It has taken a while but the penny finally seems to be dropping with those in charge of English club rugby. Perhaps it is simply maturity striking as the professional club top tier reaches its 30th season. Remember how things felt when you began to settle down, look for a proper job and start a family? According to the league’s chief executive, Simon Massie-Taylor, it is a similar story with the Prem.
And maybe he has a point when he says the league, which kicks off this Friday, is entering a new phase. In the rear-view mirror are the toddler tantrums and playground politics that disfigured the early years, the teenage growing pains and the subsequent existential struggle of finding a foothold in a precarious world.
“We picked all the fights, we made all the mistakes,” Massie-Taylor says. “[But] a bit like any 30-year-old, you now have responsibilities. And there’s an excitement that there’s quite an exciting career ahead.”
The club rugby game is also belatedly appreciating the value of its heritage. The promotional campaign to accompany this year’s launch is a good example. Until very recently rugby was almost entirely obsessed with attracting younger audiences. Suddenly there is a realisation that history can be marketable, too. Cue images of modern stars like Finn Russell and Maro Itoje wearing 90s-style baggy cotton club jerseys in homage to past legends, neatly linking vintage and modern and quietly underlining how far the sport has come in a relatively short space of time.
It was a similar story with the Greatest Rivalry series between South Africa and New Zealand; people loved how much the outcome genuinely mattered compared to, say, artificial constructs like LIV Golf. “We do see the 30-year thing as a bit of a pivot point and a platform for us,” says Rob Calder, Prem Rugby’s head of growth.
“We’ve seen in the last couple of years across other sports like athletics and golf that competitions haven’t really cut through. They can get attention but they can’t get affinity. Growth in sport is going to come from strong, authentic competitions. We think we’re really well positioned to exploit that.”
Back to the future and all that. There might even be the bones of a decent movie in there. In the league’s first fully pro year, assorted owners such as Sir John Hall at Newcastle, Chris Wright at Wasps and Frank Warren at Bedford were still wrestling with old amateur dinosaurs who disliked change of any kind. The Guardian’s Ian Malin, in his excellent book on the 1996-97 season entitled Mud, Blood and Money, asked Warren for his first impressions of Bedford. “It wasn’t so much a sleeping giant as one in a coma,” came the boxing promoter’s pithy reply.
Many of the same old obstacles – the season structure, crowd numbers, financial uncertainty – still exist. For Massie-Taylor and Calder, therefore, the crucial question is what happens next, beyond making retro leisure gear fashionable again. And the latest news is interesting. Among other things, Massie-Taylor predicts more high-profile investment deals – “I think there will probably be two or three more in the next two years” – for Prem clubs. And while the expansion league pledge of another two teams by 2029 still requires clubs such as Worcester, for example, to find further backing there is quiet confidence that interest is growing.
“I went to this investor conference last week and there were various city bods talking about sport as an investment becoming the hottest opportunity within the market. They see it as actually a very stable investment. There was even an argument that it was more stable than US government bonds, partly because it’s relatively recession proof. During recessions people continue to spend money on consuming sport. And it’s AI proof as well. We’re not going to suddenly start watching avatars playing each other.”
Meanwhile, suggestions that the league’s private equity backer CVC Capital Partners might be poised to cash out after almost eight years are also being rebutted. Massie-Taylor insists CVC “will continue on as they have done” while attempts continue to attract more investors like Red Bull at Newcastle: “The good news is that there’s not the urgency that there was. Newcastle was a distress situation, everyone knows that.”
In almost the same breath, though, he concedes any proposed franchise in Birmingham is logistically impossible within the next five years and that the oft-mooted World Club Championship has been mothballed again for the next four years at least. An imminent rise in the Prem salary cap is also highly unlikely. “Before choosing to spend any more money on players, we need to be sure of the return. If you increase the cap you may just be just inflating salaries without necessarily accumulating players that are going to move the dial, either in European competitions or at a local level commercially.’
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Moves are afoot, though, to reinvent the Prem Rugby Cup in 2027-28 as a next gen-style tournament during the Six Nations. “All the research tells us that people want to know who the next generation of players are,” says Calder. Ditto a restructured Europe from 2030 – “We want to make that as high quality as possible,” Massie-Taylor insists. He says increasing audiences across the board will be equally key. “There’s a big effort here to max out crowds because that’s the main week-in week-out income for our clubs. You can’t rely on a big ‘Hail Mary’ broadcast deal that’s suddenly going to change things.”
Something called the Broadcast Innovation Group, designed to encourage more collaboration between club chief executives and host broadcasters TNT, is another initiative, as is the Prem Media House, which is essentially its digital marketing arm. YouTube is increasingly attractive in the hunt for younger viewers; more than 250,000 people watched the opening two Prem Rugby games on the platform, a fivefold increase from last season.
Mash it all together and the ambition is to make the Prem “match fit” for whatever awaits in the coming decade. Massie-Taylor compares the league to a rugby team with fewer obvious weak points. “There was a point where getting a full team of players on the pitch was difficult. There were holes in certain places.”
Look, the French Top 14 remains out in front and polyester shirts are lighter to play in. But English club rugby is finally making a better fist of winning hearts and minds, one vintage cotton jersey at a time.
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