Premiership gears up for new season with battle for eyeballs never greater

RFU, PRL, PGP, PRB, IDP, TNT, CVC, RPA – drowning in alphabet soup yet? Welcome to English rugby’s new frontier, where it seems there is no problem too big that an acronym cannot solve. Given the addition of a few more over the summer, maybe it is not complete coincidence that Premiership directors of rugby were recently given a lesson in language.

It is said they were all called into a meeting room and encouraged to be more strident in their public views for the coming season. To embrace and celebrate the gladiatorial nature of the sport, rather than shy away from it. In short, to sex things up a bit.

Related: RFU to axe 42 staff – weeks after selling Twickenham naming rights for £100m

It is believed one wag raised the point that the Rugby Football Union has a habit of hitting him in his wallet whenever he speaks his mind but the recently agreed professional game partnership (PGP) has, so we are told, ushered in an era of unprecedented collaboration between club and country, so you would hope for some leniency by the disciplinary department.

The point here is that the Premiership season finally kicks off on Friday, five weeks after the Premier League, with an acute awareness that the battle for eyeballs has never been greater. France’s Top 14 began last week to great fanfare with a litany of well-known England stars on show, stealing a march on the Premiership, where most players have not had any competitive action since May.

The salary cap has gone back up to £6.4m but the majority of clubs are choosing not to spend to the limit and, though the appointment of Michael Cheika as Leicester’s head coach promises to be box office, the days of clubs recruiting A-list overseas stars are long gone. The arrival of the Fiji captain, Waisea Nayacalevu, at Sale may be the exception that proves the rule but across the board clubs have released considerably more players than they have signed.

By a recent count there were 37 players without a club, having been let go at the end of last season, and though it is an inevitable consequence of a 10-team Premiership – and so fewer fixtures – squads have shrunk. If it means members of the England Under-20s side who won the Junior World Cup over the summer get the game time that they are often starved of, all the better, but it will not be the allure of watching overseas stars that sells tickets this season.

It is also a consequence of the continued post-pandemic recovery at a time when government bailouts are still expected to be repaid and the financial landscape is such that a club such as Harlequins, who sold out all but two of last season’s home matches and who take two fixtures a year to Twickenham with great success, consider being within £500,000 of breaking even a reason for optimism.

As the outgoing Northampton chief executive, Mark Darbon, puts it: “We and the other clubs are striving for this financially sustainable model and lots of us are making good progress but we are not yet profitable on a P&L basis, consistently. That feels like a bit of a step away so we’ve got to continue to work really hard to ensure that we’ve a model that can thrive in the future. Otherwise we’re going to see challenges that we’ve seen in recent years with the loss of some clubs.”

With most clubs cutting their cloth accordingly it has made for an ultra competitive Premiership – so much so that it is now the league’s selling point. But if the clubs have stabilised since three of their number went to the wall, there is an awareness of the need for growth. Extending the title sponsorship deal with Gallagher for another three years is a positive development but that need explains the language lesson and the promise from TNT Sports to push boundaries this season.

“We’ve got to continue to grow the audience, grow its appeal,” adds Darbon. “Only then can we monetise that proposition, can we get media and broadcasting companies investing properly to help us sustain things into the future. We need the broadcasters to want to invest in our sport because there’s an audience that follows it, we need major corporate partners investing at league level because they want to be involved in the Premiership.”

The TNT deal was renewed earlier this year for another two seasons but at a reduced price, which has further focused minds across Premiership boardrooms. It also explains why talk of Anglo-Welsh and British & Irish leagues continues to bubble away, all the more so when the Champions Cup has moved to Premier Sports because TNT didn’t see value in keeping it – a decision that some insiders consider the death knell for the once-vaunted competition.

It has been a long-held view at the RFU that the best way to grow the club game is to have a successful England team. The union’s chief executive, Bill Sweeney, often laments how England have won the Six Nations just four times since lifting the World Cup in 2003, and only one grand slam, and the RFU is unashamed in its aims for the PGP, which gives Steve Borthwick more control over a select group of players.

