A worrying place to be?

These days – with the internet being a law unto itself and social media spreading truths, half-truths and wild speculation like wildfire – it is easy to become (or seem to become) a Jeremiah crying ‘Wolf!’ at the slightest issue or problem. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, developments during 2016 have left me feeling somewhat concerned at the general state of rugby union and today I wish to explain why.

On a superficial level, one could be forgiven for thinking that all is well and rugby is making good progress in its quest to become a fast-growing world sport. At international level, some of the recent matches have been outstanding – I’m thinking of the two clashes between New Zealand and Ireland and some of England’s performances during the autumn internationals series. Argentina, despite running out of steam towards the end of the year, have become a worthy competitor in the Rugby Championship, the Southern Hemisphere’s equivalent of Europe’s Six Nations. Various moves are taking place to promote the sport in North America and awake the potential ‘sleeping giant’ that is, or may be, the USA. Japan will be hosting the 2019 Rugby World Cup. Fiji won the Rio Olympics Rugby 7s gold medal. There are cogent arguments being mounted for adding Georgia to the Six Nations, accompanied or not by a ‘promotion/relegation’ system which one day may allow other European nations to join in – or perhaps even some of the ‘older’ nations to lose what might be called their protected status. What’s not to like about these?

And yet. We all know the jokey advice about “How to make a small fortune in pig farming”, i.e. you begin with a large fortune … and then move into pig farming.

English rugby, for all the millions piling up at the RFU headquarters at Twickenham, is in an ‘interesting’ state. Many of the Premiership clubs – I’d hesitate to suggest the majority – are owned and/or run by people who have made healthy capital elsewhere and, being rugby fans, have indulged their passion by buying into it, imagining that with the increasing revenues arriving via television and sponsorship any short-term losses will be more than made up by future riches to come.

However, this may work for some but it doesn’t for others. There simply isn’t enough money in the club game to support two divisions of full-time professional players. In bucket chemistry terms, the junior of the two English divisions (the Championship) can be split neatly into those with seriously-rich owners/backers who have designs on promotion to the Premiership and The Rest – i.e. those who can only afford to pay peanuts and/or who, hampered by grounds who do not meet the exacting criteria required for admission to the top table, have already accepted that the Premiership is an ambition too far and have opted for the hopefully more achievable goal of ‘financial survival’, often with mixed results.

Life isn’t much fun even for the Championship clubs possessing Mr Moneybags as backers.

Three seasons ago London Welsh gained promotion to the Premiership, spent all the money it could to buy players to help it stay there … and barely won a bonus point, still less a match all season.

Now back in the Championship, two seasons on, and having necessarily had to retreat from Oxford’s Kassam Stadium (to where they unwisely decamped in an effort to grow a bigger supporter base) back to Old Deer Park in south-west London and attracting ebbing crowds, in a few weeks from now London Welsh will be facing their second (or is it third?) winding-up order in the past twelve months after a new group of promised backers failed to materialise when the chips came down.

They’re not the only ones facing hard times. This season Bristol, who have a substantial backer behind them and a vibrant supporter base in the proud West Country, finally came up into the Premiership after three seasons of desperate ‘near misses’ in the Championship play-off process. Ten games – and ten losses – later they have already sacked their head coach Andy Robinson and seem to be preparing for what looks like their similar, seemingly inevitable, ‘one season up and straight back down again’ return to the Championship.

Nigel Melville, Rob Andrew’s replacement as the RFU’s director of professional rugby, is currently conducting a review of what to do about the structure of elite English rugby and specifically the Championship. The smart money is moving towards either throwing money at the latter (in order to make it viable as a professional development vehicle for Premiership clubs) or just accepting that ‘the powers that be’ – including the Premiership clubs – are, or may be, unwilling to dip their hands in their pockets that far and letting the Championship decline into either a semi-pro or even amateur league. The second of those options, of course, would be virtually tantamount to removing promotion and relegation from the Premiership set-up – something that the majority of the Premiership clubs would like very much indeed.

A different aspect. My family gave up attending matches at Twickenham Stadium nearly a decade ago, simply because the match day experience there is such poor value for money: criminally expensive food, a terminally-inferior public address system and – worst of all – far too many brash, boorish and thick supporters who don’t seem remotely interested in proceedings on the pitch.

In which context I was interested that in one of his Daily Mail columns last week  Sir Clive Woodward laid into the antics of ‘new’ England supporters at Twickenham (presumably attracted by the Rugby World Cup and England’s current successes) who seem to have little understanding of, or interest in, the game and instead spend the bulk of their time going off for (and returning with) trays of beer, undertaking toilet visits, shouting and cheering at inappropriate moments and even carrying on non-rugby conversations in loud voices through the games.

Clearly things haven’t changed much since 2008 then.

It’s an easy default position to adopt, of course, but I cannot help but feel that rugby union is sleep-walking down the same path that English football’s Premier League had trodden these past twenty years. Shedloads of television money and media coverage seems to be enabling mediocre clubs – and indeed mediocre club managements – to survive by papering over the cracks and thereby disguising the very real and worrying underlining issues, including crazy business models, the growing menace of agents making unrealistic demands, a general lack of concern for player health and safety (far too many games being played and a half-hearted response to the growing number of concussion injuries) and too much ‘time serving’ at the top end of the major rugby authorities and – inevitably – far too little dynamic vision.

I suspect it’s just the same as in every area of life. If too many second-rate people get to the top, you get the quality of [whatever it is you’re talking about] you deserve.