Prioritising professionalism: Why Premier 15s and unions are leading the way
Women’s rugby is one of the fastest growing sports on the planet, in the past few years it has built a significant foothold within the wider sport while also creating its own audience who didn’t see themselves reflected in the crowds at your typical club or international game.
That growth has led to repeated calls to professionalise the women’s game and over the past month we’ve seen the RFU announce a change to the Premier 15s as well as announcements from the Scottish and Welsh unions.
The Allianz Premier 15s announcement was perhaps the biggest bombshell of these, a ten-year strategy that will see the league form its own operating company, move towards professionalism and open up the prospect of growing beyond 10 teams.
There is no change for the forthcoming season, and while the play on the field will no doubt be even more exciting than we’ve come to expect, there will be a lot of attention to what goes on behind the scenes and each team’s movement up and down the table.
At the end of the 2022/23 season, we will likely see some new teams join and current top tier teams leave the league. With Leicester Tigers, London Irish and Bath among those applying to get in, there are far more teams than current space in the league.
DMP Durham Sharks are a likely bet to lose their place having finished last on the Premier 15s table in the last two seasons with only one win to their name with Sale Sharks also consistently dwelling at the bottom, but I can’t see a world where both northern teams are dropped so one of them may be safe, while the current exodus of players (and coaches) at Wasps begs the question of whether they will be in a position to maintain their spot given their loss of top talent to other clubs.
In likelihood though we probably will see one team go and one team join (and Wasps moving to Coventry to join their male counterparts). Thankfully the Premier 15s strategy caters for this, suggesting that aspiring teams who don’t get in will be given support to get to the point they can bid again as the league seeks to grow over the coming decade.
Projections suggest revenue over this period will skyrocket to potentially £174 million with the RFU and clubs kicking in a further £48 million to cover the projected running costs. These costs include salaries for players, increased support teams at each club, including coaches, strength and conditioning and medical and lifestyle support.
𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗶𝗲𝗿𝟭𝟱𝘀 𝟯.𝟬
BREAKING 🗞 The RFU has announced a 10-year strategy to professionalise the #Premier15s 📈
Read the full release here: https://t.co/rIqZnksJiX pic.twitter.com/Jq8wL9amF8
— Premiership Women's Rugby (@ThePWR) June 30, 2022
There is also a push to significantly increase the off-field investment, moving all games to stadiums instead of the current mix of Gallagher Premiership stadia, university pitches and even local club grounds. This is all with the aim of securing a free-to-air television deal, built around higher quality broadcasts.
If, like me, you tend to be a positive person then this probably sounds great and I agree that there’s a lot to be excited about here, but there are questions too…
Where does all the money come from? Most clubs aren’t exactly flush, so this is a further drain on the resources of the likes of Saracens and Sale. Wasps are already in the news for being late to pay back bonds their fans raised for their move to Coventry, as such there must be questions over the validity of moving their women’s set up into the midlands too, and whether they can afford to maintain and improve it.
Loughborough Lightning and Gloucester-Hartpury are both affiliated to universities who can’t really be expected to kick in further millions of pounds so their partner clubs (Gloucester and Northampton respectively) will inevitably become more involved and could erode the identity of the women’s teams somewhat.
We also need to question: when is the right time to expand the league? For anyone who follows Championship 1 (the highest tier of rugby below Premier 15s), you’ll be aware there is plenty of talent around the league that is capable of stepping up, indeed many players have played some Premier 15s and will play more in the future. Indeed, last season you had some great talent turning out in the league below.
Exeter Chiefs’ Charlie Willett played for Cullumpton RFC in Championship 2 south west, while the winners of that league – London Irish Emeralds – had former Wasp Georgia Wood as captain and Amy Montague, previously part of the Harlequins set up, join mid-season to bolster their scrum. So there’s plenty of players who have the potential to make the step up and given recent announcements and clubs stating their intentions to join the league, they may soon be needed.
