Gloucester put case for a rugby revolution

Top-flight club’s chief executive tells Chris Hewett why suspending relegation from the Premiership will end a flawed system and even benefit those Championship clubs excluded from the elite level

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Stephen Vaughan knows it will be a hard sell; that the argument for a temporary suspension of promotion and relegation to and from an expanded Aviva Premiership will have to be extraordinarily convincing to persuade the vast majority of rugby union followers in England that this is not a brazen attempt by the strong to enrich themselves at the expense of the weak. Especially as the top-flight clubs have just negotiated an 80 per cent hike in broadcasting money from BT Sport.

But the Gloucester chief executive is an eloquent supporter of the most significant change to the way the professional club game is run in the world’s biggest union-playing nation since the late 1980s, when leagues were first sanctioned by the governing body at Twickenham.

“We see this as a move that will ultimately create more opportunities for more clubs, rather than the other way round,” he said this week. “The worst-case scenario is that we continue as we are.”

Vaughan sees this as the moment for bold decision-making. “Premier Rugby [the top-flight clubs’ administative body] are in the process of discussing a new long-term agreement with the Rugby Football Union; we have a home World Cup heading our way this autumn; we have our new European tournaments up and running; the domestic television deal is in place; we believe there is fresh investment money out there if we can offer the right product. If ever there was a good time to take our game to another level, this is it.”

If they are to make their great leap forward as great as it can be, the Premiership clubs believe promotion and relegation must be placed on the back-burner for at least three years, and possibly as long as five years.

They claim the gulf between the elite teams and the vast majority of the clubs currently playing in the second-tier Greene King IPA Championship is widening by the day, and that with a small handful of notable exceptions – Bristol, Worcester and Yorkshire Carnegie, each of whom have retained a Premiership shareholding from previous seasons in the top league – they are in no position to compete. For evidence, they point to the torments suffered by London Welsh over the last eight, utterly joyless months of winless futility.

Those who support the expansion of the current 12-team Premiership into a 14-team tournament from the end of next season – a move that would allow all three of those Championship clubs to be incorporated – say the door should then be slammed shut, and stay shut until, after an agreed period, the position is “reviewed”, a word that will strike opponents as chillingly vague.

“The most important thing to make clear,” Vaughan said, “is that none of this is Premier Rugby’s decision and theirs alone. This only goes through if all the stakeholders agree [including the RFU and Championship clubs] that the change reflects the financial and competitive reality in which we find ourselves.

“So let’s look coldly and clearly at the current situation. A full house watching Gloucester at Kingsholm, a packed crowd for Leicester at Welford Road, a rocking Recreation Ground when Bath are playing… these things are highly attractive to the top foreign players, the broadcasters, the sponsors and investors. We want to introduce new minimum standards criteria aimed at improving what is already an outstanding product, and if I’m honest, the clubs outside a 14-team Premiership who might be able to meet those criteria in the short term would be few and far between. We’re talking about infrastructure, support base, finances… we’re talking about genuine ambition.

“Of course, the absence of relegation for a period of time would make it easier for the Premiership clubs to attract new investment. We’re looking for fresh investment ourselves and one thing business likes is a sense of stability. But I believe a move in this direction would give ambitious clubs outside the 14 the time and space to prepare themselves for the realities of life in the top league.

“A five-year moratorium would certainly offer them that space. We want to welcome those who demonstrably have the wherewithal to be something bigger and better than good one year and awful the next. If you win promotion under the current system but then don’t win a game, it kills your support base and makes investors run away.”

All fine and dandy, so far as it goes. But what about the obvious downsides: more dead games in the bottom half of a relegation-free league; the lack of clarity on whether promotion would ever be restored, or whether the Premiership titans would simply opt for further expansion as and when it suited them; the tacit acceptance – deeply wounding for English rugby, given its playing numbers and financial resources – that the country cannot sustain two competitive professional leagues?

“If we were like France – if we had seven or eight well-supported clubs in the Second Division who had all the right ingredients for top-flight rugby and wanted to come up – I’m sure none of this would have come under discussion in the first place,” Vaughan said. “But we’re not like France and we don’t have those clubs.

“I happen to think that the Championship teams would benefit from a much closer relationship with Premier Rugby: that we should bring together the two leagues and have them run by the same people, along the lines of the set-up in France. After all, Premier Rugby is run by the clubs, for the clubs. But we would need a gargantuan change of heart from the RFU for that to happen.”

There is one other obvious point of weakness in the expansion argument – or at least, there will be if the free-market fundamentalists in the current top flight, Saracens and Bath among them, succeed in abolishing the salary cap that has been such a valuable equalising force since the founding of the Premiership in 1997. A free market, run within the confines of a closed shop? Would that not be philosophically incoherent, as well as nakedly self-serving?

“No one is saying that we want a closed shop, and anyway, we at Gloucester strongly support the continuation of a salary-cap system,” Vaughan responded. “I think it would be very damaging for English rugby if it were to be removed completely.” In saying this, he stood squarely alongside the Harlequins rugby director, Conor O’Shea, who last weekend warned of a profoundly damaging “arms race” in the event of a complete untying of the purse strings.

He did, however, concede ground on the “dead games” argument. “It’s hard to argue with that,” acknowledged the chief executive, “but please believe me when I say that we’ve thought long and hard about all of this. A lot of us don’t find the prospect of a relegation moratorium easy to swallow, because it’s so deep-rooted in the culture of English team sport.

“It’s why so much of the detail of any change is still up for discussion, not just amongst ourselves but with everyone who has a legitimate voice. This can’t happen if it doesn’t work for the Championship clubs as well as those of us in the Premiership.”