The RFU and the Premiership clubs look set for another clash over the new deal set to come into force on July 1

By Peter Bills

The English rugby union is confronting a nightmare scenario with its Premierships clubs that will see money paid by Twickenham going to help recruit stars from the southern hemisphere.

The extraordinary development is a kind of Orwellian rugby scene and is set to explode like a ticking bomb throughout the English game, especially at grassroots level.
What lies behind it is a wily move by Premier Rugby Ltd, the clubs’ organisation. It has completely stunned senior RFU officials who have found themselves caught like flies in the spider’s web. IRFU officials will breathe a huge sigh of relief they control their own destiny.

Last weekend’s news that Newcastle had told two of their England internationals, Matthew Tait and Toby Flood, that they could leave the club raised eyebrows throughout the English game. The real reason is that most clubs will reduce their England contingent and use the RFU’s money to recruit overseas stars, thereby hugely damaging the long term supply line for England’s national team.

What has happened is a direct and serious threat to the long term success of English rugby. It seems that the trend of England’s Premiership soccer clubs buying a glut of overseas stars at the expense of the England national side is about to be copied in rugby union.

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Harlequins this week announced a 3 year deal worth £1 million for highly rated New Zealander Nick Evans. Part of that budgeted expense has almost certainly come from pledged RFU monies.

The long term agreement which was supposedly hammered out a few months back between Twickenham and PRL remains unsigned.

From July 1, a new agreement was set up whereby the clubs would allow the RFU far greater access to England’s international players. PRL accepted that England would require their top players exclusively for four internationals each autumn, a summer tour plus the entire block of the 6 Nations Championship. It meant, in effect, that the top players would represent their clubs for half a season at most.

The RFU agreed to pay compensation of approximately £146,000 per top player to each club affected by the demands of the England Elite Squad. Under the previous agreement, each club received £30,000 per player. This amount was to have been in addition to the long existing pot of money which the clubs already share out from TV rights and marketing. This produces approximately £2 million per club per season.

Under the new pay-out structure, a club like Leicester, who could very well see eight of their players included within the elite squad from July, would receive compensation of just under £1.2 million. The RFU believed that all this agreed extra money would recompense the actual clubs producing the most England players. But PRL’s own formula for dividing up the cash will not mean that.

The clubs organisation conducted a secret ballot, asking its 12 members to agree that any extra monies from the RFU for England player representation should NOT be paid directly to each club. The motion was carried unanimously and what it means is that the more players a club provides for England, the worse off it will be.

PRL will use Twickenham’s approximate £6 million pay out to the clubs firstly to pay each Premiership club an extra £250,000. That takes care of £3 million. Then, although PRL would pay a club that provided five leading players to England the full £700,000 plus envisaged by the RFU, that club would then lose that amount of the central income it had received.

However, if a club provided only one player to England, it should receive £146,000 as intended by the RFU. But under the PRL scheme that club would receive £310,000; £250,000 as its automatic share of the new pay-out plus £60,000 (for a player that had been with the club four years). For instance, a club with two England players would get the £250,000 plus £100,000 in total for one player of four years service and one less than four.

Correspondingly, after that, the club is progressively worse off the more elite players it employs. Thus, PRL’s interference with the scheme which the RFU believed would be implemented is counter productive rather than supportive of English rugby’s long term health.

By the end of the negotiated 8 year agreement, for season 2015-2016, major clubs were to have received £200,000 per player produced for England. But under the PRL scheme, the more players clubs produce the less they will receive.

An insider told me “The more players you have in the England squad, the less compensation you get under this scheme. The accountants have pored over this and the maximum number appears to be two or three. Any more than that and your club starts losing out big time. We reckon that if a club supplies England with five players, it would get only 60% of what the RFU intended.”

It means that clubs with many England players, like Newcastle, are already starting to off-load them. In their place will come southern hemisphere players who are available all season.

What it also means is that clubs who have spent their money developing their grounds, installing facilities for a second business income and making a profit without employing any English players, will receive just as much RFU money as those who have produced several players for England. But the RFU’s future business plans are hugely dependent on England being successful.

The decision has pulled the rug from under the RFU’s feet. The insider said “Francis Baron (RFU CEO) has had his nose rubbed in the dirt. He claims he was given a verbal assurance by the clubs that no stunts would be pulled and that the clubs losing players to England would be recompensed.” Alas, nothing was written down to that effect. And the damage to Twickenham is enormous.

What is more, it appears Twickenham can do nothing about it. Although Baron is alleged to have used delaying tactics to try and avoid signing the Long Form Agreement, a Heads of Agreement that included the assurance of extra financial recompense to the clubs, was signed. And the legal document stated that if the Long Form Agreement was not signed by a certain date (which has now passed), the Heads of Agreement would become the legal document.