Premiership Rugby bosses give their take on breakaway R360 league

The proposed rebel R360 league, spearheaded by England World Cup winner Mike Tindall, has been met by widespread scepticism from Premiership Rugby and television bosses, who have questioned how the league would function.

The breakaway franchise competition seeks to launch next year and hopes to showcase the top 300 players in the men’s and women’s game in venues across the world.

But Premiership chief executive Simon Massie-Taylor has “no idea how it could ever work” logistically. While he concedes that the league is a “distraction”, neither he nor Premiership Rugby chairman Martyn Phillips is perturbed, with the latter saying they must trust in the model they have in place currently.

“The R360 thing is a distraction, sure, but it’s not grounded in the same amount of work and detail that we’ve been doing,” said Massie-Taylor.

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“There hasn’t been any engagement [with R360]. It’s not a threat per see. Equally, I have no idea how it could ever work full stop, but definitely for the club game – in England, in France, in the URC, Southern Hemisphere, how would it actually work to develop the club game?

“The thing that I agree with is that rugby has the opportunity for global growth and it needs innovation. Hopefully, we’ve demonstrated our appetite for it, but rugby needs roots, it doesn’t need pop-ups.

“The complicated thing about rugby is there is an international game, there is a club game it relies on, and there’s a community game. There’s a whole connectedness to it. That sometimes is an inhibitor to growth because you have to find a solution that compromises all these types of things, but without those roots, it’s very difficult to understand how a system could ever work.

“The phrase ‘it takes a village’ – that one person is going to turn up on a Galactico field, but there’s a whole system, a whole team, a whole grassroots network that needs to develop that person beyond just rocking up.”

Players have already started to express an interest in the competition, but Massie-Taylor queried how that would work with pre-existing contracts.

“There are players with contracts already, and therefore, if you sign a contract within a contract, that’s a problem in itself,” he said. “But even if they’re out of a contract, I’d be worried if players are counting on that because they miss out on genuine opportunities that exist with the club they currently play for or elsewhere.

“Things need sanctioning for a start and things need money coming through the door before people can get paid.”

For Phillips,  it is the exorbitant sum to get the competition up and running that is the biggest roadblock, as he predicts hundreds of millions of pounds will need to be spent to launch R360.

“Rugby does need to change,” he said. “The bit for us is we’ve got a good plan, so we don’t really want to get distracted. So I think having the discipline to say ‘don’t let this distract us, keep doing what we’re doing, but maybe do it better than ever’ would be something.

“There’s a big difference between a good PowerPoint and the reality of what’s the business model and how does it work.

“You do the maths and you quickly get that it’s probably 300, 400 million to get that off the ground.

“To get that off the ground, sponsorship, renting the biggest stadiums in the world, marketing because nobody has heard of it, if that can work, then it’s going to be a big cheque. So that’s the bit I’d love to see.”

From a broadcasting perspective, president and CEO of WBD Sports Europe – owners of TNT Sports – Andrew Georgiou has questioned how the competition will be a commercially sustainable model amid what he describes as a “generational change” in the media industry.

“I’ve been involved in sports for 25 years, I can’t tell you how many of these PowerPoint presentations have come across my desk with people who were absolutely certain that what they had on that page was going to be the new thing,” he said.

“The one question that I think you guys [the media] should be asking is, how are they going to grow the revenue by putting this event on? Where’s the money coming from?

“The media industry is going through a massive, generational change. There has been more change in the media industry in the last five years than there has been since the invention of cable television – the late ’70s and early ’80s.

“If these folks believe that they are going to grow the revenue by putting this thing on, I think they’re delusional. I really do. What it will do is further complicate what is already a well-functioning rugby ecosystem.

“So I would just ask some pretty fundamental questions around is this a commercially sustainable model?

“The fact it’s being likened to LIV Golf, I think is a perfect analogy. It’s a perfect comparator to what this is really going to be, commercially unsustainable.”