Gerry Thornley: Talk of a breakaway rugby competition odd at such a perilous time for the sport

Irish Times

a day ago

Rarely a season or two seems to go by without some talk, or not so idle threat, of a breakaway rugby club competition to lure the best players with vastly increased riches. But while the odds remain against the latest grandiose concept, namely the R360, well-placed sources do give it some chance where previously they would have given it none whatsoever.
The founders and people behind R360 are former England international Mike Tindall, Stuart Hooper, who spent seven years as the director of rugby at Bath, player agent Mark Spoors and John Loffhagen, who was the chief legal adviser for LIV golf for a year.
Their proposal is to create two superclub competitions based on franchises, one between eight men's sides and one between four women's sides, which would compete initially in a seven-match season rising to 14 matches, to be run on consecutive weekends in two windows from April to June and then August to September.
Rounds would take place in a different city each week, with São Paulo, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles all mentioned as potential venues to weeklong events, involving concerts. They want to hire the best 360 players in the world by doubling their salaries and claim to have interested backers from Formula 1 and the NFL, with eight franchises already agreed in principle at €55 million apiece.
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They have conducted several meetings with player agents and representatives, and also the game's governing body, World Rugby. Players from countries, including Ireland, have signed non-binding heads of agreement and, potentially in some cases, contracts which are predicated on the premise that the R360 starts up by next September. For players in their late 20s or more, promises of doubling salaries would be an attractive end-of-career segue.
While the R360 has been in the planning for a while, and is reasonably well advanced, next September is a tight timeline and must count against the project taking off. It seems unlikely the unions and federations will give the R360 the green light, in which case World Rugby won't do either. In that scenario, it's harder to envisage players sacrificing their international careers.
It's also puzzling to see how the project could even begin to make a profit any time soon. Comparisons with the hugely lucrative, franchise-based Indian Premier League in cricket and LIV golf hardly seem remotely apt.
The IPL had a ready-made fan base in a country of one billion people, which dwarfs cricket's global popularity. It's hard to conceive of a major sport where its popularity is so concentrated in one country.
The Indian Premier League has been a massive success, but it takes place in a country where cricket dominates the sporting interests among the population of over a billion people. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images
LIV golf is backed by a trillion‑dollar petrochemical fund. Furthermore, when golfers on the LIV circuit pitch up at golf's Majors, they've tended to be less competitive and this would inevitably be the same were players to take a detour into a franchise-based mini league.
Imagine, say, franchises with amalgamated squads rolling into Dublin for a week, even ones with some leading Irish players, complete with new names and new strips, and tens of thousands of supporters buying into these teams as the R360 claims is the potential for this venture?
Rugby has tried something like this. They're called the Barbarians. They've held their place or worked, to a degree, thanks in large part to their longevity but they're not the attraction of yore for spectators.
That's just not the way rugby works. Supporters' loyalties have been generated over time, through family heritage and a strong sense of identity, be that local, provincial or national. It's hard to see R360 filling out Energia Park, much less the Aviva or Croke Park, and is even less likely to do so in the aforementioned cities in non-rugby territory.
Television money would also seem critical, but since the pandemic that has been a shrinking market, which is partly why rugby is facing such a perilous time. There is talk of the R360 initially being televised by Premier Sports, but they are not big spenders.
At best, this latest concept will not be a breakaway per se, but will be World Rugby-approved and somehow be squeezed into an already overcrowded calendar. At worst, it will cause a huge schism in the game which will do untold damage. Most likely, it won't happen and will serve as a working template for the next breakaway-type concept.
Because the drivers behind R360 are right about one thing, namely that the rugby keeps drawing from the same well, the international game, to fund pretty much everything else, including the club/provincial game, which save for the French Championship, is unsustainable.
There are too many self-serving, competing parts in rugby which are pulling in different directions. It seems ridiculous that every competition does its own deals, with no leverage from the World Cup down. The sport is ripe for the plucking, perhaps even by this R360, which is not entirely out of the question. And if not this one ...