In other news which bolsters the women’s game, the Welsh RFU announced on July 6th that they would add a further 17 full time contracts to their already contracted players, bringing them up to 32 full time players. This followed on from the Scottish RFU announcement in mid-June that they had offered 30 players contracts and would also be setting up two semi-pro teams.
📢 Huge boost for #WalesWomen ahead of @RugbyWorldCup
– 17 new full-time contracts bringing number of WRU contracted players to 31
– @IoanCunningham commits as head coach to 2025 Rugby World Cup
– New coaching and sports science staff added #HerStory
— Welsh Rugby Union 🏴 (@WelshRugbyUnion) July 6, 2022
There’s no news yet on where those teams will play or indeed who they will play against, but it does make us wonder, will these contracts, along with the inevitable Irish ones that follow – the IRFU are not in a rush as they didn’t qualify for the World Cup so expect them to announce in the autumn – lead to these unions wanting their players closer to home?
Scotland’s squad almost all play in the Premier 15s and Welsh players are key parts of the Bristol and Gloucester-Hartpury squads while Wasps have long had a pack built around Irish power (though a few of those players have moved on and we believe at least one more is set to announce they are leaving).
For me this seems an ideal time to consider some sort of Celtic League. If the three unions can agree on how to run it, there could be some superb match ups between Irish provinces, Scottish clubs and maybe Welsh regions? It also opens up a more realistic option for a European Cup in the future as currently Premier 15s clubs and French teams would undoubtedly dominate.
It’s probably fair to say that by the time this article is published we’ll see even more change coming… As I was writing this month’s column the announcement of a combined Team GB’ 7s squad came, another exciting bit of news that builds out the player pathways.
It’s hard to know what the women’s game will look like in 12 months, but I can’t help feeling that it’s only going to keep going from strength to strength if the Premier 15s and unions keep driving professionalism forwards and by the time World Cup 2025 takes place in England, I would expect the 82,000 seats of Twickenham to be sold out for the final!
Comments on RugbyPass
After their 5/0 start, I had the Crusaders to finish Top 4 only…they lost the plot in Perth but will reload and back themselves vs 4th placed Rebels…
3 Go to commentsBoth nations missed a great opportunity to book a game that would have had a lot of interest from around the world. I understand these games can’t be organised in 5 minutes but they should have found a way to make it happen. I don’t think Wales are ducking anyone but it’s a bad look haha.
3 Go to commentsIt will be fascinating to see the effect that Jo Yapp has. If they can compete with Canada and give BFs a run for their money that will be progress
1 Go to commentsFollowing his dream and putting in the work. Go well young fella!
3 Go to commentsPerhaps filling Twickenham is one of Mitchell’s KPIs. I doubt whether both September matches will be at Twickenham on consecutive weekends. I would take the BF one to a large provincial stadium so as not to give them the advantage and experience of playing at Twickenham before a large crowd prior to the RWC.
2 Go to commentsvery unfortunate for Kitshoff, but big opportunity potentially for Nché to prove he is genuinely the best loosehead in the world, rather than just a specialist finisher. Presuming that if Kitshoff is out, it will also give Steenekamp a chance to come into the 23? Or are others likely to be ahead of him?
1 Go to commentsA long held question in popular culture asks if art imitates life or does the latter influence the former? Over this 6 nations I can ask the same question of the media influencing the thoughts of its audience or vice versa. Nobody wants to see cricket scores in rugby, as a spectacle it is not sustainable. With so many articles about England’s procession and lack of competition it feeds the epicaricacy of many looking for an opportunity to pounce. England are not the first team to dominate nor does it happen only in rugby, think Federer, Nadal, Red Bull or Mercedes, Manchester Utd, Australia in tests and World Cups. Instead of celebrating the achievements why find reasons to falsify it pointing towards larger playing pool, professional for a longer period or mitigate with the lack of growth in other nations. Can we not enjoy it while it is here and know that it won’t last for ever, others coveting what England have will soon take the crown, ask the aforementioned?
6 Go to commentsShame he won’t turn out for the Netherlands now they’re improving. U20s are Euro champs and in the U20 Trophy this year. The senior sides gets better every year too.
