Slash salary cap and ditch marquee men

With at least another three weeks of lockdown ahead of us, people are speculating about how we can emerge from this crisis, and what our post-pandemic world will be like. In the greater scheme of things rugby’s fate is trivial, but that doesn’t stop us speculating about what might happen.

- Colin Boag

Million pound man: Semi Radradra will be at Bristol next season, exempt from the salary cap

Starting at the top of the pyramid, I am as convinced as ever that World Rugby has outlived its usefulness and needs to be restructured. It’s cash rich through the Rugby World Cup, but whether it does a better job of organising it than the unions could, has to be open to question.

The power in the game sits firmly with the major unions, because it’s they that generate the cash needed to maintain the professional game. Whichever model a union has, central command and control or club-based, you have to question the relevance of the Dublin-based administrators. Their largesse in offering loans to struggling unions at present is really just repatriating funds!

Below World Rugby the unions are responsible for generating their own revenues and deciding how to spend their cash. That revenue is generated by a small number of professional players playing at the highest level. In England it’s Eddie Jones’ 45-man elite squad, although in reality only about 30 of them play in Tests in a given year – of the RFU’s £213m revenue in 2019, by my reckoning £130m can be directly attributed to the efforts of Jones and his men, and to that can be added a sizeable chunk of the £54m that comes from hospitality and catering.