Wallabies offered big bucks to sign for global rugby breakaway league
Several Wallabies stars have been offered big money by organisers of a new global rugby breakaway league, which is pitched being as a formula one-style roadshow and counts royal son-in-law and former England Test star Mike Tindall as a co-founder.
But under the reported plans for the eight-team franchise competition, which is branded 'R360' and hopes to launch next year, Australian players may have to give up playing for the Wallabies to join the breakaway ranks.
After plans for new competition first emerged in November last year, reports in English newspapers on Tuesday added more detail to a concept that is being sold as rugby's revolutionary equivalent to the Indian Premier League in cricket.
According to the Telegraph and the Times, R360 would involve eight men's teams and four women's teams competing as franchises under a 'grand prix' model that would see the competition move between major global cities for 16 rounds, along the same lines as formula one. The games would be played over a weekend at stadiums like the Nou Camp in Barcelona and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, and involve live sites and music concerts as well.
Team owners from other sports, like the NFL and motor racing's formula one, are reportedly interested in owning franchises.
The London-based organisers of R360 reportedly includes Tindall, the former World Cup winner who is married to Zara Phillips, the daughter of Princess Anne; former Bath rugby coach Stuart Hooper and John Loffhagen, a lawyer who helped launch LIV Golf.
The organisers have engaged with World Rugby – who would have to sanction the league – and Rugby Australia chief executive Phil Waugh is one of several national bosses who has met the R360 organisers.
Just how the breakaway league will secure the hundreds of millions of dollars in funding required is still unclear, but the vast riches of the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi sovereign wealth fun which bankrolls LIV Golf, is not involved, according to informed sources.
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