While European Super League row gets ugly, Premiership Rugby stays silent hoping nobody notices

If the Premiership is determined to force through expansion and ring-fencing, it must walk through fire to get there - just look at football

DANIEL SCHOFIELD

DEPUTY RUGBY UNION CORRESPONDENT

20 April 2021 • 2:06pm

In the unseemly rush to tap in the open goal of condemning the European Super League proposal – a scramble that included the Duke of Cambridge, Keir Starmer, James Corden and Dr Evil (probably) – there was nothing but silence from Premiership Rugby.

Indeed, an edict from head office went out on Tuesday effectively gagging executives from discussing the matter with the media. Right now Premiership Rugby is sitting in its delicate house of glass, desperately hoping none of the stone-wielding mob notices its presence as it storms the gates of Anfield and Old Trafford.

While the Super League is on an entirely different scale to the ring-fencing designs of many Premiership clubs, the accusations of rampant greed, trashing the integrity of the league and going against the wishes of the supporters will hit home as uncomfortably as a massage with a sea urchin. To be clear, the R-word has yet to be implemented. Relegation is suspended this season while a two-legged Championship play-off final will determine who becomes the Premiership’s 13th team next season, most likely Saracens.

In a year in which clubs have made losses of around £10 million because of the pandemic, this was understandable, however the fear remains that this was always a Trojan horse towards the end of relegation. Once you have 13 teams then you might as well have 14 as you do not need any extra weekends to accommodate them. And once you have the 14th team, if they cough up an entrance fee, then you can quietly pull up the drawbridge for an arbitrary period.

One proposal on the table is to suspend relegation until the 2024-25 season. This would have to be signed off by the RFU Council, which is a very different beast to the one a few years ago that considered ring-fencing anathema. The quiet confidence among some – but not all – Premiership clubs that the RFU Council would come on board may need to be reevaluated in the wake of the universal opprobrium that the European Super League has attracted.

Clearly the prize for the top-flight clubs is more matches and more stability. The present system of one team falling down and bouncing back straight away means the Premiership was already a de facto 13-team league. The last team to break that stranglehold was London Welsh and look at them now.

But if there is one lesson you can draw from recent rugby history it should be: tamper with competition structures at your peril. The prime example is Super Rugby. At the turn of the century it was the sport’s golden goose, continuously laying shining eggs. Yet its stakeholders could not resist fattening it up, increasing it from 12 teams to 14, then 15 and ultimately 18 teams in an unwieldy conference system at which point the goose collapsed under its own bloated weight.

Similarly the Pro 14, soon to be Pro 16 with four South African teams, already looks like heading down the same messy path.

The Premiership’s great selling point was always its competitive tension to the backdrop of raucous atmospheres, that every game mattered throughout the season. Remove relegation and you lose its USP. You only have to look at Worcester Warriors’ recent results – conceding 159 points in their past three games – to see what happens when you remove the peril of walking close to the trapdoor. What motivates the casual fan to turn up or tune in to another 50-point drubbing?

It is too soon to say whether the backlash to Super League proposals will cause Premiership clubs to change course. But if they are truly determined to force through expansion and ring-fencing, then they will have to walk through fire to get there.