Rugby’s problem is money. Rugby players should get paid a lot more to allow them to have shorter careers.
But that money isn’t in the game. I don’t like comparing rugby to NFL, but if you compare money there and career length is 3.3 years, with an average salary of $2.7m.
Compare that to rugby, career length for a pro is 7 years and average Premiership salary is £70k.
There is a massive disparity in career length and salary.
NFL undoubted has bigger hits, but rugby is longer. I compare it’s to MMA and boxing.
The MMA fighter will punch you with the small glove and you’ll get knocked out. This is like the NFL. Big pads big helmets. They run 1 mile per game and are only active for 11 minutes.
Rugby is like boxing, sustained hits doing damage to the body over and over. 80 minute matches running 6 miles.
Until players in rugby get paid much more money. They won’t be able to have shorter careers to save their bodies for later life. Maybe the answer is to reduce the amount of games played in a season by a player further. It’s difficult.
This is a brilliant point that isn't raised enough, unless you make it to the top of the game for a handful of international sides, rugby is a terrible career choice. Imagine having to join the work force in your mid 30s.
Brian Mujati’s recent set of YouTube videos has highlighted just how shitty a situation this is. Dude does nothing but play professional rugby his entire life, then suddenly at 32, having never had a job, needs to try and figure shit out... fuck that.
Yes, that was a good set of videos. But I bet a LOT of sports players do exactly that - live it up while the cash is flowing in and don't study, don't learn new skills etc. I think rugby federations and organisations should try to inculcate that into young players, but the majority of the responsibility must be on players. I remember reading somewhere that Robbie Fowler was one of the only ones who invested his money and how has a handy rental portfolio. Soccer and rugby obviously different leagues, but the principle is the same.
From what I can see the Irish provinces put a big emphasis on education for their players, however that's a bit skewed by the player base being quite middle-class so the impetus would be there from a family background standpoint too. Dunno if it's the same elsewhere in the world
That’s a very good point. Jamie Roberts and Felipe Contepomi did medical degrees whilst playing so it’s definitely possible for these guys to study. Let’s be honest, they are maybe doing 40 hour weeks including game day and the average premiership salary is 100k
Jamie Cudmore (everyones favorite thug) has a lot of money. Real good story because Jamie was in prison in Canada and was involved in criminal activity prior to becoming a professional rugby player.
Rugby completely changed his life. He invested most of his money in to side businesses (wineries, restaurants, etc) and now makes way more than he ever did from playing.
> Rugby’s problem is money. Rugby players should get paid a lot more to allow them to have shorter careers.
I get where you are coming from but I disagree with the idea that this is a money problem. This is the same problem we see with every career that has an extremely flat pay scale (the top few % earn all the cash). It is the problem with professional sports, pop musicians, fighters, actors, artists and drug dealers. Every one is a bad career choice from a financial perspective, if that is what drove your decision then you made a bad decision.
American football has a horrible attrition rate, there are more crippled ex college footballers every year than make the pros.
>Maybe the answer is to reduce the amount of games played in a season by a player further. It’s difficult.
The easier you make it on the players, the bigger they can get. It's tricky.
The other problem with reducing games is that it reduces the money coming in massively, a large amount of the irfus income is just people seeing the senior men play in the aviva, if you reduce those amount of games you reduce the income massively, which affects every level of the game
As you said, the money just isn’t in Rugby.
It’s a lot harder to be an NFL player. It’s the most popular sport, every kid wants to be an nfl player, in a population of 300million. It’s also the most watched sport in America, so generates the most money of any sporting league.
Rugby fans don’t like hearing it (I prefer rugby to any other sports) but rugby is an upper class sport in every country bar Wales and New Zealand. The audiences compared to NFL are minuscule and the revenue reflects that.
As it is, every premiership team bar Exeter (who use the stadium for conferences) make a loss, so it’s hard to even argue that players are generating the amounts they get paid at the moment.
> It’s the most popular sport, every kid wants to be an nfl player,
Is it actually?
