ONE OF THE MOST-ICONIC advertising campaigns ever run was when Avis Car Rentals admitted: yes, we're the number two car rental company – but – we try harder. If the idea was to turn this admission of sleeves-up commitment into the number one position, the campaign failed, but, it certainly struck a chord and got them noticed.
Perhaps the game of Rugby Union Football should adopt the Avis slogan in it's seemingly, in the United Kingdom anyway, unwinnable battle for hearts and minds with Association Football. I make this suggestion following this week's disclosure that, according to a NAO (National Audit Office) report, some £29 million in government grants, given to sports bodies by DCMS (Department of Culture Media and Sport) to mitigate the effects of Covid will be unrecoverable.
This follows the collapse of three of England's Premiership clubs: London Irish, Wasps and Worcester Warriors. Despite receiving over £41.6 million from DCMS, all three clubs failed. Worse for the game in England, Government officials say they are increasingly pessimistic over the financial stability of professional rugby union, as they defended loans given to sports organisations dueing the pandemic.
A National Audit Office (NAO) report published last year said that as much as £29m of a total £474m lent to sports organisations during the pandemic will not be recovered. Central among the defaulters are three rugby clubs.
Speaking in front of the Public Accounts Committee in parliament on Monday, the director general of policy at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), Polly Payne, said the government was now monitoring financial risks not only to clubs but the Premiership itself, and that concerns over financial viability had grown.
Asked by MPs if she anticipated more rugby clubs going into administration in future, Payne said: “We are absolutely reviewing and updating our forecasts. Are we more or less pessimistic than at the time when we gave the loans? I think given everything that has gone on in the sport, we are more pessimistic than we were then. I wouldn’t want to talk about our individual borrowers but absolutely we keep it under review and really care about it.
“In rugby when we have been thinking about likely insolvencies and the financial strength of the individual clubs, we have also thought about the financial situation of the Premier League (sic) as a whole,” she continued. “We have not only been taking account of it, we’ve been using the government’s convening power to try and help with the financial sustainability. We take this very seriously.”
Payne defended the decision to award a total of £123.8m to Premiership clubs, a quarter of the total amount lent at the time. “It wasn’t that there was any special treatment and we didn’t think about it sport by sport,” she said. “I think it’s worth saying that the [total amount] we could have spent was underspent, so it was not the case that other sports missed out.”
Some £10 million of the grant money has apparently been clawed back since the three clubs failed.
This bad news may not, on the face of it, have implications for Scotland, since our club game has never operated in the sometimes fantasy economics world of billionaires pishing cash up against a wall which appears to be the norm in England – the Scottish Rugby Union will (hopefully) never go down the road of paying even Finn Russell £1 million per year to strut his stuff for Edin burgh or Glasgow Warriors.
But, it does demonstrate the problem our game faces in balancing its fair share of the public response to a professional sport with the reality of how rich the “cake” for that sport can be.
English Rugby is the real outlier in trhe professional game. In France, the Top 14 clubs appear to have a better, more substantial financial relationship with the government, both national and local, while, everywhere else, the national governing bodies rather than the clubs control governance.
But, as we have known for over 300 years, 'Mother England' knows best, so I suppose the rest of us can only stock-up on popcorn, sit back and wait for the final implosion.
The Rugby Football Union's finances and governance structures are in a mess. For all the bullishness and “Look how wonderful our game is” approach of English rugby's media cheer-leaders, the Premiership is in a mess; their “Championship” in an even bigger hole.
However, they are operating in a market of over 50 million people, I look at the poor state of the Scottish Rugby Union's finances, in a market one-tenth of that size and yes, I'm worried – very worried.
Do we have the talent and the application; has the Murrayfield Junta the desire and capacity to try harder to get us out of our mess? And can they carry the rest of us with them?
FINALLY – A wee thought, in the wake of that embarrassing non-show at Scottish Gas Murrayfield on Sunday.
Apparently, the International Squad's reward for giving us all red faces with that awful display against Ireland is to be a week's warm-weather training in Spain, to prepare them for their trip to Twickenham.
Has somebody broken this news gently to Jim Telfer? I appreciate “Creamy” is now in his ninth decade and has, apparently mellowed somewhat, but, I wonder if he would have come up with this strategem following a bad loss.
Instead of jetting the squad off to Soain for a week, might I suggest a week in (assuming it has not, as it ought to have been, razed to the ground) the spartan barracks of Broomlea Residential School, West Linton – a fate which befell 11 and 12-year old Ayrshire school children of my “Baby Boomers” generation.
We tended to emerge from West Linton, determined to try harder, to pass “The Quali” just as long as they never made us go back there again. Send the failures of the Irish game there for a week; I am sure that would guarantee victory in London.
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