LONG READ Why the Gallagher Premiership is setting the gold standard in club rugby

All was not entirely lost, but too much flotsam and jetsam circled helplessly in the stormy air for comfort. The English league had just lost three stakeholders in Premiership Rugby to administration in the 2022-23 season – London Irish, Wasps and Worcester Warriors.

They left a trail of financial debris in their collective wake, not least the £30m in unrecovered loans from the taxpayer during the Covid-19 pandemic. But all three clubs are now well enough to apply for re-entry to the second-tier Championship [or ‘Champ Rugby’ as it will be called henceforth] when it expands from 12 to 14 clubs next season.

All the rugby creditors will need to be paid off in full before that happens, but the spectre of government loan debt will still be following all three clubs ominously, like an albatross across open water. A report by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media & Sport select committee suggested elite rugby in England was “in disarray”, while referring variously to “inert leadership” from the RFU and PRL, a “disastrous and ill-thought-through relocation to Coventry” by Wasps, and “unscrupulous owners [who] mismanaged club finances while attempting to strip the club of its assets” at Worcester.

In an interview with Sky Sports, the London Irish administrator Lee Manning claimed:

“There is little prospect of profitability in the medium term and therefore considerable risk of other clubs going to the wall.

“I think it is [just a matter of time] – unless the game’s financial model can be radically changed.

“It only takes one other club to fail, perhaps two, and where’s the viability of the league? Where’s the attraction of the league?”

The need for some form of external regulation was highlighted by Gloucester owner Martin St. Quinton in an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live at the start of the year.

“At the moment it’s the clubs who decide what the salary cap should be and the clubs have proved, year after year, [to be] completely incapable of setting it sensibly,” he said.

“It should be set independently from the PRB [Professional Rugby Board] with some input from the DCMS [Department for Culture, Media and Sport]. What is the right amount of money that we can afford to pay our club players?

“If our central distributions went up because our media rights went up and our sponsorships went up, then the salary cap could go up.

“We are all living beyond our means which is why the annual losses of all 10 clubs is over £30m which is madness. The whole club game, the model is flawed.”

Financial mismanagement, taxpayer bail-outs, unsustainable self-referencing systems? It all sounds like something out of the 2008 banking crisis more than a product of ‘the gentleman’s game’.

The Premiership has been left contemplating its own navel in recent months, especially after proposed merger talks with the URC to form a British and Irish league melted back into a featureless ocean of possibilities. There was an abiding impression other leagues around the world did not know what to make of the Premiership, maybe because it did not know quite know what to make of itself.

When data science academic Dimitri Perrin produced the following fascinating article comparing leagues north and south of the equator a couple of months ago, he included the URC and the Top 14 but chose to omit the Premiership from his assessment. Ironically, it is the Prem which approximates Perrin’s favourite Super Rugby most closely in terms of content. Here are some selected stats after the latest round of play in all four leagues.

The financial model may be flawed but the answer to Manning’s double question ‘where’s the viability of the league? Where’s the attraction of the league?’ is right there, out on the field. If there is one league which approximates the aerobic demands and entertainment value of Super Rugby Pacific 2025 most nearly, it is the Premiership. Both competitions share the same values and plant their flags on the same landmarks: ball-in-play time above 36 minutes, eight tries scored, and fewer than 20 penalties awarded per game.

The similarities are too close to ignore, but they are likely to be overlooked because of English rugby’s long-standing reputation as a one-paced, set-piece based trudge. That may have been true in the past, but it is not true now. Britons used to travel by horse-and-carriage, but now they have shiny new motors on long-lease deals. Times change. They no longer drive inferior products.

Off the field, the Premiership has been trying to follow the model across the Channel by forming closer links with the Championship. Three of its stakeholders will be playing in that tournament in 2025-26, and the Prem has looked to draw closer by committing more players via loan schemes.