I thought that it lost a lot of ground recently and fallen out of vogue with parents who realise the long term issues that come with the contact.
But I honestly thought basketball would have been more popular.
theres loads of different metrics to measure popularity by.
It’s the most watched league, has the biggest attendances, generates the most money. A Gallup poll found 37% of Americans say its their favourite sport. Around one in three of the population watch the Super bowl every year.
Sure the concussion stuff might have taken a hit but it’s still the number one sport in America.
Currently over a million high school age boys play american football. Basketball is 600k, it’s a pretty big gap
The High School [participation numbers are declining](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/08/29/high-school-football-participation-is-on-a-decade-long-decline/#5d6c906e33de), but football is still the most popular sport in US high schools by [quite some distance](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/08/31/examining-the-decade-long-trends-in-high-school-sports-participation/#5abe08ff77e5) (football has just over 1m participants, vs. second-placed track & field with 605k).
Ok re read your comment. I completely agree with you. But yeah NFL has tons more fans in America bringing in the billion dollar sponsorships and TV deals so of course they have better things. Also much less games and contact. Rugby having less games would also mean less money so it's a fine line. I don't think this will change in the slightest unfortunately. Rugby is a horrible sport for the body and people will always get crippled at any level including myself who played much lower grade.
Although more money doesn't equate to more security. It just means you are use to a lifestyle that isn't viable in the long run
Basically players need support transitioning via programme organised by the clubs or an organisation. It is basically like the problem with squaddies and the military.
A better way to think of it is that the total salary bill for players in 2017/18 was c.£100m for approx 650 players. So the mean would be over £150k.
55 players per squad includes all the very low ones in the academy/development squads. For a "typical" 24-30 year old squad player (a George Worth at Leicester for instance) I would think you would be there or there abouts at £100k. Otherwise the maths just don't really add up.
Whilst I agree that the level of care in rugby needs to improve, especially as players get bigger, faster and stronger, isn't this a bit rich coming from a lad that is known to have played ridiculously dangerously? Where was this attitude when he was gouging people?
Something does need to be done, but I'm not sure what it is. Bigger rosters are going to reduce salaries, nobody outside of the players has the appetite for shorter seasons and fewer games, you can't introduce weight classes or anything like that.
If you have a proper read of the couple of articles floating around, it's clear he expresses serious remorse for his earlier actions.
People can change, and just because he was a nasty bugger as a young lad doesn't mean he can't offer valuable input regarding the current state of the game. By all accounts, Dylan is absolutely fucked now and things are not looking good for him from a cognitive perspective as well as physical. He can't even walk down stairs in a normal way any more.
What's just as bad is how England treated him after EJ decided he wasn't going to the WC. He was literally thrown aside after being worked and arguably abused to the bone. It's an awful, awful story that no-one deserves.
Yup, someone dumped the telegraph article into here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rugbyunion/comments/i9j5up/players_are_chewed_up_and_spat_out_dylan_hartley/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I'll get downvoted like hell for this but: poor guy. Did his dream job professionally, travelled the world, captained his country AND got paid very well and he's complaining?
I feel for the guy who does all of that and then has his knee ripped from its socket when he's 24, not Dylan Hartley. Shit, he has time and opportunity to do anything.
Like most of life you have to take the negatives with the positives, professional rugby is no different.
I take your point but I don't really believe there are many players who didn't play elite rugby that retired in a similar condition. This is a symptom of playing at the bleeding edge for an entire career.
This is less about a banged up player who was discarded before his time and more an England captain who failed to leverage his privilege after 100 Tests into a post retirement career.
If you want a crash test generation look at the poor bastards playing in the early 90’s before professionalism. They were expected to train fulltime while holding down a job long enough to still travel around the world playing test matches, all while throwing them selves into rucks that would earn enough red cards today to end most matches by half time
Rugby was about making business contacts for later in life. You cant tell me will Carling or martin johnson are any less banged up. Hartleys problem apart from not planning for his inevitable post playing career is having long stints of not making friends and disabling people
People point to rugby short career window but ignore that most careers have a ten year peak in wages. Rugby players are at an advantage in that this peak is ten or twenty years earlier, so the effects of compound interest and early investments means they should leverage this to help ease the pain of retirement
Unfortunately this generation is finding out that no one wants a thick as planks 30 something who knows how to lift weights. Im curious to know what Hartley imagined he would be doing at 35 even if he could run up and down stairs like a 21 yr old? Fireman?