“Anyone looking in at the age profile, the type of profile of this England team, the growth that’s in that team at the moment, the players that are potentially coming into that England team, is only looking at it and going: ‘England is only going one way,’” says the RFU’s Conor O’Shea. “The proof will always be on the pitch, and we have to deliver that, but the agreement allows us to deliver it on a consistent basis.”

That view is mirrored in the Premiership, if not quite as enthusiastically. “It’s a better agreement for the progression of the international game and that’s what brings in the majority of support, resources and finance into the game,” says Sale’s director of rugby, Alex Sanderson. “[But] it’s definitely more intrusive around how I’m able to manage those players.”

Rob Baxter, the Exeter director of rugby, has voiced his concerns about the PGP but has been enthused by subsequent conversations with Borthwick. Whether it will transform the English landscape for the better remains to be seen, however. “I didn’t get the impression it was bad before,” says Baxter. “The most important thing rugby can do is to stop changing every time it thinks it needs to change.

“Post-Covid salary caps went down, they’ve only just returned now. People even now are talking about whether it should go back up, the RFU are always talking that they haven’t got enough money, they didn’t support the clubs through Covid at all, which is one of my bugbears. Now to get a bit of extra money clubs have got to give up more control. It doesn’t sound like a completely aligned game in this country and that’s probably how it’s going to feel for a little bit.”

Ultimately, whether the PGP realises the RFU’s objectives comes down to Borthwick. For all the granular detail contained in the agreement, for all the individual development plans (IDPs) laid out for his players, how he manages relationships with clubs to ensure he gets best use of his players without turning directors of rugby against him will be key. “I had a good relationship with Eddie [Jones] and I do with Steve now,” says Sanderson of the previous and current England head coaches. “I’m not going to get on with everyone all the time and when those disagreements occur it’s going to be the player caught in the middle. If Steve isn’t there and I don’t get on with the next England head of rugby, that’s my concern.”

The hope is that, at the very least, it no longer becomes an unattractive proposition for clubs to have a number of England internationals in their ranks and the exodus to France slows. That Premiership matches no longer clash with Test weekends helps but the maximum appearances a player can make has been reduced to 30, meaning clubs will have to factor in planning when to rest their internationals even before Borthwick tries to tell them precisely when.

Then there is next summer’s British & Irish Lions tour of Australia. There are no strictly mandated player welfare limits for those players selected – a worry because there are an extra 10 matches bolted on to the end of the season – but perhaps of greater concern is the Wallabies’ recent form. It does not lend itself to the kind of narrative that Lions tours need to thrive – that of a newly assembled squad heading to the end of the earth to tackle one of the world’s leading Test sides against the odds.

Selection for the tour will loom over the entire season, starting at the Rec on Friday as Bath host Northampton. Will Andy Farrell fancy Finn Russell as his fly-half? Perhaps Fin Smith, 22 but able to play with an authority beyond his years, can usurp him. More pressingly, it is said that ticket sales for Friday’s curtain raiser are slow, which is a concern given the Rec is normally a popular place to be under the Friday night lights, all the more so given it is a rerun of last season’s final.

It offers Bath the chance for some early revenge for their four-point defeat in June, having had Beno Obano sent off in the 21st minute for a dangerous tackle. Whether that sending-off ruined the contest or took Bath to within a whisker of what would have gone down as one of the most famous victories in recent memory is open to debate but it does the sport no favours that the Premiership final, the Champions Cup final and the World Cup final all featured red cards last season.

To the letter of the law they were all correct decisions but none were for acts of flagrant violence. Instead they punished marginal mistakes in an era of zero tolerance against the backdrop of concussion litigation and at a time when prioritising safety as well as the spectacle is an increasingly difficult task. If only there was an acronym for it.