RFU's annual youth festival delights and frustrates in equal measure
Every year, the best and the brightest U16 players in England are brought together at Wellington College for a week-long festival of rugby, coaching and education.
All 14 regional academies under the Premiership Rugby Limited umbrella convene on leafy Berkshire to attend the RFU-run event, in order to both develop the players at their disposal, as well as helping set a number of the youngsters on paths to becoming professional rugby players in two- or three-years’ time.
There are two game days where the academies all play off against one another, but beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, the Wellington Festival provides education on nutrition, psychology and different coaching techniques, all the whilst promoting integration and socialising between the different squads.
As preparation for the final two years of their school rugby careers go, in which many of the attendees will be targeting professional contracts, it is an extremely beneficial and enjoyable experience.
Of course, not everyone who attends the Festival will go on to feature for their affiliated academy at U18 level. There is a drop-out rate, but the Festival at least provides them with a memorable farewell with their teammates and potentially paves the way for them to link up with another team, perhaps at a slightly lower level, and play their way back up into that elite pathway further down the road.
The 2019 edition of the Festival got underway on Saturday, before the first of its two game days on Sunday. There was no lack of talent on show and to the casual observer, it would look as though the future of English rugby is particularly bright.
The range of skills and ability on show is truly exciting. One openside played with a line-speed and proclivity over the ball that should have him starring in the U18s next season and there was a multitude of decision-making and ambitious scrum-halves and fly-halves. Back rowers were showing adept kicking skills and there was a glut of tightheads who, whilst obviously fairly unpolished at this point, look as if they have won the genetic lottery. Second rows offloading and stepping in at first receiver, centres that looked like back rowers on fast-forward and full-backs with great variety in their games.
You can go from team to team and pick out multiple players that, with the right physical and technical development over the next two years, should be capable of picking up professional contracts with their Gallagher Premiership clubs. Year on year, the quality seems to get higher at the Festival and the development of players from this level to the U18s is notable and reflects well on both their schools and the academy coaching staffs.
With that, however, comes the negative of the Festival and it’s actually nothing to do with the week-long event.
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Premiership clubs, for a number of seasons now, have been locked in an arms race with their financially better off rivals from France. With the marquee spots in a Premiership roster, English clubs are able to compete for individual players with sides from the Top 14, but with their lower salary cap, they are less able to deal with the rising salary expectations that those marquee spots bring throughout the entire team.
For the second year in a row, all Premiership clubs apart from Exeter Chiefs made a financial loss. For some clubs, those losses can be underwritten or are part of an ongoing process towards sustainability, but for others it signals worrying times. Yet, they continue to recruit heavily from abroad, paying the salary premiums that signing, rather than developing talent, brings with it.
The recruitment is also often targeted at established Tier 1 players who do not come cheaply, having already made their names in Super Rugby or the Guinness PRO14. They tend to eschew the approach that the Scottish clubs have shown in targeting unheralded Fijian and South African players with plenty of promise, or the Irish approach of just sprinkling an array of foreign talent around the core of their squads that have been developed at home.
The financial situation that this approach has imposed on the clubs is not likely to get better anytime soon, either, with CVC’s 27% stake in the Premiership almost certainly going to eat up any short-term increases in revenue. The wisdom of the deal won’t be decided until much further down the road, when we will see if CVC are able to increase the commercial appeal of the competition beyond the cut that they will now take, and the clubs become better off as a result.
With all of this in mind, it brings us back to the negative side of the Wellington Festival and that’s the amount of talent that is going to go wasted from this group of young athletes.
English rugby is sitting on a player pool of talent, thanks to the school system, academy staffs and RFU pathways, that is arguably unrivalled in world rugby. In terms of quantity, it far exceeds that on offer in New Zealand, and the quality is not far off, either. The closing of that gap with New Zealand over the last 10 years has been impressive and from a skill level perspective, the gap only looks like it will further diminish.
If you take the Kiwi Super Rugby franchises, they are capable of losing handfuls of players every year to lucrative contracts in Europe and Japan, yet they are able to restock and go again the next season, barely missing a step as they do. It’s that jump from juniors to seniors where New Zealand steals a march on England, particularly in terms of opportunities for players just outside the elite prospects.
