Rugby may be going the way of all sports

One of the uncomfortable home truths coming home to roost in world sport in the last five years is the extent to which the powers-that-be [and in that description I include both sports administrators generally and those club owners (in team games) and personal managers (in individual sports) who control elite sportsmen and women] organise themselves and their charges to not only preserve the existing status quo but thereby also act against those developments which might improve fairness, integrity and even the missionary spread of some sports to parts of the globe previously unexploited and/or in some cases even unreached.

There is a danger that, if I begin citing examples, it will soon present as if I’m composing I’m an endless and random shopping list but perhaps needs must.

The extraordinary series of FIFA corruption scandals at the highest levels and the ‘rigged’ voting system of awarding the soccer World Cup that it took the Swiss and American authorities to uncover when others – including England’ Football Association – either turned a blind eye and/or knowingly shrugged their shoulders, took a deep breath and ‘played’ the oft-criticised ‘bidding’ game anyway simply because they felt it was the only way to achieve the Holy Grail of hosting a World Cup in the 21^st Century.

Similarly, the International Olympics Committee with its Byzantine ‘bidding’ processes, half-hearted approach to rooting out the evil of performance-enhancing drugs-taking amongst athletes and its total ‘bottling’ of dealing properly with suspected state-sponsored drugs use by Russia and certain African countries.

I could also point to World Rugby effectively operating a ‘First World’ cartel as regards the awarding of Rugby World Cups evenly around the globe – a situation only now being (partly) rectified when Japan hosts the 2019 RWC.

Or New Zealand happily plundering the Pacific Islands for players with outstanding potential whilst barely paying lip-service to the concept of compensation – you can count on the fingers of two hands the number of times in history they’ve played Test matches in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. Even to the fact that New Zealand seems to get ‘special nation’ favourable treatment with their pre-match Haka performances and the number of times their players appear to get off lightly with the disciplinary authorities compared to players of other countries.

For another sport rife with the phenomenon, I only have to mention the words ‘Formula One’. It’s the only world sport I know where – at any one time – (despite the occasional exceptions that prove the rule) there are only ever two or three teams out of eight or nine that have a realistic chance of reaching the podium. And yet [I suppose we should be congratulating Bernie Ecclestone and his marketing outriders for this] it’s one of the most lucrative sports going.

When it comes to the UK and soccer’s Premier League, there’s in an in-built form of apartheid operating with six or seven super-rich clubs splashing around spending tens, even hundreds, of millions of pounds on their playing squads … whilst the remainder [let’s leave aside Leicester City’s achievement of winning the title from nowhere in 2015/2016] scrabbling around trying to acquire squads and managers that – the bottom line is – will enable them simply to stay in the Premiership and therefore have ongoing access to the silly Monopoly money that broadcasters and others are willing to throw at the sport.

Where soccer goes, these days it seems that the sport of rugby union will do its best to follow, even though its financial scales are and will remain forever but a one-hundredth and counting of those in soccer.

Even though England Rugby is currently basking in a (post-2015 Rugby World Cup disaster) purple patch under no-nonsense new coach Eddie Jones, it labours under a just-renewed ‘arrangement’ for access to England-qualified players with the English Premiership clubs in which national development and success, when it does happen, is effectively just an occasional happy random product because the clubs, who control the players and pay their day-to-day wages, have far too much of a whip hand.

Last season the English Premiership dealt with a major ‘salary cap breaching’ scandal involving some of its richest clubs by fudging its investigation and then kicking its resulting (confidential) report into the long grass, leaving the identity of the culprits unclear and their punishments, if any, eventually lost (they presumably hope) in the mists of time.

We are now two weekends into the 2016/2017 Premiership season and events – and results – are unfolding broadly as most fans, scribes and impartial observers would have predicted.

Those clubs with the richest owners or backers – in other words, those with the deepest pockets – have bought up the best world players coming on the market and thereby made their already impressive first team squads even stronger.

Meanwhile those Premiership clubs without Grade A sugar daddies, or those who have decided (sometimes against their own inclinations and instincts) to try and live within their means, are rapidly being consigned to the ‘also rans’ bin. It doesn’t make for a healthy, thriving professional England game. You only have to look at the second tier (the Championship) to see clubs struggling to stay afloat, sometimes by going semi-professional with some players earning less that £25,000 per annum and one club, newly-promoted Richmond, having openly discussed the issue with its players, deliberately opting to continue upon a non-professional basis.

The irony is that – despite the English Premiership’s various woes detailed above – on the evidence of this season so far the standards of play and fitness at the top end are improving rapidly.

Saracens looked imperious against Worcester Warriors in their opening match and yesterday I watched on television the epic clash between Leicester Tigers and Wasps (a 34-22 victory for the latter) which was as dynamic, physical and dramatic in nature as any match below international standard that I have ever seen. Elsewhere yesterday Bath, now under the coaching direction of hard-nosed Kiwi Todd Blackadder and with fly-half George Ford on top form, scored eight tries in a 58-5 thrashing of Newcastle Falcons.

No doubt some might argue that, as long as playing standards keep improving, it doesn’t really matter if the business side of a sport is not everything that it could and ought to be, or even whiffs a bit.

And some of us might counter-argue that’s not quite the point.