Matt Williams: If a solution is not soon found to create a feasible global club calendar, Australian rugby may soon face an era of irreversible decline
Matt Williams: French Top 14 fast becoming what English Premier League is to soccerThe first round of this season’s French Top 14 was played on August 19th of last year. Those of us in the broken nose and cauliflower ear brigade, who suffered multiple concussions back in the day, are challenged to remember back that far.
The northern hemisphere’s professional club calendar is 10 weeks too long and everyone, from the boardroom of World Rugby to the cleaners of the changing rooms, knows that is a fact. The Top 14 and its now highly-funded second tier, the Pro D2, has created a 32-club structure that is becoming to rugby what the English Premier League and Championship are to soccer. A giant and powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks up talent from across the globe.
Super Rugby has the opposite problem to the Top 14 as it has too few games, which places great financial strain on their respective organisations. An aligned club season across the northern winter allows for a mandatory non-playing period for clubs across the northern summer between late April and mid-September. If this is integrated with a realistic set of international windows the French could be forced to follow.
Many are suggesting a terminal decline in Oz has already started and is infecting New Zealand rugby, which is in the almost unimaginable position of recording a decline in participation numbers and bums on seats. Even a child with the most basic comprehension of mathematical division can clearly understand that it is impossible to have annual rugby seasons of 13 months in a calendar year that contains only 12. Yet, somehow, rugby’s administrators have managed to achieve this impossible task.
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