Why, therefore, is there not more of a premium put on developing your own talent in England?
It should be pointed out that this isn’t a weakness of English rugby. A number of the Premiership clubs are built around cores of homegrown players that have come through from their own junior academy, whilst the quotas of English-qualified players required by the RFU are usually all met.
There is a bountiful crop of players pushing for international selection year after year, too, but that should not be surprising or necessarily even a reason to celebrate. Given the resources and player pool England has as a country, being able to develop enough players to push for and compete for one national team is the absolute bare minimum. It should also be able to sustain 12 professional teams.
No one is saying don’t recruit players from abroad, but when you’re losing money year after year, paying out big to bring in a ‘name’ who might depart after a couple of seasons and then letting talented players walk at 18, you’ve got to question the logic of it.
Each individual club operates in their own way and there is no blanket generalisation you can adhere to them all, just as each individual player coming out of a junior academy at 18 is a unique situation, but this recruit-heavy approach is financially unsustainable, not delivering competitive sides in European competition and further driving rising salary expectations.
The threat of relegation will always be used as the counter argument to this. The clubs will say how can we take the risk on of filling our squads with younger players who have come through the academy system, when that lack of experience or ability of a 28-year-old from Super Rugby, could cost us our place in the Premiership?
It’s a fair comment and probably something which could only be changed by the Premiership itself, by insisting on regulations that require each squad to carry a certain percentage of players that have come through the academy pathway. This will create the opportunities they need, because outside of the improving BUCS Super Rugby competition and the even more financially unsustainable Greene King IPA Championship, those opportunities are sorely lacking.
A number of clubs this year have let players in the £50k to £120k bracket leave if they aren’t first XV regulars in order to contract the higher earners in their squads, and there needs to be some sort of action to at least arrest the rise in wages. The French flexing their financial muscles started it and the marquee spots and BT Sport broadcast deal have since exacerbated it, but if they rise much more, no one apart from the French are going to be able to live with it.
You would expect, with these increases in salary expectation at the highest level that also trickle down to squad players, that senior academy contracts would be on the up around the Premiership, with clubs eyeing those youngsters as affordable depth options, but early indications are that the numbers aren’t increasing in line with that. There will be several smaller intakes this season when the clubs announce them in the next few weeks or months.
And again, that brings us back to the Wellington Festival.
Player development has seemingly never been better in this country and for all of the excitement and promise that the Festival offers, you get the same melancholic feeling that, in two years’ time, these players will be facing the same difficulty in winning a professional contract that the current U18s are.
As the recent sanctions around high tackles have attempted to change long-term behaviour in order to provide better outcomes, in which early results are proving promising, it seems sadly as if the positive behavioural change in the pathways is not yet having the correlated effect across the board on off field outcomes among Premiership clubs.
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Comments on RugbyPass
Dear Robbie, Please return to the Crusaders next season. Sincerely, Scott
1 Go to commentsDid the big E call the Irish the ‘White Can’ts’? That would’ve been good
28 Go to commentsDalton Papalii will be lucky to be selected on the Matchday 23. Ardie Savea, Ethan Blackadder, Luke Jacobson, and Peter Lauki are all as good or better openside flankers
9 Go to commentsScott Barrett is a lock and they have a much longer shelf life than a loose forward. Far more likely that Barrett will still demand a starting position based on performance at age 33 at RWC 2027 than Savea, whose explosive athleticism will have declined and he will in all likelihood have been surpassed by Hoskins Sotutu, Wallace Siti, Peter Lauki and Brayden Iose.
9 Go to commentsExtremely frustrating to get yet more speculation over whether or not Eben actually counted 12 players or not, but honestly big respect to McCloskey for keeping it classy and not pointing out Etzebeth’s hypocrisy. The Irish are a popular team outside of Ireland because they do their talking on the pitch, and its honestly a PR masterclass that they’re keeping it that way following Etzebeth’s provocation.
28 Go to commentsGood option for the lineout lost there.
1 Go to commentsIt’s not like Saffas have a long history of spouting absolute shite at any & every occasion. Oh wait… The dangers of an inferior third world education strike again.
