Should the Premiership be ringfenced?

I was reading an article on the BBC Sport website, in which the Worcester chairman Cecil Duckworth stated that he'd like the RFU to introduce a moratorium on the issue of promotion and relegation from the Aviva Premiership. The full article can be read at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/9494339.stm. It also backs Sir Ian McGeechan's views.

The issue I have with it is that the RFU have made the Championship into a fully professional structure (or virtually forced clubs to become fully professional) but haven't introduced any measures they promised. For example, they haven't found a league sponsor and although more coverage has been given on Sky it still falls short of the original deal.

It's all well and good for Mr. Duckworth to point his argument, but if you look at both Harlequins and Northampton who were both relegated and see where they are now then it could be argued that relegation was a positive thing in which restructuring was essential for immediate promotion.

My local side is the Cornish Pirates, who have major ambitions to be promoted and are waiting on a feasibility study from the Cornwall Council to see how to go forward to have a Premiership side in Cornwall with the relevant infrastructure (such as a stadium which meets the promotion criteria). What message would it send to the sides with genuine promotion aspects?

What are your guys thoughts on the issue?

Personally I think that the League could change from being a club league to a ring fenced club/regional league.

Tigers Saracens etc are all big enough clubs, but in different area's maybe instead of having a club in the league make a region.

eg take your Cornish Piriates, instead of them struggling to get to the premiership, have the Cornwall Rugby Football Union form a team.

The Cornwall Rugby Football Union has 39 rugby union clubs which includes every rugby union club in Cornwall.

The Cornwall Rugby Football Union has already made a team before using the best players from every club in Cornwall, enter this team in the Premiership, with every Cornish Club only able to play at a maxium level of the Championship as Prem will be ringfenced

You would end up with a Cornish team set up in a Similar model to the Irish and S15 teams. It would Concentrate the best players in Cornwall into one represenative team that could be part of a ring fenced Prem.

A cornish club team(like pirates) may not gain the support of everyone in Cornwall (due to old club rivalirys) but a Cornish representative side made up of all the clubs could gain support from everyone in Cornwall and have a bigger draw of players than any club in Cornwall could have.


Similarly Have a Yorkshire team ( a representative side made up of all the clubs in Yorkshire) and a Worcestershire Rugby Football Club (representative side made up of all the clubs in Worcestershire) same for North east England etc,

Therefore you'd create a 14 team league with the major clubs still in it but county teams to represent the clubs in areas rugby isn't as popular creating stronger teams.

England should not form so called regions, it has turned out a disaster in Wales, stick to your clubs and have promotion and relegation to keep the clubs on their toes. Look at Wales, we are going backwards we not have 4 clubs no further than 1 km from the S Wales coarst and the rest of Wales has third rate rugby to watch. For England's sake don't follow the WRU idiots keep what you have but get shot of these SH journey men.

Kingshu wrote:
Tigers Saracens etc are all big enough clubs, but in different area's maybe instead of having a club in the league make a region.

Therefore you'd create a 14 team league with the major clubs still in it but county teams to represent the clubs in areas rugby isn't as popular creating stronger teams.

What makes you think that a Cornish team would be stronger than the Pirates? I imagine they get a lot of the best players in the area anyway. New fans would be from a larger area and have to travel further. This would be even worse in the NE and NW where the distances would be greater.

If any sort of ring fencing came it would have to be along the franchise system in league. The 'best' 12 or 14 clubs would be selected based on performance, support, finances, location, etc. This would make some clubs unhappy (we might not have seen Exeter promoted due the large number of big clubs in the SW). This would then be reviewed every three years. That gives clubs 3 years of security to strengthen their position (and 3 years of planning to built their case for promotion).

Not sure if this is really what I want but it's unlikely

England do not need a regional system. They are achieving great things at club level. They have delivered 6 Heineken Cups in 16 years (depsite being absent for a year or two). They have the resources to keep this going and finally got the relationship between clubs and country in order it seems with EPS.

There seems to be a case of grass is greener with many fans though who look on with envy at the Magners League and what they perceive is a system that will reward success better. They also lust after the wealth of the French to a certain extent.

Like its footballing counterpart the Premiership does have a problem with the amount of foreign talent plying its trade in England. If they can work out a system to help their own boys prosper and reduce the dependency on external signings they will have few problems to contend with.

Keep the promotion & relegation for me, it keeps the intensity of the league up. I will probably get shot down in flames here but when I watched the ML final at the weekend I enjoyed it, as I do all the Munster Leinster games but for half of the season, as an outsider looking in to that league, I don't recognize half of the top teams players unless it is a derby or HC game, and the intensity just isn't there. For me promotion and relegation helps keep the interest throughout the season more.

Do agree with glamorganalun. Limit the SH imports per squad (not team so the larger clubs can just rotate between SH journeymen on a weekly basis) so as the younger EU players get game time*

*I stated EU players as the laws of the European Union mean that you can not discriminate between EU countries when it comes to employment.

red_stag wrote:
Like its footballing counterpart the Premiership does have a problem with the amount of foreign talent plying its trade in England. If they can work out a system to help their own boys prosper and reduce the dependency on external signings they will have few problems to contend with.

What counts as a problem? Around 65% of the players in the premiership are English qualified. That's 117 English players starting each week or nearly 10 per team. Apply that to the 6 HEC teams and they're just short of the 60 players the Welsh and Irish teams could put out maximum. Obviously this is even better when there are 7 English teams in the HEC, such as next year. Is this not enough?

