Interview with CEO of Six Nations, John Feehan - the 6Ns are not moving

Six Nations boss John Feehan will resist any moves to shift the rugby showpiece away from its traditional place in the sporting calendar

The first of 24 rounds of fixtures in the Pro12 – the domestic rugby competition for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Italy – began this weekend. Already, the talk is less about the prospect of champions Connacht being able to retain their title, and more about fixture congestion, competition restructuring and financial viability.

John Feehan has seen this all before. From behind his desk in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, he has spent the last decade managing the most lucrative competition in professional rugby in the Six Nations, running the British and Irish Lions, as well as growing the former Celtic League into a far more robust competition from which the Irish provinces conquered Europe.

None of that, however, stops the carping, from both the media and from other rugby “properties”, as Feehan calls them.

Already, there have been calls for the Six Nations to be moved to accommodate the Pro12 season, with suggestions ranging from shifting it a few weeks back to putting it at the end of the season; and for the Six Nations to be opened up to developing nations such as Georgia, with the Economist magazine accusing the competition of being “a cartel”.

Meanwhile, the Pro12 is expanding into the US, with the risk of further fixture congestion.

At the same time, the English Premier League chief executive Mark McCafferty has criticised the “punishing” itinerary for next season’s Lions tour, voicing strident concerns over the impact it will have on the club game.

But, to borrow a well-worn phrase, the Six Nations boss – one of the most powerful men in professional rugby – is not for turning.

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This week, Feehan will oversee the announcement of the head coach for the Lions tour of New Zealand in 2017.

Already, the tour has been mired in controversy over that “punishing schedule”, but for Feehan it is part of a valuable revenue engine for the unions both north and south.

It costs “multimillions” to run what amounts to a mini-World Cup, he says, and it makes a modest profit for the home unions of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales. “The real benefit money-wise would be for the host union,” he says. “It’s fair to say it stopped the Australian rugby union going bankrupt the last time it took place in Australia.

“The Lions series is part of the quid pro quo for them coming here and providing opposition in the November series, where our unions make a lot of money and the southern hemisphere teams don’t make anything like the same amount.”

For Feehan, it’s like a rising tide lifting all boats, even if it does tighten up the space available in the rugby season.

“Does it cause some congestion? Yes, it does,” he concedes. “But there aren’t that many players involved. The Lions touring party, even with injuries, is probably 42 players in total.” Many of those don’t play in the last two weeks.

“Everyone said when the game went professional that it would get less popular and die off, but it hasn’t. Any of the indicators we have show that it is probably more popular today than it’s ever been.”

He expects up to 30,000 people from Britain and Ireland to travel to New Zealand “for what are basically three Tests at the end of the day,” he says, “and all the craic and all the stuff that goes with it”.

“It’s still a concept that is almost romantic. It’s a devil-may-care format, the best of the best pitting themselves against the best,” he says. “And it works.”

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This year, the Pro12 will stand on its own feet for the first time. Feehan has handed over the reins of the competition to new managing director Martin Anayi, and last week he finally changed his LinkedIn profile to remove the reference to his position as chief executive of the Pro12.

But the league in its current shape is very much his creation, and he’s keen to defend it from any of its critics. “The Pro12 has grown. Let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a certain cohort of some of your media colleagues who feel that it hasn’t,” he says, bristling slightly.

“You’ve only really got to look at the numbers watching on television, the numbers engaging on digital, and the numbers attending the games. There are hundreds of thousands of more people going to Pro12 games today than there were four years ago.”

Nevertheless, the Pro12 remains the runty sibling compared to the financial giants of the English Premiership and the French Top 14 – and the financial gap is growing. Last year, for the first time ever, none of the so-called Celtic clubs from Ireland, Wales and Scotland made it out of the group stage of the European championship.

For this, Feehan blames fixture congestion. He acknowledges that despite the fantastic Pro12 win for Connacht last season, it was overall a tough year for Pro12 clubs.

“Everyone is talking about how the Pro12 sides didn’t do that well in the [European club championship]. But you’ve got to realise Leinster had something like 21 or 22 players taken out because of the World Cup and they came back emotionally drained, having had a very tough tournament, and it’s very hard just to slot back in,” he says.

English clubs, by comparison, would have just a handful of players pulled out.

“I think that 2015/2016 was an extraordinary year and I think this year there’ll be a different response from the Pro12 clubs.”

In the end, though, working around fixture congestion and living in the shadow of bigger competitions may well be the Pro12’s lot in life, Feehan suggests.

“Realistically, you’ve got to factor in a certain common sense in these things,” he says. “It’s a much younger league and it takes time to develop and build your base and your audience and your commercial arrangements and contracts as well. The issue comes down to money.”