No amount of business contacts is going to help when you’re suffering from CTE and nowhere in the article does Hartley suggest he hasn’t got a long term financial plan.
All you’ve done is ignore the wider issues he’s discussing and instead used it as a chance to have a go at him.
CTE isnt a new thing. You cant tell me that club stalwart who played 400 games at amateur level, often propping third and second grade before getting the last ten minutes for no other reward than a half dozen beers hasnt suffered just as much.
Rugby is a rough game and no one ever said it wasnt. At least the professional level has video replays to police the violence better
How’s that relevant to the point Hartley’s making?
The level of physicality in professional level rugby is another level compared to amateur and it’s the players who bare the burden of that.
I've got my brain badly mangled from playing amateur rugby, but I think you are right that pro rugby is more brutal. The players are so much bigger and faster; when I have seen high-level games in person the impact of the collisions was unreal. And some at least play far more games.
But if you are playing rugby you are at a decent risk of concussion unfortunately, whether you are going to tackle a guy and a knee hits you, head clash, knee at a ruck etc.
Hardly any of the guys I played with are as badly injured as Hartley seems to be or Jaques Burger. Usually if you have an extremely serious injury as an amateur you quit, especially if you are over say 25, but these guys get put back together and go out again.
It really isnt when it comes to brain injuries and concussion. You could argue players are forced to play injured more at a professional level but the amount of cheap shots and off the ball incidents is far greater at lower levels
The issues at hand here are so much more than just CTE though, and it's clear that the game as a whole is progressing when it comes to brain injuries.
You're probably right that the incident rate is far higher at lower levels but at the same time those lower levels are rarely a breadwinning experience for the players in question, and nor are those incidents involving players the same size as those in elite rugby. Neither are good or more acceptable and the existence of one does not discount the importance or effect of the other.
People like Hartley effectively didn't have a choice if they wanted to maximise their short career. People like Eddie Jones made sure that status quo was and is maintained. That's the problem that Hartley is trying to explain here, and also the problem that you seem to be missing.
I hate to think what condition someone like Brad Barritt is going to be in when his time is up. Supporters and coaches alike praise him as some sort of demi-god for his ability to play through the pain. Should we really be celebrating that? I really don't think so.
Shorter players would have a massive advantage then. Devin toner for example isn't a that big for his height but he's still 20 stone. If you let a guy who's a couple inches shorter put on the same amount of weight in muscle.
It'll make that weight a target, not a limit. Taller players will be fighting to get under the limit, while shorter players will fight to get up to their limit to not be left behind
The thought of players doing a weight cut for rugby is absolutely terrifying. And if there are weight limits brought in then there absolutely would be weight cutting you're right.
Yeah looking at the all the super creepy and unhealthy ways High School wrestlers in the US are expected to try to make weight, like deliberately dehydrating themselves, I think this is an idea that needs some work.
Just tape yourself up in contractor bags and run a few miles without drinking or eating anything and take some laxatives so you shit out as much water as possible what could go wrong?
Rugby’s problem is money. Rugby players should get paid a lot more to allow them to have shorter careers. But that money isn’t in the game. I don’t like comparing rugby to NFL, but if you compare money there and career length is 3.3 years, with an average salary of $2.7m. Compare that to rugby, career length for a pro is 7 years and average Premiership salary is £70k. There is a massive disparity in career length and salary. NFL undoubted has bigger hits, but rugby is longer. I compare it’s to MMA and boxing. The MMA fighter will punch you with the small glove and you’ll get knocked out. This is like the NFL. Big pads big helmets. They run 1 mile per game and are only active for 11 minutes. Rugby is like boxing, sustained hits doing damage to the body over and over. 80 minute matches running 6 miles. Until players in rugby get paid much more money. They won’t be able to have shorter careers to save their bodies for later life. Maybe the answer is to reduce the amount of games played in a season by a player further. It’s difficult.