How would this problem be solved? Replace the foreign players with worse English players? This would lower the standard of those teams and the premiership. Maybe the top teams could buy up all the best English talent but this would worsen the divide between the top and bottom. These foreign players improve the quality of the competition the 117 starting English players play in, improving their development and therefore the English national side.

Also the U20 sides generally have more experience with the premiership clubs than their celtic counterparts. Plenty of the premiership clubs use their academy players. Also a lot of the foreign players are developed (if not from scratch) at the premiership clubs. Many of them have developed into the players they are for their nations due to the professional environment provided by the clubs.

B91212, there already is a limit of 1 foreign player per playing squad. It's a joke but there's nothing that can be done about it. However the RFU has introduced funding based on the number of EQ players in match day squads. There has been an increase this year and this may improve more next year.

Thunor, for me its not a problem when the teams are signing foreign guys to increase the standard. But to me many of the teams are completely reliant on foreign players. I feel the issue of the wage cap is tied to this too.

In my view yes but I believe it is not just the premiership that needs change it's the championship that needs revamping. I am not saying this just because my team have plummeted into a lower division for the umpteenth time , i believe it also effects the clubs directly above us ( which is maybe another issue) the decline of rugby in the North and for that I would steer you to someone who would put it more eloquently than I can.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/my_club/leeds/8295119.stm

That though applies to other clubs not just to Leeds.
or

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/13279854.stm

returning to ring fencing here is further support for a change.

http://www.leedscarnegie.co.uk/news/11769.php

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/club/8501448/Brian-Moore-time-has-come-to-end-Premiership-relegation-in-order-to-promote-tries-and-excitement.html

http://www.espnscrum.com/premiership-2010-11/rugby/story/139746.html

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/nick_westby_ring_fencing_reform_required_to_re_energise_northern_rugby

I could go on posting links,but I think you get the gist . I though have other reasons why for me ring fencing needs to be done.


The premiership needs equality and a level playing field, it is difficult for clubs at the lower end and with limited resources to sign or resign new players as they are uncertain on the clubs future. This in turn make it very difficult for a squad to gel and unlike clubs at the top end who have the luxury of allowing a team to bond over a year, because of the rapid turn around, we have to do it in less and with a smaller squad, this makes the task monumental..where is the fairness in that.

Ring fencing works well in league, so why not in union? IF after 4 years a club fails not just to win matches, but on other criteria ..then fine let them drop...but as one of the links said above ring fencing will aid development of rugby in England as a whole. One final thought the criteria for entry, which restricted the Pirates from gaining promotion ( had they won) needs to be changed. There are a number of clubs in the premiership whose grounds do not meet the criteria..you can't have one rule for one and another set for others.

A lot of slated the ML saying its not a 'proper league' due to fact there is no relegation.

Now a lot are calling for the AP to become a 'Non Relegation' league.

Is this due to the fact that one of their own (Northampton) claimed tiredness as one of the reasons behind them losing out in the HC final?

red_stag wrote:Thunor, for me its not a problem when the teams are signing foreign guys to increase the standard. But to me many of the teams are completely reliant on foreign players. I feel the issue of the wage cap is tied to this too.

Which ones are completely reliant? And what do you mean by this? Some sides will have their best players being foreign (otherwise they wouldn't get game time). Most (if not all)could easily field a 100% EQ 23 although it would obviously be inferior to their 1st team.

The rules are changing next season (I think) and there will exceptions for academy players. At the moment once an acadamy players has a certain amount of game time their salary is added to the pool. That limits the number of games some academy players got for their main team and play the rest of the season for a Championship side.

Bedford, surprisingly the clubs in the premiership now want it ringfenced (with them on the top side of it). It's not new or surprising. It's the fans (most of them) and the RFU who want to keep relegation.

Hammer, the best team in the country (Saracens - Champs) had six non English players in their starting pack this weekend. IMO that isn't acceptable for a league. Compare it to Munster in Magners League who had 13 Irish men in their starting team when they won the Magners League.

Its fine for now but what about down the line. Will it be like Arsenal in football who have a token English man in their team.

Stag: Brits, Nieto, Brown, Burger and Joubert - who was the 6th?

Asbo it is Botha. Though I can now see from googling that he is being called up by the Saxons

Munster are one of four representative sides for Ireland. Saracens are one of 12 top English clubs with several more at Championship level (Kitchener has played for Saxons while at Worcester this year). The situation is completely different. Even if every side was as bad as Saracens there would be 96 EQ players starting every week. The maximum number of Irish or Welsh players starting for their home teams is 60. We are a long long way from it being a problem. That's forgetting about the fact Harlequins have fielded a 100% English side several times. Also several of those non-EQ players were born and bred in England but opted to play for another side by parents/grandparents (e.g. Will James, Jim Hamilton, etc). Should we be trying to get rid of these players?

There's no problem as things stand. If we end up with a couple of English players in each side then it would be a problem. However there are less foreign players getting time this year than they were last year. This is probably largely down to financial incentives given by the RFU for reaching quotas of EQ players in match day squads. This is as much as we can do legally and it seems to be working (only one year so far).

I think ring fencing it would be a bad idea, you only have to look at the lack of competiveness within the magners league amongst the last 4 teams to see what the effect of no cost of finishing last is.
Glasgow, Edinburugh, Connaght and now the Italian teams have all been around the bottom for many years as teams have been added from the original Welsh / Scottish league created in 1998. It's embarrasing to finish last but there is no penalty for it.

The Scottish teams have had the previous positions in the table (starting last year and going backwards)

Glasgow - 3rd, 7th, 5th, 7th
Edinburgh - 6th, 2nd, 4th, 8th

Hardly at the bottom for years.