, billions. Yet, they turn a blind eye to terrorism, Nazi-ism and industrial levels of threats against individuals including their address and childrens schools being published online all from ananoymous accounts not real people. They claim free speech. Free speech for anonymous trolls/voilent thugs threatening people under false names? The fault is with the perps but also social media companies who think anonymous personas posting death threats constitutes free speech.
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