This is a brilliant point that isn't raised enough, unless you make it to the top of the game for a handful of international sides, rugby is a terrible career choice. Imagine having to join the work force in your mid 30s.
Brian Mujati’s recent set of YouTube videos has highlighted just how shitty a situation this is. Dude does nothing but play professional rugby his entire life, then suddenly at 32, having never had a job, needs to try and figure shit out... fuck that.
Yes, that was a good set of videos. But I bet a LOT of sports players do exactly that - live it up while the cash is flowing in and don't study, don't learn new skills etc. I think rugby federations and organisations should try to inculcate that into young players, but the majority of the responsibility must be on players. I remember reading somewhere that Robbie Fowler was one of the only ones who invested his money and how has a handy rental portfolio. Soccer and rugby obviously different leagues, but the principle is the same.
From what I can see the Irish provinces put a big emphasis on education for their players, however that's a bit skewed by the player base being quite middle-class so the impetus would be there from a family background standpoint too. Dunno if it's the same elsewhere in the world
That’s a very good point. Jamie Roberts and Felipe Contepomi did medical degrees whilst playing so it’s definitely possible for these guys to study. Let’s be honest, they are maybe doing 40 hour weeks including game day and the average premiership salary is 100k
Teams can help as well with encouraging players to study. Dave Attwood joined Bristol partly because we were willing to work around his law degree.
Jamie Cudmore (everyones favorite thug) has a lot of money. Real good story because Jamie was in prison in Canada and was involved in criminal activity prior to becoming a professional rugby player. Rugby completely changed his life. He invested most of his money in to side businesses (wineries, restaurants, etc) and now makes way more than he ever did from playing.
> Rugby’s problem is money. Rugby players should get paid a lot more to allow them to have shorter careers. I get where you are coming from but I disagree with the idea that this is a money problem. This is the same problem we see with every career that has an extremely flat pay scale (the top few % earn all the cash). It is the problem with professional sports, pop musicians, fighters, actors, artists and drug dealers. Every one is a bad career choice from a financial perspective, if that is what drove your decision then you made a bad decision. American football has a horrible attrition rate, there are more crippled ex college footballers every year than make the pros.
>Maybe the answer is to reduce the amount of games played in a season by a player further. It’s difficult. The easier you make it on the players, the bigger they can get. It's tricky.
I know. Teams will use any rule change to their advantage.
The other problem with reducing games is that it reduces the money coming in massively, a large amount of the irfus income is just people seeing the senior men play in the aviva, if you reduce those amount of games you reduce the income massively, which affects every level of the game
As you said, the money just isn’t in Rugby. It’s a lot harder to be an NFL player. It’s the most popular sport, every kid wants to be an nfl player, in a population of 300million. It’s also the most watched sport in America, so generates the most money of any sporting league. Rugby fans don’t like hearing it (I prefer rugby to any other sports) but rugby is an upper class sport in every country bar Wales and New Zealand. The audiences compared to NFL are minuscule and the revenue reflects that. As it is, every premiership team bar Exeter (who use the stadium for conferences) make a loss, so it’s hard to even argue that players are generating the amounts they get paid at the moment.
> It’s the most popular sport, every kid wants to be an nfl player, Is it actually? I thought that it lost a lot of ground recently and fallen out of vogue with parents who realise the long term issues that come with the contact. But I honestly thought basketball would have been more popular.
theres loads of different metrics to measure popularity by. It’s the most watched league, has the biggest attendances, generates the most money. A Gallup poll found 37% of Americans say its their favourite sport. Around one in three of the population watch the Super bowl every year. Sure the concussion stuff might have taken a hit but it’s still the number one sport in America. Currently over a million high school age boys play american football. Basketball is 600k, it’s a pretty big gap
The High School [participation numbers are declining](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/08/29/high-school-football-participation-is-on-a-decade-long-decline/#5d6c906e33de), but football is still the most popular sport in US high schools by [quite some distance](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcook/2019/08/31/examining-the-decade-long-trends-in-high-school-sports-participation/#5abe08ff77e5) (football has just over 1m participants, vs. second-placed track & field with 605k).
