We keep pressing self-destruct button

IT IS high time English rugby with its huge resources, in both player and financial terms, ceased pressing the wretched self-destruct button.

As Nick Cain detailed in his damning column last week, Rugby Football Union CEO Bill Sweeney is clearly not up to the task of running English rugby.

In February 2020, Nottingham chairman Alistair Bow stated: “Bill Sweeney may go down as the man who ruined English rugby. The RFU have sold their soul to Premiership rugby and CVC.”

Sweeney’s crime then was to inexplicably ruthlessly cut the £534,000 budget for each of the 12 clubs in the Championship, the vital but dismissively treated all important feeder league for the Premiership, back to the 2015 level of £288,000 per club for the 2020-21 season.

Since this ill-conceived decision Sweeney has done his best to justify Bow’s doom-ridden prediction. As Cain details, his latest £296m Professional Game Partnership (PGP) proposal is yet again handing a huge funding deal to the debt-laden clubs in the Premiership, a cumbersome sporting concept overpaying players relying on millionaire owners, RFU money, and private equity money for survival.

On Sweeney’s watch, the Premiership has become ring-fenced ending promotion and relegation while three clubs, Worcester, Wasps and London Irish went bankrupt last winter. Then in September, Championship title holders Jersey Reds ceased trading through an abject lack of RFU support despite the fact England use the club’s facilities as a training base.