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Daily Mail
08-08-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Organisers of rugby union's breakaway R360 league look to sign up top coaches as part of plans for 'generational change' with Louis Rees-Zammit amongst players to have joined
Organisers of rugby union's new breakaway league have now turned their attention to signing up top coaches as part of their plans to shake-up the game's established order. R360 wants to create 'generational change' in the sport by creating eight new franchise men's teams made up of the world's best players who will play all around the globe. As previously reported by Daily Mail Sport, the likes of Fenway Sports Group, the Glazer family and Red Bull have expressed interest in franchise ownership while it is understood close to 200 players have already agreed to join for the slated R360 start of summer 2026. They include Wales wing Louis Rees-Zammit, who has confirmed his rugby return after a stint in the NFL. R360 is now being seen as a genuine proposition by World Rugby – who are co-ordinating how to respond to the threat – and the game's individual national governing bodies. There is an acknowledgment that both leading players and coaches will be attracted by the proposition of joining R360 both from a financial and lifestyle perspective. R360, run by England 2003 World Cup winner Mike Tindall and leading agent Mark Spoors, are understood to be close to sealing the required number of circa 200 players they need by September to get up and running which is why coaches are now their next priority. Any coaches who join R360 will be tasked with playing an entertaining brand of rugby to attract new fans to the competition which will follow a Formula1-style global model. Both players and coaches who sign must be out of contract with their current employers by the summer of 2026 to take part in the first season. R360 was a hot topic of conversation in Australia between rugby's top bosses during key meetings held during the British & Irish Lions tour. 'I think it's a genuine potential disruption,' Welsh Rugby Union chief executive Abi Tierney said of the proposals being put forward by R360. 'None of us are thinking this isn't going to happen. It might not happen. But we're better off planning for it to happen and make sure we do our best to respond to that.' Former Wales coach Warren Gatland looks unlikely to be joining R360 with reports in the Far East on Friday suggesting he is set to take charge of Japanese side Urayasu D-Rocks. R360 has no plans to disrupt international rugby. But any England players who join the rebel league would have to forgo their Test careers to do so. English rugby rules state players must be employed by a Premiership club to represent Steve Borthwick's national side. For R360 to be approved by World Rugby, its bosses would have to show it complies with the regulations stipulated by the game's governing body. That includes player release for international windows. Crucially, R360 approval would have to be tabled for World Rugby Council consideration by one of the game's national unions. It is unlikely a major union such as the RFU or WRU would do so given they are potentially at risk of losing out should R360 get off the ground. The WRU is set to cut the number of its professional teams from four to most likely two, so Tierney is aware Wales players may be attracted to R360 given that it is uncertain as things stand which teams will continue to exist long term. The WRU plans to confirm in the coming weeks its preferred option for the future with a period of consultation with stakeholders then set to take place. Wales captain Jac Morgan, who impressed with the Lions in Australia, is one of a number of Welsh players out of contract at the end of the forthcoming season and would be a leading target for R360 as a result. 'At the heart of all this, we want to provide stability and the best for Welsh rugby,' Tierney said. 'Contracts start to be talked about in October and R360's aim is to be up and running by next summer. I'm absolutely aware of that.'
The Guardian
03-06-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
R360 makes correct diagnosis but proposed cure is unproven
There is one passage in the sales pitch for R360, rugby union's new breakaway league, everyone ought to be able to agree on. 'Clubs around the world are feeling the strain, and are being propped up by the international game,' the proposal goes, and it is true there is not a single team in the Premiership making a profit, seven of the 10 owe more than they own. Worldwide, at least 12 professional sides have gone out of business in recent years. It is just a shame about the rest of it, which has more holes than Newcastle's defence. R360 is brought to us by the team of Mike Tindall, Stuart Hooper, whose management career at Bath was one seven-year lesson in the Peter Principle that organisation's tend to promote people to the point of their incompetence, player agent Mark Spoors and John Loffhagen, who had a 13-month spell as the chief legal adviser for LIV golf. Their idea is to create two new superclub competitions, one between eight male sides, one between four female sides, which would sit above the club structure. They would compete in a 16-match season in two windows from April to June and then August to September, with rounds taking place in a different city each week. The words are cheap, but what they are promising sounds very expensive. They say they want to hire the 360 best players in the world on double their salaries, mention São Paulo, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles as potential venues and plan to run 'a week of live events', including gigs before every game. Investors from the Premier League, F1 and NFL are said to have 'expressed interest', and 'dozens' of players have apparently signed letters of intent. All of which will be good for nothing but hamster bedding unless the organisers can fulfil their end of the deal and raise all the necessary capital by September. There is (there always is) a lot of ready talk about emulating the runaway success of the Indian Premier League, which is built on the support of the largest single-sport market on the planet, and LIV golf, a competition launched by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund as a screw-you to the PGA Tour after they refused to allow their players to compete in the existing tournaments. It is amazing what you can do when you have a billion fans with no worthwhile domestic competition to watch or the backing of a trillion-dollar petrochemical fund run by a man with a grudge. What rugby does have, according to a Nielsen report from 2021, is 800m supporters worldwide. That is 800m supporters who like the game more or less the way it is and don't necessarily want to tune in to a match between two newly minted teams designed by committee, see their favourite players creamed off from club rugby by a rival competition or ruled out of the next Test because they are playing in a domestic game that clashes with southern hemisphere internationals scheduled to take place in the August-September window. That is if anyone who makes the hop across to the new competition is even allowed to carry on playing for their country. Right now, anyone who signs up would probably be ineligible to play for England unless the 'exceptional circumstances' clause was triggered. That won't happen unless World Rugby votes in favour of the enterprise and that won't happen unless the unions are on board and all the anti-doping and insurance regulation issues are resolved (all of which, you can be sure, would happen surprisingly quickly if R360 can persuade PIF to spend a few of their spare billions on all this). Sign up to The Breakdown The latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week's action reviewed after newsletter promotion Unless that happens, it seems the large part of the money is supposed to come from, well, us, the paying public. Last May, Tindall talked it all through with his former Gloucester teammate Mark Foster, who went on to become an executive at LIV, on an episode of his podcast, The Good, the Bad and the Rugby. Tindall's main complaint is that rugby is not extracting enough money from its fans. Foster explains that a new business model could conceivably involve charging £75 a ticket, and '£100 a day easy on food and beverages' so by the time you have bought your new team jersey 'everyone there is spending three-to-five hundred pounds' at the match. It's worth a listen, not least because they say so much right about what is wrong with the game. Tindall absolutely has a point when he says that piecemeal change, when repeated tweaks are made to the existing game, have not worked and that something more radical than the Club World Cup is needed. But he has a long way to go, and a lot of money to find, to begin to persuade anyone this is it. You do not need to be a medical expert to know someone is sick, but it sure helps to be one when you're trying to find a cure.