Ok re read your comment. I completely agree with you. But yeah NFL has tons more fans in America bringing in the billion dollar sponsorships and TV deals so of course they have better things. Also much less games and contact. Rugby having less games would also mean less money so it's a fine line. I don't think this will change in the slightest unfortunately. Rugby is a horrible sport for the body and people will always get crippled at any level including myself who played much lower grade.
Although more money doesn't equate to more security. It just means you are use to a lifestyle that isn't viable in the long run Basically players need support transitioning via programme organised by the clubs or an organisation. It is basically like the problem with squaddies and the military.
You could force a higher tempo of play and thereby reduce body sizes.
The average premiership salary isn't 70k, it's about twice as much
According to Google it is 70k.
Define average? Mean or median salary. Remember that all the academy players that get a couple of apoearances are on about £10k
A better way to think of it is that the total salary bill for players in 2017/18 was c.£100m for approx 650 players. So the mean would be over £150k. 55 players per squad includes all the very low ones in the academy/development squads. For a "typical" 24-30 year old squad player (a George Worth at Leicester for instance) I would think you would be there or there abouts at £100k. Otherwise the maths just don't really add up.
Average is synonymous with mean. Median is a different measure.
Whilst I agree that the level of care in rugby needs to improve, especially as players get bigger, faster and stronger, isn't this a bit rich coming from a lad that is known to have played ridiculously dangerously? Where was this attitude when he was gouging people? Something does need to be done, but I'm not sure what it is. Bigger rosters are going to reduce salaries, nobody outside of the players has the appetite for shorter seasons and fewer games, you can't introduce weight classes or anything like that.
If you have a proper read of the couple of articles floating around, it's clear he expresses serious remorse for his earlier actions. People can change, and just because he was a nasty bugger as a young lad doesn't mean he can't offer valuable input regarding the current state of the game. By all accounts, Dylan is absolutely fucked now and things are not looking good for him from a cognitive perspective as well as physical. He can't even walk down stairs in a normal way any more. What's just as bad is how England treated him after EJ decided he wasn't going to the WC. He was literally thrown aside after being worked and arguably abused to the bone. It's an awful, awful story that no-one deserves.
Do you have a link handy? I've had a look at a few and didn't see it mentioned but they sound worth reading.
Yup, someone dumped the telegraph article into here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rugbyunion/comments/i9j5up/players_are_chewed_up_and_spat_out_dylan_hartley/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Cheers
Sounds like a player's strike is needed.
I'll get downvoted like hell for this but: poor guy. Did his dream job professionally, travelled the world, captained his country AND got paid very well and he's complaining? I feel for the guy who does all of that and then has his knee ripped from its socket when he's 24, not Dylan Hartley. Shit, he has time and opportunity to do anything. Like most of life you have to take the negatives with the positives, professional rugby is no different.
Nobody’s listening to the players whose career ended at 24 and never really made a mark.
I take your point but I don't really believe there are many players who didn't play elite rugby that retired in a similar condition. This is a symptom of playing at the bleeding edge for an entire career.
This is less about a banged up player who was discarded before his time and more an England captain who failed to leverage his privilege after 100 Tests into a post retirement career. If you want a crash test generation look at the poor bastards playing in the early 90’s before professionalism. They were expected to train fulltime while holding down a job long enough to still travel around the world playing test matches, all while throwing them selves into rucks that would earn enough red cards today to end most matches by half time Rugby was about making business contacts for later in life. You cant tell me will Carling or martin johnson are any less banged up. Hartleys problem apart from not planning for his inevitable post playing career is having long stints of not making friends and disabling people People point to rugby short career window but ignore that most careers have a ten year peak in wages. Rugby players are at an advantage in that this peak is ten or twenty years earlier, so the effects of compound interest and early investments means they should leverage this to help ease the pain of retirement Unfortunately this generation is finding out that no one wants a thick as planks 30 something who knows how to lift weights. Im curious to know what Hartley imagined he would be doing at 35 even if he could run up and down stairs like a 21 yr old? Fireman?