28 Go to commentsI’m so glad we’re revisiting this. Really needs to be dissected further. I’m also so glad that a guy in the stands who wasn’t anywhere near the field when any of it would have been said (and even confirms this) has taken the lead and commented as Ireland. Definitely cleared it all up. This article would be hilarious if it wasn’t so misleading.
28 Go to commentsits such a shame he hasn’t achieved more success at club level. He’s really not been a potent finisher for a while now, but he’s still excellent in the kick chase. That’s the kind of skillset that generally only gets appreciated when you’re playing in premiership and european finals. I’m not sure whether the challenge cup counts given the quality of the competition seems lower than in previous years, but his duel with Mapimpi should be enthralling.
1 Go to commentsThe point is the irish players were arrogant,call it like you want sugar coat it aswell but they were you could see it in their way they handeled themselfs on the field when they got something right so dont tell me it was not arrogance it was,you can fool other people but not me,and to say to one of our players see you in the final put a nail in the coffin for this bullsh@t,just be grown men and accept it that you were arrogant,you could if seen it from a mile away, and then you lost to the allblacks what a cocky move that didnt work out for you ,Eben was right when he said u were arrogant,the point is you will deny it because you lost it all just grow some balls and move on we had won you lost accept it.
28 Go to comments“summer tour of North and South America” so its a summer tour of america?
1 Go to commentsEverybody is giving the Irish players the benefit of the doubt in ‘what they meant’, but none of these pundits or commentators offer the same courtesy to Eben. I don’t think Eben went, 1, 2, 3… etc. What might have happened is he didn’t count and when the 3rd or 5th guy said he went, hang on why are so many of them saying this… and then started to concentrate on it more and more as players continue to say it. So no, he didn’t count it, he realised many Irish players said it and made an assumption based on that… The Irish team was VERY confident at the time and I do believe they believed they were going to win the World Cup, which borders a bit on the arrogant side…
28 Go to commentsI can see how some of the Irish players would have said”see you in the final” as a gentle comment after a victory. It’s open to interpretation but it’s clumsy language. I don’t know the fella but I assure you Eben doesn’t have an axe to grind with Ireland. He has never been the media seeking pro. Oh and BTW it is I’ll be our winter in July so won’t be wet.
28 Go to comments*McCloskey*: _I saw this clip. Like, I wasn’t playing that game; I was in the stands…so you don't know sh!t in other words, infact you know just as much as Goode on this matter. I will believe the guy who was on the pitch when things were said as appose to two people speculating over what was said._
28 Go to comments@ turlough dream on buddy. Your boys are in for one tough time down in sa this summer…
28 Go to commentsI think Goode is looking to establish a platform for himself. Eben said “Probably” so that suggests he wasn’t counting. It’s an estimate Goode. I think even with your short and uneventful experience with the Sharks you probably realise winding up Saffas will get you some airtime. It’s a none event. Move on
28 Go to commentsRugby has never been as structured and synthetically pleasing as it is at this moment. The game is simply beautiful and messing with it too much will ruin it for everyone. I can't help but feel that over the past decade or so many rules have been changed to accommodate a certain hemisphere and counter another. Perhaps I am wrong but I somehow don’t think so.
2 Go to commentsNoted some excellent defensive steals from the Rebs last week against the Reds, largely J Canham, I think. It’s not a Rolls Royce but they are a real threat with their defensive line out at the beginning matches. What do you make of Canham Nick, WBs squad material?
86 Go to commentsCoin flip between Ardie and Scott Barrett. Both have their pros and cons, and both would probably be decent. Ardie has way more passion on the field, but that hasn’t always translated into the best decisions. They will both turn 34 at the next World Cup, so both will most likely have their best days a few years behind them. It’s hard to imagine now, but looking at young players coming through Ardie will probably be under the most pressure to retain his place in the team. Beauden Barrett also an outside chance if Razor sees him as the first choice 10.
9 Go to commentsQuality stuff from Flats. Rugby can’t replace football nor should we want it to. I think the ‘product’ (awful term sorry) now is absolutely fantastic. Growing the game shouldn’t be at the expense of losing its brutal beauty.
2 Go to comments