If there is to be no relegation from the Prem then you are right, regarding the promotion from the Championship (i.e. no promotion) - in particular as it won't be a full league season. The Rugby Paper loves to pop out sensationalist headlines without much substantiation from any sources - but then again going back to posters references of "By hook or by crook PRL / RFU will have Saracens back in the Prem next season"; I would not be surprised to see the people in the seats of power trying for this move as we discuss this matter.

Marigold - do you honestly believe the ticket receipts / food and drink profits from a home game doesn't cover the cost of an away game expenses? Perhaps if your home game attracts one man and his dog this is the case but otherwise that is just nonsense. 

It doesn't say what may happen in 2022 and beyond that.

Going back 24 hrs to before this story was published - did anyone expect there to be relegation this June? I didn't.

Hopefully the Champ clubs can battle to ensure some form of pathway/opportunity in the future (2022 and beyond), in the event that one-up/one-down is stopped.

Was the MD, but still point still correct. I'm pretty sure England also has the most registered players in the world?

That is true.

the most significance difference is that the two top divisions Top 14 and PROD2 (30 clubs in total) are run by the same body, the Ligue Nationale de Rugby (LNR)

Using this logic (something the RFU are not renowned for) how can European places be decided?

If the Championship starts this season and games are cancelled due to Covid will the same points system be used? Surely promotion and relegation from the Championship should be halted this season?

Absolutely. You can't have one rule for the Prem and a different one for the Championship - or can you?

Well we have had one rule for the Cheats and one for everyone else in the Premiership for the last six years so ....

I doubt the Championship will actually happen. Super League and RFL Championship have moved their start date back to 26th March...... and  I doubt those will happen also, particularly RFL Champ as they need crowds. No TV deal, no wads of Governing body funding and the RFL Champ Clubs and Div.1 can only do non-contact training because they aren't "elite" sport. That sounds very similar to many RFU Championship Clubs, think only 3 or 4 clubs are full-time Sarries, Ealing, Donny off the top of my head other Clubs have players who also work for a living and therefore won't be getting the vaccine until September-ish. Depressing all round IMHO

Good old Ugo!

'Marigold Bedford Blues state that every home game is worth minimum of 50k to them which more than covers trips to Jersey and Cornwall which involves overnight stay'

MB that may well have been the case when the RFU were giving them £560k to play 15 home games per season. This season they will get less than £150k for the season so the figure is nowhere near that, plus the costs of trips to Jersey and Cornwall have significantly increased due to Covid requirements.  I would love to see evidence of a profit of £50k per match.

I would love to see evidence that revenue from a home game with 2500 spectators isn’t enough to cover the cost of hiring a bus for a day. That revenue generated on match days has nothing to do with the money received from the RFU?

For finishing last, how could you expect players to give 100% each week

Look at what happened when the lesser code did it. They had Harlequins RL getting smacked around every season, no-one wants to see that. They want to see clubs fight to avoid dropping.

Please keep your repeated bigotry out of discussions on rugby,particularly when your bogotry is consistently incorrect. There is no such team as Harlequins RL.

Lets be realistic,one code is all about running,tackling,passing and scoring tries,whilst union is about kicking and clapping,together with collapsing and resetting. Even the BT commentators are getting bored with the game.

Have a nice day and take that bag of potatos off your shoulder.

It isn’t a profit, just turnover, but simple maths 2,500 @ £20 gross = £41,667, that is before the hundreds that take up hospitality, stand seats which cost more, beer sales etc. etc. 

£50k is only £20 net from everyone very achievable.

When we had playoffs years ago we were getting around £75k for semi finals and £100k for the final against Newcastle.

The other big loss is the sponsorship boards, not sure many clubs have boards covered inside and outside the perimeter of the ground and any other location that they can be fitted. That is another massive revenue stream, which may be lost/reduced.

There was a Harlequins RL back when they had a ringfenced Super League. You may know them now as London Broncos.

Oh and by the way, league is just "5 tackles, kick and pray then repeat". Just saying.

Robb,stop digging,you really dont have the intelligence.

Broncos were vastly more competitive than Irish,Worcester and Newcastle in their various relegation seasons and certainly never dropped to the sordid depths of Saracens.