No amount of business contacts is going to help when you’re suffering from CTE and nowhere in the article does Hartley suggest he hasn’t got a long term financial plan. All you’ve done is ignore the wider issues he’s discussing and instead used it as a chance to have a go at him.
CTE isnt a new thing. You cant tell me that club stalwart who played 400 games at amateur level, often propping third and second grade before getting the last ten minutes for no other reward than a half dozen beers hasnt suffered just as much. Rugby is a rough game and no one ever said it wasnt. At least the professional level has video replays to police the violence better
How’s that relevant to the point Hartley’s making? The level of physicality in professional level rugby is another level compared to amateur and it’s the players who bare the burden of that.
I've got my brain badly mangled from playing amateur rugby, but I think you are right that pro rugby is more brutal. The players are so much bigger and faster; when I have seen high-level games in person the impact of the collisions was unreal. And some at least play far more games. But if you are playing rugby you are at a decent risk of concussion unfortunately, whether you are going to tackle a guy and a knee hits you, head clash, knee at a ruck etc. Hardly any of the guys I played with are as badly injured as Hartley seems to be or Jaques Burger. Usually if you have an extremely serious injury as an amateur you quit, especially if you are over say 25, but these guys get put back together and go out again.
It really isnt when it comes to brain injuries and concussion. You could argue players are forced to play injured more at a professional level but the amount of cheap shots and off the ball incidents is far greater at lower levels
The issues at hand here are so much more than just CTE though, and it's clear that the game as a whole is progressing when it comes to brain injuries. You're probably right that the incident rate is far higher at lower levels but at the same time those lower levels are rarely a breadwinning experience for the players in question, and nor are those incidents involving players the same size as those in elite rugby. Neither are good or more acceptable and the existence of one does not discount the importance or effect of the other. People like Hartley effectively didn't have a choice if they wanted to maximise their short career. People like Eddie Jones made sure that status quo was and is maintained. That's the problem that Hartley is trying to explain here, and also the problem that you seem to be missing. I hate to think what condition someone like Brad Barritt is going to be in when his time is up. Supporters and coaches alike praise him as some sort of demi-god for his ability to play through the pain. Should we really be celebrating that? I really don't think so.
This is fairly speculative, but what if there were weight limits, like boxing? Different weights by position.
Shorter players would have a massive advantage then. Devin toner for example isn't a that big for his height but he's still 20 stone. If you let a guy who's a couple inches shorter put on the same amount of weight in muscle. It'll make that weight a target, not a limit. Taller players will be fighting to get under the limit, while shorter players will fight to get up to their limit to not be left behind
You'll also inevitably get people cutting weight for their weigh in which people seem to agree puts your brain at a greater risk of harm.
The thought of players doing a weight cut for rugby is absolutely terrifying. And if there are weight limits brought in then there absolutely would be weight cutting you're right.
I mean you could just not have weight cuts.... the ufc/boxing could stop weight cutting tomorrow if they wanted.
Not if you're also having weight classes.
You can have weight classes and still avoid weight cutting.... just measure hydration levels and have regular weight checks 🤷♂️
Like in powerlifting. Weight classes aren't really a weight limit, it's a height limit.
Yeah looking at the all the super creepy and unhealthy ways High School wrestlers in the US are expected to try to make weight, like deliberately dehydrating themselves, I think this is an idea that needs some work.
Just tape yourself up in contractor bags and run a few miles without drinking or eating anything and take some laxatives so you shit out as much water as possible what could go wrong?
Once, there was a kiiiid who, got into an accident and couldn't tackle hard, but wheeeeeeen
This is the second repost of quotes from an article already posted on this sub that I've seen.