Several Premiership clubs have ‘paired’ with Championship sides to farm out their younger squad players to the second tier: in the Midlands, there is a partnership between Northampton and Bedford Blues, in the West Country it is Exeter Chiefs and Cornish Pirates and Gloucester with Hartpury. Most recently, high-flying Bath Rugby opted to partner with one those three phoenixes rising from the ashes of administration, the Worcester Warriors.

Imagine young Bath front-rowers such as Archie Griffin, Vilikesa Sela and Kepu Tuipulotu fast-tracking through ‘the Champ’ rather than awaiting their rare first XV chances at the Rec. The plan moving forward is for second tier clubs to be able to recruit unlimited dual-registered players from Premiership sides, with the sole restriction a cap of six loanees in any one 23-man matchday squad.

Northampton’s progress to a Champions Cup final, a contest they could so easily have won with a full complement of players, and Bath’s victory over Lyon in the Challenge Cup only underlined how efficient the Premiership is becoming at the preparation of players for the levels of the game above domestic club competition.

Ironically, it was dyed-in-the-wool ex-Wasp Lawrence Dallaglio who foresaw a potential ‘golden era’ for one of his greatest rivals in the early noughties in his role as pundit for Premier Sports:

“I hate constantly making parallels with my own playing career but when Wasps embarked on our golden period of success, it all started with that Challenge Cup final [a win over Bath in 2002].

“It was a fixture against Bath in the final that kicked us off. We won that and then went on to win our first Premiership final against Gloucester as well.

“Bath have targeted the Premiership and been the front-runners all season, they have been outstanding in terms of their consistency, but this is a golden opportunity for them to get another trophy in the cabinet.”

The emphatic win over Les Loups was a West Country version of what the Springboks have been doing over the past few seasons. Bath have scored 330 fourth quarter points while conceding only 120 before the final round of the Premiership, at an average score of 20-7. Head of rugby Johann van Graan began unloading his 6-2 bench in the last half hour in Cardiff, and his charges cruised home 17-0 in that decisive period of the game.

The introduction of forwards with the power of prop Thomas du Toit and number eight Alfie Barbeary, and the contact nous of young Guy Pepper was entirely too much for the Lyonnais. Contact situations became increasingly unmanageable for the Frenchmen in that last half hour. Du Toit and Barbeary are two of the top short-range carrying specialists in the English game.

With Barbeary the inside option, Du Toit outside him and Beno Obano on the delayed arc off nine in between, it is very tough for the defence to account for all that power delivered at different angles. In the event, Ben Spencer picks Obano and Du Toit obliterates his opponent on the outside edge of the cleanout to drive him over.

Between them, Pepper, Du Toit and Barbeary have amassed 25 breakdown turnovers in the Prem so far, and they added another to the total in the 68^th minute.

Finally, there was the scrum. It seems positively unjust Bath can lead off with a likely Lions Test tight-head in Will Stuart, then follow up with the best two-sided prop on planet rugby –Du Toit – in the final 30 minutes. Stuart delivers the punishing jabs and the Springbok lands the big right hand. Bath sit second in their domestic league with a balance of +10 penalties won at scrum time, and ‘Ingo’s Bingo’ was on target again in the final, racking up four penalties to nil in the final 30 minutes.

There is still a lot of work to be done on the Premiership’s financial model to make it viable and debt-free in future. There are no guarantees a fourth club might not follow the same bleak path into administration as London Irish, Wasps and Worcester. Premiership Rugby must come to its senses about the equation between total revenue and player salaries.

At least some sensible first steps are being taken, with all three clubs likely to dip a revived toe in the water in ‘Champ Rugby’, and the cavalry of considerable player-loan support from squads on the tier above riding to the rescue. The domestic product on the field is in a constant state of evolution and it provided excellent preparation for the Six Nations. The Premiership does not suffer in comparison with the best rugby played south of the equator. Not by any means. The days of ‘kick and clap’ are but a distant memory.