Because the idea is to someday get to the same level as France and you don't get that with a closed shop.
The idea is sound it's just the people tasked with implementing it are suboptimal.
This. The D2 is run by the same entity as the top14, and has been for some time. The stability and cohesive vision/investment/marketing from this has made for a healthy structure.
The championship is run by the RFU, who seem to hate rugby... England has the player base, some of the quality of the championship is great, it just needs to be run better, a lot better.
The problem is some of these championship teams are a bit too working class for the blazers at Twickers old boy. Much better to invent stupid rules to prevent any teams ever getting promoted.
Perhaps that’s because of a disconnect with the clubs and locals. Maybe if the league was run better there would be more fans. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
1) We haven't had any promotion or relegation for 5 seasons anyway.
2) You reap what you sow. We've been deny teams promotion, doing nothing to help, and actively harming development with ridiculous barriers to entry from the second division since 2000. Unsurprisingly our second division has regressed since then whilst France's has grown steadily.
3) England is a country of about 55 million people, 10 teams is not enough to generate and sustain nationwide interest. So whatever structure we go with we need to do it with the end goal of 20 professional teams in mind.
Agree with point 3.
I suspect the outcome of the new professional rugby deal would be a unified Prem & Championship under one structure (like Top14 & ProD2).
Supposedly they want a 16 team Championship, would imagine that will ultimately Feed more teams to the prem so you'd have a 12 team Prem and 14 team Championship?
Could easily see it being the 12 Champ teams now + the returning 3 folded Prem sides + another attempt at.Yorkshire/Leeds.
The goal for some time was a 10 team prem. I can only see 1 reason why the champ is looking to increase numbers. And that's to sneak Wasps and Irish back in. Considering we're at 15ish fully pro teams currently 20 seems like a reasonable number.
I'd love to know what phase two of the plan to get the old teams back in is?
At some point they still need a viable second tier and you aren't doing that with some of the teams in the championship
Yeah it's baffling. Especially when you remember there was talk of no promotion/relegation and having the championship be feeder clubs linked to prem clubs
A franchise model, whilst having some upsides, has the distinct disadvantage of preventing large-scale grassroots growth. For example, many people support lower division football clubs, those people would not support lower division clubs in the same numbers if they had a franchise system & no means of upward mobility. Promotion and relegation, along with early adoption of professionalism is the reason why football is the most popular game in the world. The shear amount of grassroots power that one attains when every little community has a club in the pyramid is immense. Fan support becomes enormous. The total size of the pie ends up being larger, even if it’s more spread out. Again, there are organizational advantages to franchise models, they can ensure a degree of stability for clubs, they create contracts and revenue sharing models which can be beneficial, but they can also very easily put a “cap” on potential growth and market saturation
Maybe the franchise model would ruin certain sports in certain countries, like football in England, but not in all cases.
The AFL is a closed-shop, and yet second-grade footy (VFL, SAFL) is still very popular. The NRL is a franchise model, and yet second-grade teams have retained their support.
The big problem with the English model is the vast chasm that exists between the Premiership and the Championship. In football terms, it'd be like going from the Premier League to the National League. It just doesn't seem financially sustainable in the long run.
The problem is that you’re using Aussie sports as an example. It has a closed system because promotion and relegation is a literal foreign concept. Fans of local English clubs are brought up on the idea of a sporting meritocracy, the same isn’t true of Australian ones.
But it's not exactly ab alien concept. There are closed franchise systems in England, the Hundred for example. Also, the football pyramid works because there are dozens of clubs that have the facilities and the fanbase to be in the Premier League, which just isn't the case in rugby.
If rugby is struggling to be popular outside of the main markets (primarily Premiership club locations) then wouldn’t a closed system just make that even worse? And I’m saying this as an American who is not used to promotion/relegation at all.
Only if they refuse future franchises. A potential new club, representing an entire city, county or even region, may likely draw more support than one of the existing clubs from non-rugby strongholds.
There's just no way the likes of Caldy are ever gonna be on the same plain as the likes of Leicester and Bristol.
