This week we will mostly be concerning ourselves with global calendars and getting shirty about shirts…
And there it is! Having waited patiently for months, nay years, for the next bout of squabbling within rugby’s growing professional hierarchy, it has finally begun. Although we confess, we had anticipated a more club v country type of debate.
Still, with characters as strong as Gus Pichot in the hierarchy, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be some form of robust public debate in the upper echelons of the game at some point. The issue of passport players was dealt with as efficiently as it was publicly, but the debate around the shape of the international calendar has the potential to be a lot stickier.
Pichot’s ideas – some of which centre around a new annual tournament of Tests to replace the current series of friendlies – have a certain merit in terms of firing up competition to make Test series more attractive and competitive to potential spectators, but they are so hard to place in the imagination without disrupting so much of the progress made in determining a global calendar.
His points are valid. The international game, outside of the Six Nations, is absolutely on the wane. Fans of all countries are served up at least six Tests per year with barely any material meaning beyond ranking points and revenues. These are often played by tired teams at the end of their respective seasons. Tier two nations rarely get a meaningful look-in to tier one contests. Yet ticket prices continue to ramp up to service declining union revenues.
Even the meaningful Tests are looking tired. The Six Nations is still the global flagship tournament in terms of history and audience participation, yet the relative weakness of Italy means games are no longer as unpredictable as they once were. France’s national team is only now recovering from a spell where the Top 14 took such precedence that the national team was consistently compromised, both on the pitch and in the Stade de France.
Furthermore, Pichot’s point that the initial agreement made in San Francisco to move the Test window to July has been exploited by Premier Rugby rather than honoured, is just as valid. Attempts to create a global calendar were, among other reasons, ostensibly to help manage the players’ workload more sensibly: but there’s no sign of the long-needed decrease in on-pitch time for players whose risk of injury has been shown to have grown over the last few years. Indeed, the announced intention to stretch the English season to June looks more like an increase in workload than anything else.
International Rugby Players’ Association chief executive, Omar Hassanein, is among those who believe the players deserve a much better-structured season.
“I think Gus’s comments were very relevant,” he said to The Guardian.
“More money shouldn’t mean more games and shorter rest periods. In order to get the optimum out of these players, we feel they need to be playing less anyway.”
The RFU – and the ‘Sydney Summit’ happening as we go to press will notionally illuminate whether there are those who side with England’s governing body: France, South Africa and New Zealand are all thought to be closer to Pichot’s stance than the other – is understandably miffed at the thought of losing dozens of millions of pounds of revenue each year, not least because their – and others’ long and medium term business plans were founded on the San Francisco agreement of Test windows in July and November. While doubtless a self-serving stance, there has to be a certain amount of sympathy for an operation which runs well having its revenue model disrupted because other operations are struggling. Unfortunately though, the RFU’s millions depend on a robust international scene creating mouthwatering competition which puts bums on seats. That scene is currently unstable – even the RFU is feeling a pinch.
World Rugby committed to exploring ways to enhance the attractiveness and value of international rugby https://t.co/gWtSkduugr pic.twitter.com/t7FYX2BD8d
— World Rugby (@WorldRugby) September 26, 2018
Among all this is also a genuine threat to the international game from the club game. Though the European club scene is looking a little tired, the PRO14, Top 14 and Premiership are all in rude health competitively despite the intrusion of international windows. Super Rugby should also be in rude health, but the pig’s ear of a league system has ruined that. Even so, both sides of that conflict deserve clarity: a clear divide between club windows and international windows. Pichot’s proffered solution certainly moves in that direction.
Which is why we are backing his suggestions of revisiting the San Francisco agreement. All we want, as rugby observers, stakeholders, fans, players, coaches and others, is clarity, competition and a commitment to welfare for players. We hope Sydney starts to move in the direction of providing this.
White Noise? Really?
Yes, although we claim above that the RFU is working well, we are also aware it has embarked on a scheme of redundancies to help reduce costs in tough times. And we are aware that although Twickenham is a huge source of revenue, it is not the only one.
What we are not aware of, and perhaps we need to be, is just how much importance is attached to revenue generated by merchandising.
The RFU released England‘s twelfth – yes twelfth – England kit in the last four years, a snip at just, erm, GBP95!
New home and alternate kits are also expected to be released next season and worn by England in their World Cup warm-up matches in August and September as well as the subsequent Six Nations and on the 2020 summer tour of Japan. Separate World Cup kits will also be released – which would bring the grand total to sixteen in five years, including change kits for all those games where England play against other teams wearing white.
In the RFU’s annual report for 2017, merchandising revenue was up £1.5m to £7m – around the same as that of an England home match against a tier two nation – but the union defends its policy of releasing at least two new kits every year on the basis that “revenues generated through kit sales are invested directly back into the game”.
But sifting through the bumff accompanying the new kit’s release, which included sentences such as the minute St. George crosses on the kit ‘reflecting patriotism’ as well as the platinum and titanium colours ‘reflecting the strength of those metals’, it’s a little hard to not think that a lot of that cash is spent on paying bored marketeers to conceptualise new ways of ripping supporters off with irrelevant design details. Even the name of the kit, White Noise, is…who on earth will remember that come the Six Nations? Who needs to?
Loose Pass compiled by Lawrence Nolan