I've both played and watched both codes of rugby,whilst you have been trying to understand the difference between a maul and a ruck. As it happens I much prefer SL to the Premiership,whilst at the community level,say level 5/6,I happen to prefer union.

The codes are very different but each can learn from the other. I am very open minded on the pros and cons of each but unlike you,I'm not an ill informed bigot. I happen to have an extremely close connection with the Broncos and have had since I lived in Wandsworth 40 yrs ago. I've forgotten,more than you will have ever known. Now be a good boy and take that dummy out of your mouth.

Surely the Prem Cup gets binned - would that constitute a major problem?

First and final warning. 

I agree this hasn't been spelled out directly, but the Prem Cup 'swap' seems obvious, doesn't it? (and also scores some 'player welfare' points - if there are 13 teams - due to there being 2 x bye weeks)

Be plenty of Samoa vs Germany style matches but there's still always a chance for promotion

at promotion. The championship may be split into 4 conferences to reduce fixtures and I’ve even heard I could be a shoot out between the championship teams that can operate without crowds.

Who knows what the outcome will be, but I guarantee there are a lot of people in dark rooms thinking about all sorts of ways to ensure the championship has a team promoted

I certainly think there will be a lot of people in dark rooms thinking about all sorts of ways to ensure the Cheats are promoted. Sadly.

Because the Prem clubs don't want this, and they can't - realistically - be forced into it.

Stephen Jones' Sunday Times column addresses this quite well. Guess you'd have to get behind their paywall to read it online - but a good read if you can.

Bcause the Premiership was a break away by the senior clubs.

The RFU felt they did not have the power to stop it as they felt at the time they could break away entirely.

Because, and I thought this when MOse were in the Championship too so it's not special pleading - every club in the country aside from the chosen 12 has been raging at the premiership for running away and pulling up the drawbridge since 1995. I'm inherently sceptical of any solution which involves the 12 Championship clubs joining them to make 24 who are running away and pulling up the drawbridge.

Brian Moore had it right in the most recent Rugby Journal - we should have gone regional in 1995 with the RFU in the driving seat and 4-6 pro clubs playing in a NH club league. Instead we got a small number of business men with sacks of cash and delusions about how big RU was going to be which have *never* come to fruition, a broken relationship between the union and the professional game, and carnage at every level below.

Allied Dunabr Premiership One and Two was exactly this, only without the actual money or TV deal...

This is what Fran Cotton more or less proposed, Divisional teams, but political in-flghting and money strangled the idea before birth. 

One of the views against English regions is that they didn't have an historical link/interest/involvement to the general public/rugby supporter. The 4 Irish provinces don't have this hang-up, whereas an ill-defined South Wales of England appeals to few, as we saw during the Divisional Championships of the 70s and 80s. 

The biggest failure the RFU made at the start of professionalism was not to centrally contract the top X number of players, then decide a structure to play them in - this could have been loaning back to the clubs who could/would have paid for the privilege - a reverse of the current situation, whereas the RFU pay the top 13 clubs a silly amount of money twice - once to fund the academies and again to loan the same players to play for England. 

I think the argument is that there was a small window where that wouldn't have mattered. 

For the sake of potentially losing the entire average gate at Quins, Leicester, Saints and maybe a couple of other clubs who regularly had crowds in the late 1980s that could be measured with the naked eye, they could have done something that worked better for the sport overall. 

Until the advent of league rugby there was a defined pecking order where clubs knew where they stood, and who was above them - all this would have been doing was grafting another tier on top - so suddenly the list A clubs would discover themselves to be list B and have to suck it up. Given this would have been before the cash came in to those clubs (so they'd have struggled to do much about it), it might have worked.

And, again, I say that as a supporter of an erstwhile List A club that would have been affected at the time. But no, we got 'they've got sacks of cash going in at that club over there... where's our sack of cash? Quick, find a sack of cash.... where's our ground?'

This was by far and away the best proposal.  The simple reason being it was an established structure which already existed in England and was working well and also didn’t affect the club structure but alas the opportunity to make money was the allure of the greedy owners.

Imagine the North / Midlands playing their fixtures in a range of stadiums.  London would probably play out of TW1 and the South West might have a Stadium and people could then really get behind the sides without ditching their club rivalry. 

