Sugar daddy era is over. What happens next will make or break Premiership

Times

01-05-2025

We are on the verge of the second era of English professional rugby. The initial era began with the outbreak of professionalism emanating from the southern hemisphere. The RFU handed the responsibility of the elite English club league to a band of committed individuals with a long-established love of the game.
The likes of Northampton Saints' Keith Barwell were heroes. They sustained their clubs and, with it, the early years of professionalism. Bruce Craig has funded Bath through dark times to the bright present.
In one way, the first decade of the professional age wasn't that different to the final hurrah of amateurism. Individual businessmen accepted the challenge to ensure their beloved teams were competitive. The businessman and fanatical Bath supporter, the late Malcolm Pearce — who ironically was never to own Bath but their great rivals, Bristol Bears — employed the likes of Gareth Chilcott, Ben Clarke and Steve Ojomoh in the dying days of amateurism. These were players with the mindset of professionals but the incomes of amateurs.
The arrival of national leagues accelerated the growth of the game in England. A sport that had been an excuse for a few beers at the highest levels was now competitive at the top end. Yet while in 1996-97, the National League Division One had 12 teams, all those years later, there are a mere ten teams in the top division — now the Gallagher Premiership — and a great deal more financial risk than back in the last century.
Phil Dowson, Northampton's director of rugby, spoke this week of more confident investment and pointed towards a question central to rugby union's future: whether the sport is business, or the business is sport?
In the first era of professionalism — the days of the so-called 'sugar daddies' — that was a valid question, but we are entering times when all kinds of investment are perceived as the future of the club game. The answer is broadly united. The dream of the men running the Premiership is to save the sport by making it into a hard-nosed business. Theirs is a world in which meritocracy on the field is secondary to the long-term benefit of the game. And maybe it is. Maybe relegation is the existential threat to the English professional game.
Bill Sweeney, the RFU chief executive, said that: 'Promotion and relegation doesn't currently work.' The most interesting word he used was 'currently'. Is this a sap to the traditional voice of Twickenham, which sees the Premiership as the problem, not a solution? Not a chance. 'Currently' translates as 'forever'. Sweeney spoke of an intention to grow beyond the initial ten teams, but only clubs who can present the right business case will be granted entry.
I am not taking the side of either the pro or anti-relegation lobby. Promotion and relegation isn't the essence of the impasse in which the professional English club game finds itself. We are witnessing the crunch moments where sport becomes, first and foremost, a business. This is portrayed as wholly positive but an awful lot of business is run for the lopsided profitability of the owners. Investment in rugby is being portrayed as wholly beneficial.
Rugby union doesn't bare comparison with the giant that is the NFL and the stripped-down entertainment of the Hundred in cricket. But private investment sees an opportunity to grow the game. There's no doubting the parlous state of the sport but what we are being sold sounds extremely short term. Do we want the English club game to thrive and survive for ten or 20 years only to stagnate for eternity — the investor profits long taken? After all, investors do, I presume, invest for profit as well as sport's well-being.
In the long term ten teams will grow to perhaps 20 with good financial practice. There will come a time when expansion will stop. The numbers can't multiply on and on. Then what? Well, just as clubs who present the right business credentials will have an opportunity to become part of the Premiership package, so those who fail to meet corporate criteria can be dismissed. The most subjective way to decide whether a club should maintain its position or not is on the field. Or it was, until the sport started on its final leap towards becoming first, foremost and only a money-making business.
Sweeney dismisses any comparison with the thriving French leagues. France has a history and tradition all of its own when it comes to the club game. The English club game was on its 15th pint in the clubhouse when Bayonne were packing the crowds in against Biarritz.
The clarion call for immediate investment is marketed as the short-term salvation. I understand the Premiership's short-term needs yet the arguments seem rushed. In a ten-team league, two games a week tend to be irrelevant if Newcastle Falcons or Exeter Chiefs are involved. How do their hammerings away to Bath and Gloucester respectively last weekend help to market the Premiership? Meanwhile Vannes, newcomers to the French Top 14, had a thrilling victory against Toulon last weekend in their fight for survival. It's gripping stuff for the French TV audience.
France's long-term focus on what happens on the field seems more of a template than what the Premiership has offered in the shape of Newcastle in the past few years. A closed shop is worrying. The debate is not straightforward, whatever your age and sporting preference. And yet there is a rush to turn rugby into business as the sugar daddy era gives way to the age of the investor.
Who knows; it may well make the Premiership. It could also break it. One thing for sure. It is too important a moment to allow anything to be hastily decided upon.