The leagues in England (with around 56 million viewers) and France (around 65 million) are both able to command bigger television broadcast fees. “It’s not as successful, commercially, as the English league or the French league. It probably never will be.”

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The problem with the lack of space in the global rugby calendar isn’t going away any time soon. At the end of last month, Martin Anayi, the Pro12’s new boss, suggested that World Rugby – the sport’s global governing body – would need to step in and restructure the game’s increasingly congested fixture list.

With Anayi now free to make his own decisions, could the Pro12 and the Six Nations now come into conflict, I ask.

“No more than any two competitions ever do,” Feehan says. “I mean, you could argue that they’re already in conflict, in that the Pro12 has to play through the Six Nations. But it has to play through the November internationals as well, and it has to accommodate the [European club championship] as well. So it’s in conflict with any other rugby property that’s out there, effectively.”

So, with all the growth that Feehan oversaw now beginning to take shape, is moving the Six Nations to accommodate the growing Pro12 – as many are demanding – not a sensible move?

Certainly not, if it’s a move to the end of the season, he replies.

“That’s not really tenable. You’ve also got to look at the relative sizes in terms of commercial value of the various competitions, and the Six Nations is still the most valuable competition in the world.”

The Six Nations is worth between £250 million and £300 million every year, according to Feehan, between television rights, ticket sales, sponsorship and merchandise. By comparison, the next most lucrative competition is the Rugby World Cup, which is worth £350 million per completion, but only runs once every four years.

“[The Six Nations] is the golden goose, and that’s why it’s so important to all of the unions concerned,” Feehan says. “That’s why it’s the last one that they’re going to mess with, because it pays an awful lot of bills.”

Even a small change in the scheduling to accommodate either the Pro12 or the European Champions Cup could affect that, he says.

“If you were to move the Six Nations to May, you’d be up against the culmination of the football season; Roland Garros, the precursor to Wimbledon; you’d have cricket and Formula One,” he says, listing off the competing sports. “I’m sure we’d perform well against any of them, but the more competition there is, the smaller the size of any cake.

“So common sense will tell you it’s not necessarily a clever move. I’m not saying that we’re closed off to adjusting or changing, but you’d want to have a really good justification for doing it.

“It is the engine that drives all of the unions and, quite frankly, there would be no professional club rugby in the Celtic countries if it weren’t for the Six Nations.”

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The biggest chunk of that money comes from TV revenue. There, too, Feehan has had to fight his corner in recent years.

Precisely a year ago, while the Six Nations was negotiating the final leg of its latest television rights package, Feehan wrote to the then minister for communications, Alex White, imploring him not to list the Six Nations as one of the competitions that can only be sold to free-to-air broadcasters.

Feehan was in the midst of several negotiations for the broadcast rights for the competition – eventually signing deals with TV3 in Ireland and the BBC and ITV in Britain despite more lucrative offers from Sky in both regions.

Those deals run to 2021, so rugby will be free to air on these islands for five years, but Feehan knows that the hoary old debate about pay-per-view sport will resurface long before that.

“We always said we’d prefer the Six Nations to be free-to-air. We’ve never made any bones about that,” he says.

But he points to the French decision to list the competition, which he says means the Six Nations is “hindered” in the French market. “The values we achieve in France are significantly lower than the British market for roughly comparable market sizes,” he says. “It’s not a complaint; it’s a fact.”

And while the Six Nations places a premium on free-to-air, he says, “you couldn’t rule out at some point in the future an alternative”.

Feehan clearly doesn’t like hypotheticals, but he has a clear vision of what the future of rugby broadcasting contains. “The way the digital world is going, and certainly with the level of penetration that pay operators have, you could argue that who doesn’t get to see it if they don’t want to see it.”

The pay-per-view channels have extended their reach and most people can access them, he says, while digital platforms offer a longer-term option.

“The likes of a Netflix or someone like that could potentially show it to a bigger audience than you’d see on free-to-air. It’s one of those things you could do.”

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In the meantime, it’s slow and steady growth for Feehan. “We see growth across all the revenue streams. In broadcast terms we see growth in our core and foreign markets,” he says.

The newest frontier for rugby is the US, and a week ago Anayi confirmed that discussions are taking place between the Pro12 and US Rugby over a new broadcast deal for the 2018/19 season, as well as the possibility of a US franchise entering the Pro12.

A Pro12 franchise from the US would help, I suggest, to build potential Six Nations revenues too.

“Yeah, I think it’s an excellent idea. I think something that the Pro12 could do very well – particularly given the countries that are involved in the Pro12. There’s a very strong empathetic community in the States that would help,” Feehan says.

It raises the question: where does he think the Six Nations will be in five years?

“It’ll be in the same place,” he says, wryly.

https://www.businesspost.ie/the-six-nations-is-the-golden-goose-the-engine-that-drives-all-of-the-unions/