3 Go to commentsWill rugbypass tv be showing these games?
1 Go to commentsWell where do you start, the fact that England have a professional domestic league and Ireland’s is fully amatuer, that they have fully seperated professional squads at Fifteens and Sevens (7’s thinly disguised as GB), and Ireland have fully pro Sevens squad who loan some players back to the Semi-Professional Fifteens squad (moved from amateur for only a year or so) for a few games at 6N & RWC’s. The Women’s games is a shambles, and is at risk of killing itself by pushing for professionalism when the market isn’t really there to support it outside one or two countnries..
6 Go to commentsWayne Smith's input didn't have as much impact on the last final as Davison's red card for Thompson. England were 14 points up and flying when that happened.
6 Go to commentsBilly's been playing consistently well for 2 - 3 seasons now and deserves a look in at the top level. Ioane and ALB are still first choice but there needs to be injury cover and succession. His partnership with Jordie gives him first dibs you'd think. Go the Hurricanes.
3 Go to commentsIt’s not up to Wales to support Georgian Rugby. That’s up to International Rugby and Georgia. I sympathise with Georgia’s decent attempt to create this fixture. But for Wales the proposed match up is just a potential stick to beat them with and a potential big psychological blow that young Welsh team doesn’t need. (I’m Irish BTW.)
3 Go to commentsCale certainly looks great in space, but as you say, he has struggled in contact. At 23 years old, turning 24 this year, he should be close to full physical maturity and yet there exists a considerable gap in the power and physicality required for international rugby. Weight doesn’t automatically equate to power and physicality either. Can he go from a player who’s being physically dominated in Super rugby to physically dominating in international rugby in 1 or 2 years? That’s a big ask but he may end up being a late bloomer.
29 Go to commentsIf rugby wants to remain interesting in the AI era then it will need to work on changing the rules. AI will reduce the tactical advantage of smart game plans, will neutralize primary attacking weapons, and will move rugby from a being a game of inches to a game of millimetres. It will be about sheer athleticism and technique,about avoiding mistakes, and about referees. Many fans will find that boring. The answer is to add creative degrees of freedom to the game. The 50-22 is an example. But we can have fun inventing others, like the right to add more players for X minutes per game, or the equivalent of the 2-point conversion in American football, the ability to call a 12-player scrum, etc. Not saying these are great ideas, but making the point that the more of these alternatives you allow, the less AI will be able to lock down high-probability strategies. This is not because AI does not have the compute power, but because it has more choices and has less data, or less-specific data. That will take time and debate, but big, positive and immediate impact could be in the area of ref/TMO assistance. The technology is easily good enough today to detect forward passes, not-straight lineouts, offside at breakdown/scrum/lineout, obstruction, early/late tackles, and a lot of other things. WR should be ultra aggressive in doing this, as it will really help in an area in which the game is really struggling. In the long run there needs to be substantial creativity applied to the rules. Without that AI (along with all of the pro innovations) will turn rugby into a bash fest.
24 Go to commentsSouth Africa rarely play Ireland and France on these tours. Mostly, England, Scotland and Wales. I wonder why
2 Go to commentsIt was a let’s-see-what-you're-made-of type of a game. The Bulls do look good when the opposition allows them to, but Munster shut them down, and they could not find a way through. Jake should be very worried about their chances in the competition.
2 Go to commentsHats off to Fabian for a very impressive journey to date. Is it as ‘uniquely unlikely’ as Rugby Pass suggests, given Anton Segner’s journey at the Blues?
3 Go to commentsSad that this was not confirmed. When administrators talk about expanding the game they evidently don’t include pathways to the top tier of rugby for teams outside of the old boys club. Rugby deserves better, and certainly Georgia does.
3 Go to commentsLions might take him on if they move on Van Rooyen but I doubt he will want to go back, might consider it a step backwards for himself. Sharks would take him on but if Plumtree goes on to win the challenge cup they will keep him on. Also sharks showing some promising signs recently. Stormers and Bulls are stable and Springboks are already filled up. Quality coach though, interesting to see where he ends up
1 Go to comments