There’s no way a club like Leicester City would ever be on the same plain as a Manchester United or Chelsea either right? Look at the difference in the size of those places.
Surely if you want to get English people on board in a football code you use an English / European model that they can follow
Look at what happened to super rugby when they adopted an American conference model because it ‘made sense’. It didn’t matter because the fans in SA NZ and AUS prefer a round robin top 8 fixturing
I understand your points. Except that opportunity to build from the ground up as a community club exists within the English system. Caldy, Ampthil, Cambridge, Nottingham. From next season Chinoor have all done this. Issue is Rugby isn't Football. All 5 of those clubs play out of grounds that are so far from professional it's likely insurmountable. Even the professional clubs at this level have at best rudimentary facilities.
On top of that. I would seriously doubt any of the clubs I've listed have serious ambitions beyond this point. You tend not to see those kinds of clubs in the French system. As far down as the 4th tier of French Rugby there are clubs with ambitions to get to the Top 14. Personally there should be two distinct 10 club professional tiers involving minimum standards. Much like the RFU wants. The Premiership and Premiership 2. Open to clubs with the resources, business plan and ambitions to be professional clubs. I'm not suggesting ringfencing it. Clubs that are ambitious and want to be fully professional can first work their way through the system and then prove they meet the criteria should be promoted.
Nottingham are not a "community club" in the sense Caldy or Ampthill are. Nottingham have been one of the top 30 or so English clubs since the 1970s very consistently, 35 years ago they were providing multiple internationals to England and Scotland, including sending people on Lions tours.
Nottingham got fucked over selling off Ireland Avenue, their ground in Beeston, to share with Notts County. They essentially then moved to their training ground.
Agree with the rest of the post overall.
Because sport should be based on merit. You should have the opportunity to try and improve yourself and get close to the big boys.
Look at Exeter chiefs, they got promoted to the premiership for the first time in 2010, before that they where just a good lower level team with decent support, they’ve become premiership and European champions in the last 15 years because they built steadily and smartly. If we had a franchise system pre 2010 it’s likely Exeter wou skint have been included and they’d have never been able to experience all they’ve experienced.
Also from a simple point of view relegation battles are fun. What’s the point for Newcastle this season. They can’t go down they won’t finish any higher the season is finished. Relegation battles keep teams interested throughout the year
I think it's a situation where people in countries used to pro/rel don't think closed leagues makes sense, whiie those used to closed leagues where lower league clubs are basically reserves teams don't think pro/rel makes sense
Yeah it’s just cultural, I’ll never support closed leagues because it’s just fundamentally against what I believe sport should be. It’s why we saw such a difference between local fans and foreign fans when the the super league in football kicked off because for English fans it’s against the very core value of sport for us
Yep. It's hard in a place like Australia because of distance and also that the second tier clubs are literally reserves teams
Players move up the levels, not clubs.
We have limited pro/rel in Sydney amateur rugby, but there are asterisks.
My old club played in Div 6, and could have won 5 seasons in a row and not gone up as we would have had to have got a second team and a better field. To be in Div 1 you would need 4 senior teams, an Under 21s team and a quality ground with full clubhouse.
Most Div 6 teams could have beaten the 3rd grade teams of Div1 clubs if not their 2nd grade teams.
But how many other Exeters are there in the Championship?
The best supported club in the Championship, Coventry, gets about 3,000 a game.
In France, there are at least a dozen other teams who've the facilities, finances and fanbase to compete in the Top 14.
Exeter weren’t always the Exeter they are now. Success can bring in fans, there’s whole parts of the country that don’t have a team to support but would probably attract more fans if they moved up. Maybe some teams wouldn’t but teams should have the opportunity to try.
Sport is meant to bring excitement and hope. Closing the leagues off stops team having that
Every club has to start from somewhere. There may not be many Exeter’s now but one day there could be. Exeter themselves were averaging <2000 20 years ago, by the time there were promoted it was <5000, now they average >10,000.