It would prepare the players better too.

But alas people wanted to make money out of sport and neoliberalism prevailed. 

I do not understand how any businessman could ever believe they wouldmake money from a minority sport. They are meant to have the business brains to see beyond the income numbers to understand the cost of doing business. But it appears many of them are chancers who got lucky and are riding that luck without really knowning what they are doing.

It is not as though Soccer has generated huge fortunes for the club owners over the years. Anf for all its TV money it still requires owners with deep pockets to support its clubs.

I am aware that the four American Sports make money. But they do that by having a large TV market, a limited number of clubs, strict salary caps and a lot of central control by the league and stadiums paid for by local taxes.  The leagues have managed to exempt themselves from restraint of trade laws by special pleading.

 

Might that not be a sensible solution to much of the frustration with closing-off the Premiership? Simply run the Premiership and Championship under one 'professional' umbrella. Closing that off for a couple of seasons as an entity to allow things to settle could well upset the aspirants in N1 but might otherwise bring about some sense?

England having a larger population than Wales. 15 times greater.

How many regions would England have?

In many ways, Championship and National 1 have so much to offer. Clubs located in 24 communities (as opposed to 8? 16? Regions)

Possibly one of the short sighted moves in this pandemic has been reducing central coaching initiatives.

If anything should the RFU be using, say 20 Championship and National 1 clubs as development clubs, finding young talent.

As said earlier, the solution has got to be over time to bring the premiership to heel, rather than encouraging 12 more clubs to sit around the table and help themselves while everyone else starves...

As much sense to the rest of the clubs as the PL attempts to ring fence make to Championship clubs I would say. 

The community clubs would still exist under a regional concept, much as the community clubs in Ireland, Scotland and Wales exist. 

The coaching cutbacks are part of a black financial hole at Twickenham. Covid hasn't helped but the main reason for the financial issues is that the RFU gives too much of its money to 13 clubs, rather than allow a more equitable share out to its thousand plus member clubs. 

If less money was spent on the 13 then there would be more money for coaching initiatives. 

The RFU academies should fulfil your last point.

First off the FFR don't receive income from owning a stadium and therefore have less to give to clubs. They are not seen in the same way that the RFU are by their member clubs. 

Secondly the TV deal that the League signed outstrips the English equivalent. This gives clubs more money without having to give up control over their players to get it. 

Thirdly French law gives far more power to the FFR to control the game than it does to the clubs - and this allows the FFR access to players at a far 'cheaper rate' than the RFU. 

Too true. Worcester, Irish or Newcastle are okay to take the drop, but they'd better pull up the drawbridge if it looks like Leicester or Gloucester might come bottom! (PS, you can change any of those names, and the unfair ridiculousness of the situation is unchanged).

I disagree, I think PRL are refusing to get drawn into the conversation until they see how the next month or so pans out. You could argue the RFU are incompetent for allowing them to sit on their hands and not committing to anything.

RFU incompetent, I'd drink to that

Then last night. Que - dramatic music......

BT have had a few words

........ and now PRL want more time to discuss the "issue" with them.

Sounds like everyone bar the big bank rolling venture capitalists were in agreement. Looks like Money does talk.  

BTW think all the parties involved have had the "papers" via Email for over two weeks.

Good luck wi' that.

But an 11 team league.

I am sure if WEaling win the league the premiership will expand to 14 teams.

The Championship will have a season with tem before the wholesale reoganisation.

I do nto understand why that was postponed - surely having no play this season gave them more time to sort it out not less. It is going to be arbritary and marginal whenever they do it.

I only hope that for Rugby to retain a modicum of integrity that Ealing or any of the others manage to pull it off and stop Saracens going up. That's not particularly anti-saracens. Just anti PRL & RFU and their craven disregard for Rugby at every other level

So you’re saying Sarries and Ealing should both be banned from joining the prem? The press release mentions it is likely there will be a moratorium on relegation and promotion for 3 or 4 years. Read this as there will definitely be no relegation for at least 4 years.

Opens the door for Nat 1 2 and N&S 3 players to work through the ranks. Granted Provincial players may play once or twice for 'club team' it would increase tv revenue for all, whilst increasing support for championship- national 3 rugby