The organizers of two of the largest club rugby union leagues in Europe and South Africa are reportedly in talks to merge to form a new united Rugby league. The governing body of the English Rugby Premiership, (Rugby Football Union) (RFU), and the United Rugby Championship (URC) have reportedly been considering the merger since before last year’s Rugby World Cup. They have begun to explore the merger’s viability from a commercial and sporting standpoint, following the record-breaking engagement of fans during the World Cup.
The move would see the Premiership (containing ten English teams) join the URC which contains 16 teams from Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, and Wales. They would then form a new 17-team league containing teams from Britain and Ireland and then reportedly form another league for all other clubs. The collapse of three established English Premiership clubs (Waps, Worcester Warriors, and London Irish) helped to push for this change. Proponents of the move argue that it would provide an element of financial stability to the English domestic league.
However, criticism has been levied at the exclusion of South African and Italian domestic teams who, without leagues of their own, would either join leagues closer to home (such as the primarily Oceania-based Super Rugby league, the French Top 14, or Italian Top 10) or expand their domestic cup competitions to cover a longer season, eating into the potential game window for the continent’s cup competitions (the European Champions and the European Challenge Cups) as well as constricting the annual international test series in November and July.
Although both leagues have publicly denied that negotiations to form the new league are taking place, figures within national rugby unions have expressed varying degrees of support, with the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) chief executive Kevin Poots stating in an interview with the Irish Examiner last November that the union was open to “the potential of a British and Irish scenario”, adding that the game of rugby “can’t sustain itself without increasing revenues”.
“The Twickenham Stadium” by Mandy Barry-Cades is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.