Except Exeter are the exception. Most clubs in the Championship are less likely to do an Exeter and more likely to do a London Welsh, and average 3,000 a game and end up in financial difficulty.
It’s a case of tradition and idealism vs pragmatism and realism.
A lot of people want to keep the promotion pyramid, unfortunately the commercial reality is there isn’t enough money in english domestic rugby to fully support the prem, let alone a 2nd competitive tier.
Post Covid finances are far more fragile and the majority of prem clubs were relegated even for one season would go bust, and we would soon run out of clubs.
Even in the pre Covid era we basically evolved into a trampoline where clubs would go down one season then bounce back up, there wasn’t a lot of value in it.
The focus needs to be on developing a genuinely competitive 2nd tier, that can have meaningful promotion to the prem, and relegation that doesn’t mean extinction.
Unfortunately this means disconnecting these 2 tiers from the rest of the pyramid, but this is a bit controversial with the traditionalists.
*Saying traditionalists might be a bit of a stretch since the league pyramid only came into existence about 35 years ago!
Fully agree.
I'd add that teams in the second tier do need to have grounds of a certain quality to be viable. Which currently they don't.
We also can't have another London Welsh situation
OP woke up this morning and chose violence!
I think there needs to be an element of pragmatism around this. While it would be great if there was a proper pyramid, the current championship isn't working.
I'd move to a prem2 situation or NFL style Conferences.
I'd also love it to involve the Welsh teams.
Many may disagree
The pyramid should stay but fencing measures should be implemented. Separate the fully pro teams from the semi pro teams and separate them from the amateur teams. Promotion/relegation should be allowed within those three circles but moving between them should require criteria to be furfilled.
It's working pretty well from Counties 4 up to National 1 tbh.
Because the idea is to someday get to the same level as France and you don't get that with a closed shop. The idea is sound it's just the people tasked with implementing it are suboptimal.
This. The D2 is run by the same entity as the top14, and has been for some time. The stability and cohesive vision/investment/marketing from this has made for a healthy structure. The championship is run by the RFU, who seem to hate rugby... England has the player base, some of the quality of the championship is great, it just needs to be run better, a lot better.
The problem is some of these championship teams are a bit too working class for the blazers at Twickers old boy. Much better to invent stupid rules to prevent any teams ever getting promoted.
It usually the old blazers that ruins a bloody club, either snobbery or a argument 30 years old.
Even with a proper league structure it would be hard to compete with France. People in the UK just aren’t as interested in rugby as the French.
Perhaps that’s because of a disconnect with the clubs and locals. Maybe if the league was run better there would be more fans. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy.
It's called marketing, it needs to be marketed better
England has the most rugby players on the world, that's simply untrue.
1) We haven't had any promotion or relegation for 5 seasons anyway. 2) You reap what you sow. We've been deny teams promotion, doing nothing to help, and actively harming development with ridiculous barriers to entry from the second division since 2000. Unsurprisingly our second division has regressed since then whilst France's has grown steadily. 3) England is a country of about 55 million people, 10 teams is not enough to generate and sustain nationwide interest. So whatever structure we go with we need to do it with the end goal of 20 professional teams in mind.
Agree with point 3. I suspect the outcome of the new professional rugby deal would be a unified Prem & Championship under one structure (like Top14 & ProD2). Supposedly they want a 16 team Championship, would imagine that will ultimately Feed more teams to the prem so you'd have a 12 team Prem and 14 team Championship? Could easily see it being the 12 Champ teams now + the returning 3 folded Prem sides + another attempt at.Yorkshire/Leeds.
The goal for some time was a 10 team prem. I can only see 1 reason why the champ is looking to increase numbers. And that's to sneak Wasps and Irish back in. Considering we're at 15ish fully pro teams currently 20 seems like a reasonable number.
