English rugby is undergoing a significant transformation with the launch of a new Professional Game Partnership designed to produce world-class players. The partnership includes key changes to the academy structure, focusing on regional development and increased funding.
Steve Borthwick’s England team ended dreams of a second consecutive Irish Grand Slam with their excellent win at Twickenham, while there were two English clubs in the Champions Cup semi-finals in Harlequins and Northampton, the latter giving Leinster a scare at Croke Park.
The clubs are being encouraged to focus on developing players from within their regional boundaries rather than recruiting from other areas of the country, with an increase in funding to help that work. To give it its full title, the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University is one of the largest data analytics research organisations in Europe and sport features among its many projects.DCU itself offers a Master’s degree in Elite Sport Performance, as well as a Professional Doctorate in Elite Sport Performance, so it’s a melting pot for people working at the top levels of sport from all over the world, including in rugby.
The Premiership clubs handed them 20 years’ worth of data, basically everything that’s ever been collected by a club about a player apart from their medical information, for obvious reasons. “It’s supportive and a good bit of research, but the nuts and bolts are that the real difference maker is coaching,” he says.
“It doesn’t look like it has any impact at all. What seems to be the only factor that we’ve found that has an impact on player development is effectively the amount of money that the club is spending on their academy. The more money a club spends, the more players they get. “It’s also interesting in the way the academy boundary is set up – you’ve got pretty significant disparity in the number of players per region, some very small and some very big both in population and geographically, but again there is no particular correlation there with output of players.”
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