Rugby should be delighted Eddie Hearn is taking an interest

Eddie Hearn was doing Eddie Hearn things earlier this week when he dominated the headlines after saying that Henry Pollock, who is in the final year of his Northampton Saints contract, is a seven-figure player.

The job of boxing promoter Hearn is to promote his clients, and that’s what he was doing with Pollock. He was promoting him, and it certainly had the desired effect. It grabbed the headlines in a very quiet week for rugby news, and we are still talking about it.

But cast a glance at the comments section of stories written, and you would think that Hearn has just nicked someone’s lunch money instead of talking about someone that he is trying to promote.

We should be rejoicing that Eddie Hearn is talking about and getting involved in rugby, rather than making snide remarks that he doesn’t care about the sport and is just looking for his percentage of the commission.

And let’s clear up one point. Eddie Hearn won’t be sitting down and talking to Northampton Saints about Pollock’s new contract. He doesn’t have a rugby agent’s licence for one thing; his link-up is purely a commercial arrangement.

The job of handling the playing contract falls to Matt Hart, who works in partnership with Matchroom, but it is fair to say that securing his £1 million payday in this contract negotiation might be a bit of an ask, even for a rugby super-agent.

The salary cap in the PREM is currently £6.4m per club, but you are allowed to have one marquee player whose wages are counted in the cap, which is currently understood to be England fly-half Fin Smith at Saints.

Paying one player £1m within the salary cap would be difficult, but not entirely impossible. One possible solution would be to return to the two-marquee-player rule, which was scrapped four years ago, and there have been murmurs of that happening in recent weeks.

If Saints can’t afford his demands, who could? The answer is likely to be Newcastle Red Bulls, who have been looking to make a major splash in the transfer market since being taken over by the Austrian energy drinks giant last summer.

Securing the signature of Pollock, who in the space of the last year has become one of the most recognisable and marketable players in the game, would certainly do that even without the help of Eddie Hearn.

Is Pollock worth £1m a year? Yes, he is and more. Why? Because he has worldwide appeal; name another player who is constantly on the lips of rugby-mad South Africans. It was almost like he was living rent-free inside their heads earlier this summer.

Commercially, he is only going to get bigger and bigger over the next few years, especially with the Rugby World Cup in Australia only a year away, and it is safe to say that he will be the player that the casual fan will know. Of that, there is no doubt.