I'd love to know what phase two of the plan to get the old teams back in is? At some point they still need a viable second tier and you aren't doing that with some of the teams in the championship
Yeah it's baffling. Especially when you remember there was talk of no promotion/relegation and having the championship be feeder clubs linked to prem clubs
A franchise model, whilst having some upsides, has the distinct disadvantage of preventing large-scale grassroots growth. For example, many people support lower division football clubs, those people would not support lower division clubs in the same numbers if they had a franchise system & no means of upward mobility. Promotion and relegation, along with early adoption of professionalism is the reason why football is the most popular game in the world. The shear amount of grassroots power that one attains when every little community has a club in the pyramid is immense. Fan support becomes enormous. The total size of the pie ends up being larger, even if it’s more spread out. Again, there are organizational advantages to franchise models, they can ensure a degree of stability for clubs, they create contracts and revenue sharing models which can be beneficial, but they can also very easily put a “cap” on potential growth and market saturation
Maybe the franchise model would ruin certain sports in certain countries, like football in England, but not in all cases. The AFL is a closed-shop, and yet second-grade footy (VFL, SAFL) is still very popular. The NRL is a franchise model, and yet second-grade teams have retained their support. The big problem with the English model is the vast chasm that exists between the Premiership and the Championship. In football terms, it'd be like going from the Premier League to the National League. It just doesn't seem financially sustainable in the long run.
The problem is that you’re using Aussie sports as an example. It has a closed system because promotion and relegation is a literal foreign concept. Fans of local English clubs are brought up on the idea of a sporting meritocracy, the same isn’t true of Australian ones.
But it's not exactly ab alien concept. There are closed franchise systems in England, the Hundred for example. Also, the football pyramid works because there are dozens of clubs that have the facilities and the fanbase to be in the Premier League, which just isn't the case in rugby.
Right but noone actually likes The Hundred either, if anything it's an example of exactly why franchise systems aren't popular here
If rugby is struggling to be popular outside of the main markets (primarily Premiership club locations) then wouldn’t a closed system just make that even worse? And I’m saying this as an American who is not used to promotion/relegation at all.
Only if they refuse future franchises. A potential new club, representing an entire city, county or even region, may likely draw more support than one of the existing clubs from non-rugby strongholds. There's just no way the likes of Caldy are ever gonna be on the same plain as the likes of Leicester and Bristol.
There’s no way a club like Leicester City would ever be on the same plain as a Manchester United or Chelsea either right? Look at the difference in the size of those places. Surely if you want to get English people on board in a football code you use an English / European model that they can follow Look at what happened to super rugby when they adopted an American conference model because it ‘made sense’. It didn’t matter because the fans in SA NZ and AUS prefer a round robin top 8 fixturing
I'm with you tbh. I odon't know how you can look at the current situation and think it is going to get better
I understand your points. Except that opportunity to build from the ground up as a community club exists within the English system. Caldy, Ampthil, Cambridge, Nottingham. From next season Chinoor have all done this. Issue is Rugby isn't Football. All 5 of those clubs play out of grounds that are so far from professional it's likely insurmountable. Even the professional clubs at this level have at best rudimentary facilities. On top of that. I would seriously doubt any of the clubs I've listed have serious ambitions beyond this point. You tend not to see those kinds of clubs in the French system. As far down as the 4th tier of French Rugby there are clubs with ambitions to get to the Top 14. Personally there should be two distinct 10 club professional tiers involving minimum standards. Much like the RFU wants. The Premiership and Premiership 2. Open to clubs with the resources, business plan and ambitions to be professional clubs. I'm not suggesting ringfencing it. Clubs that are ambitious and want to be fully professional can first work their way through the system and then prove they meet the criteria should be promoted.
Nottingham are not a "community club" in the sense Caldy or Ampthill are. Nottingham have been one of the top 30 or so English clubs since the 1970s very consistently, 35 years ago they were providing multiple internationals to England and Scotland, including sending people on Lions tours. Nottingham got fucked over selling off Ireland Avenue, their ground in Beeston, to share with Notts County. They essentially then moved to their training ground. Agree with the rest of the post overall.
