Ideas For A Structured Season

By Simon Miller
October 17 2005

OK, so the game of Rugby Union in England appears to be at Civil War time yet again over demands to players, club finances and the World Cup. The so-called Long-agreement is the cause of all this and it’s up very soon. So what can RFU and the English Premiership do to shove this finally into touch?

Some proponents such as Eddie Butler and Rob Andrew advocate separating the season into 3 blocks and moving the Six Nations to May, I actually think there is some merit in this, but I think that it would be hard for it to compete with other sports so I would instead concentrate on blocking over the season around the internationals and would also change the structure of the Premiership as well.

Unlike others, I think there is ample reason to change the structure of the competition. At the moment the play-off system hasn’t worked, sorry Wasps but to many an eye, you’re not the League champions at all. Yes, I know you played the system but I’m still wedded to the idea that if you come top then, well, you are top, not the guys in second place.

In addition, there is obvious evidence that there are few clubs in Division One at the moment that can sustain professionalism. And here’s where I go and change the structure.

There’s nothing wrong in borrowing is there?

Well, to steal from American Football – why not have two conferences with the winners playing a ‘SuperBowl’?

Let’s say there are six clubs in ND1 that can sustain professionalism. In one swoop bring them up into the Premiership to create two conferences of nine teams each.

There would be blocks of four games h/a spread across the season.

The structure would look something like this:

After the 16 games, the table would look something like this:

So….

*For the first two seasons, there would be a moratorium on relegation while those clubs wanting to, can be given help in getting their infrastructure up to a professional standard in terms of support, sponsorship, grounds, marketing etc.

For Heineken Cup Qualification, top 3 in each conference gets it (the rest to go into the Shield) – if there’s an extra spot then a play-off between fourth teams takes place.

Each season, there would be a draw (outside of top seedings of, say, the first 3 teams in each conference) to decide which conference a team would be playing (so old rivalries and new would not be lost).

I know there will be quite a few complaints about this type of set up, but at the moment there is a serious threat of killing the goose – namely the players themselves – so this would give a more balanced number of games. At the moment, a player in a club that wins the treble could conceivably play a maximum of 41 games which is just plain daft. With a conference system, this drops to a maximum of 34. Even in a humdrum team, a player may play around 34 games – this would drop to 28.

So what about the structure of the year?

For a start, I can’t stand the new Powergen cup format so in a clear case of absolute bias, I’d chuck it at the beginning of the season, sometime round August and get it out of the way!

Then there would be four chunks of Premiership and 2 chunks of Heineken Cup straddling the internationals.

So the season would look something like this:

As I said, the current demands on the players will, in the long term, come back to haunt English Rugby and this coupled with the actual state of professionalism in the top two tiers leads me to believe that there should be a radical overhaul of the system in terms of matches played and how the structure is set up.

If more and more clubs become sustainable, both in terms of profitability and playability, then the conferences could be extended because, in theory, Clubs would be able to afford squads such as those in football.