Welsh rugby has always been tribal. But Geraint Powell has turned anthropologist to see if he can find a previously undiscovered tribe who worship the Welsh Premiership.
There are some very rare creatures within the rugby clubs of Wales.
These include supporters of the England Test team without any nationality or familial connection to England.
There are also Newport RFC fans who are delighted at the prospect of inevitably losing ownership to whichever company that now replaces Newport RFC as the legal owner of Rodney Parade.
There are rugby fans of the eastern Glamorgan Valleys who are delighted to support a region called “Cardiff” in the era of the Ospreys, the Scarlets, the Dragons and RGC.
But this article is about none of these modern day Tasmanian wolves of the Welsh rugby landscape.
This article is aimed at that most endangered species of all, the imminent Mauritian Dodo bird of the entire Welsh rugby pyramid.
I refer, of course, to the WRU Premiership club fan who is happy with the current format of that competition platform.
As if current Welsh Rugby Union Group Chief Executive Martyn Phillips has not got enough on his plate firefighting on all fronts of the Test and non-Test professional game, this undoubtedly will be the next big issue in his in-tray. His antennae will be too switched on to miss it, for he would never have tried to sell a DIY equivalent of this product when he was at B&Q.
No siree, this is currently not a commercially sellable product. And one weekly match delayed by 24 hours should be in that 2.30pm slot every Sunday afternoon on S4C, as we play professional regional rugby on a Friday evening and a Saturday evening.
The WRU Premiership is a pivotal player development league, with nearly £1.5 million of WRU member club money committed to it in order to help provide the right environment for regional academy and regional fringe players to test themselves against their equivalents at other regions and against the “best of the rest” of the WRU pyramidal player base.
This is especially so for young regional academy tight forwards, with the technical skills apprenticeship of the set piece. More and more aerobic skills are required of these players, not to be simply a mismatch risk for an opposition back to expose in midfield, but they still need solid basic skills in securing possession and providing a solid forward platform.
And to provide a “bridge the gap” role for those potential professional rugby players which were missed by the regional academies and/or developed late and/or had other ambitions and goals at 15 years of age.
If that player development role may one day be primarily usurped by full regional “A” teams, that is some years off. The WRU Premiership Selects have so far been a disaster, on any objective results based criteria rather than on more subjective and wishy-washy “development” criteria.
Potential logical regional “A” teams are a commercial write-off for the next 5 years or so. Nearly all potential consumers at the Scarlets and Ospreys are swept up into the main professional rugby offering, lack of affinity at the Cardiff Blues and Dragons eliminating any meaningful crowds there.
Regionalism first, before regional “A” teams. David Moffett succinctly made that point in 2014.
If I had any remaining doubts about the absurdity of the current league format, it was comprehensively ended in March by Parisian rugby journalist Aurélien Bouisset of L’Équipe trying to grasp that one club had no scheduled home league fixture between 24 February and 6 May.
This was a fluent English speaker suddenly losing confidence in his language skills because the answer repeatedly given to him upon his clarification simply made no sense whatsoever so could not in fact be the correct answer.
Home matches for a humble club rugby fan are simple in their desired format, and this is hardly limited to the WRU Premiership.
The WRU Championship is 2 clubs short at 12, fans hoping for inclement weather in January/February to extend the season into April. When Pontypool v Tata Steel was postponed, Pontypool Utd v Talywain was watched on that day and relief at a Pooler league match after 1 April. And the WRU Cup run, victories over Llanelli and Cardiff (before succumbing to the pincer of the quagmire of Pandy Park and the Cross Keys pack), pushing another league match back to 15 April.
Yes, a habit. A roughly fortnightly Saturday afternoon match experience between the beginning of September and the beginning of May, give or take the occasional fallow home major Test weekend and a WRU Cup weekend. This is the desired habit, other options for Saturday afternoon consumer leisure time never being given an opportunity to get a foothold into rugby consumers.
With the WRU Premiership ring fenced at 16 clubs until relegation at the end of the 2019-20 season, most consumers were inevitably going to be looking to buy into a regular season 30 match 15 home/15 away matches season. Many of these clubs are the old 1st class clubs, with the independents now noticeably outperforming those hard-linked to regions, the oldest generation of fans recalling 45-50 match seasons from a different era.
It might be hard going for RGC, albeit with away matches at the likes of Cardiff, Bridgend, Pontypridd, Merthyr and Bedwas on the mornings of most Wales Test matches, but logistically doable and revenue boosting with 4 more home matches.
So a 22 match season, consisting of 15 home or away matches, then a split into a top half and a bottom half, followed by another 7 home or away matches, is an “unusual” consumer offering. I am not aware of the widespread use of this format elsewhere in global rugby.
Few fans would seem to mourn the passing of the Foster’s Cup, a tournament so pivotal that one Premiership team could not even participate in it en route to reaching the league Tier 1 play-offs. You’d have to square off the sponsors, just as BT Sport and Sky Sport had to be squared off over Europe in 2014, but this is currently not a commercial offering that should be out there.
A rather obvious stop gap measure over 2017-18, whilst player development implications are carefully thought through at leisure by the WRU, might be to at least expand the post-split tiers from 7 home or away matches to 14 home and away matches. At least that would increase the number of matches to 29, with the extra fixtures for high intensity Tier 1 matches.
Welsh rugby has a lamentable history since 1990 of failing to adopt simple structures and, when a mistake happens, rather than back tracking to correct, instead ploughing onwards but building ever more layers of complexity upon complexity to try and rectify undesirable or sub-optimal outcomes.
Rather than adopting a complex structure, it is invariably better to adopt a simple structure and present that to the consumer. And this is usually the same even if you need to implement complex ancillary levers to achieve all the required aims within a simple product for the consumer.
If you fuse the Premiership and the Foster’s Cup, and play 29 or 30 matches instead of 22 matches, with or without a split, do you need to impose an individual player limit of (say) 18-22 matches?
If you impose an 18-20 match individual player limit, do you designate 2 or 4 commercially well timed weekends along the fixture list for high intensity local derby match weekends and where the individual player limit does not apply?
Do you split an individual player limit allocation into 50% home matches and 50% away matches, to preserve competitiveness and avoid a risk of “Top 14 style” strong home teams against weak away teams that reduce the required intensity for player development?
What limit do you place on over-30 ex-professional players in a match day squad? Or even on over-30 players in each wider squad?
Do you need to impose minimum and maximum games for regional academy players? Should regional academy players be embedded and allocated to a club for a season?
These are some of the various levers to be considered at leisure by the WRU, and which can then be signed-off with the clubs.
What we do already know is that rugby consumers will engage with a simple season long structure, even one with complex ancillary levers off their radar and left to their club management to navigate through out of sight. But nothing turns them off like a complex sparse season structure, whether the ancillary levers are also complex or in fact very simple.
Whatever the WRU Premiership is currently doing, it is not working for the consumer.