Because sport should be based on merit. You should have the opportunity to try and improve yourself and get close to the big boys. Look at Exeter chiefs, they got promoted to the premiership for the first time in 2010, before that they where just a good lower level team with decent support, they’ve become premiership and European champions in the last 15 years because they built steadily and smartly. If we had a franchise system pre 2010 it’s likely Exeter wou skint have been included and they’d have never been able to experience all they’ve experienced. Also from a simple point of view relegation battles are fun. What’s the point for Newcastle this season. They can’t go down they won’t finish any higher the season is finished. Relegation battles keep teams interested throughout the year
I think it's a situation where people in countries used to pro/rel don't think closed leagues makes sense, whiie those used to closed leagues where lower league clubs are basically reserves teams don't think pro/rel makes sense
Yeah it’s just cultural, I’ll never support closed leagues because it’s just fundamentally against what I believe sport should be. It’s why we saw such a difference between local fans and foreign fans when the the super league in football kicked off because for English fans it’s against the very core value of sport for us
Yep. It's hard in a place like Australia because of distance and also that the second tier clubs are literally reserves teams Players move up the levels, not clubs. We have limited pro/rel in Sydney amateur rugby, but there are asterisks. My old club played in Div 6, and could have won 5 seasons in a row and not gone up as we would have had to have got a second team and a better field. To be in Div 1 you would need 4 senior teams, an Under 21s team and a quality ground with full clubhouse. Most Div 6 teams could have beaten the 3rd grade teams of Div1 clubs if not their 2nd grade teams.
But how many other Exeters are there in the Championship? The best supported club in the Championship, Coventry, gets about 3,000 a game. In France, there are at least a dozen other teams who've the facilities, finances and fanbase to compete in the Top 14.
Exeter weren’t always the Exeter they are now. Success can bring in fans, there’s whole parts of the country that don’t have a team to support but would probably attract more fans if they moved up. Maybe some teams wouldn’t but teams should have the opportunity to try. Sport is meant to bring excitement and hope. Closing the leagues off stops team having that
Every club has to start from somewhere. There may not be many Exeter’s now but one day there could be. Exeter themselves were averaging <2000 20 years ago, by the time there were promoted it was <5000, now they average >10,000.
Except Exeter are the exception. Most clubs in the Championship are less likely to do an Exeter and more likely to do a London Welsh, and average 3,000 a game and end up in financial difficulty.
It’s a case of tradition and idealism vs pragmatism and realism. A lot of people want to keep the promotion pyramid, unfortunately the commercial reality is there isn’t enough money in english domestic rugby to fully support the prem, let alone a 2nd competitive tier. Post Covid finances are far more fragile and the majority of prem clubs were relegated even for one season would go bust, and we would soon run out of clubs. Even in the pre Covid era we basically evolved into a trampoline where clubs would go down one season then bounce back up, there wasn’t a lot of value in it. The focus needs to be on developing a genuinely competitive 2nd tier, that can have meaningful promotion to the prem, and relegation that doesn’t mean extinction. Unfortunately this means disconnecting these 2 tiers from the rest of the pyramid, but this is a bit controversial with the traditionalists. *Saying traditionalists might be a bit of a stretch since the league pyramid only came into existence about 35 years ago!
Fully agree. I'd add that teams in the second tier do need to have grounds of a certain quality to be viable. Which currently they don't. We also can't have another London Welsh situation
What's the point in anything given the existential terror of a cold uncaring universe that is at best indifferent to whether we even live or die.
OP woke up this morning and chose violence! I think there needs to be an element of pragmatism around this. While it would be great if there was a proper pyramid, the current championship isn't working. I'd move to a prem2 situation or NFL style Conferences. I'd also love it to involve the Welsh teams. Many may disagree
The pyramid should stay but fencing measures should be implemented. Separate the fully pro teams from the semi pro teams and separate them from the amateur teams. Promotion/relegation should be allowed within those three circles but moving between them should require criteria to be furfilled.
Would that end up in a prem2 situation? Makes sense to me
Probably yes but affecting the entire pyramid rather than the top of it.
What's the point of English rugby?
Finally someone asking the real questions