“It is a golden opportunity for Yorkshire and for the game of rugby union in England,” Melville told The i Paper.
‘It is a golden opportunity for Yorkshire,’ says former England captain Nigel Melville (Photo: Getty)
Melville is a proud Yorkshireman who has seen all sides as an ex-international player, former head coach of Premiership clubs Wasps and Gloucester, chief executive of USA Rugby, interim chief executive of the RFU and he is now chair of the Premiership’s board of investors, in which role he convenes the discussions between the owners of the 10 clubs.
“The question always is how to make it happen. Franchising brings the opportunity for Yorkshire to be a part of the journey and the future of the game. I see this as a holistic opportunity to do what we have always said we want to do.”
“What if all the club owners walked away?” Melville says.
Melville also wants a Yorkshire team in the women’s PWR league (Photo: Getty)
Yorkshire is a powerhouse of rugby union, with 121 clubs, colleges and universities playing the game, plus 21 state and seven independent schools and 70 club junior sections with 11,000 registered youth players.
Even so, around 10 per cent of England’s men rugby union internationals have been from the county: 148 players out of 1455 up to the end of 2023 if based on players born within the traditional boundaries of Yorkshire plus four others born overseas but to Yorkshire parents or with strong ties to the county.
But players like Melville himself – as a scrum-half for England and the British & Irish Lions in the amateur days, he played for Otley and proudly for the old Yorkshire county championship team but joined Wasps in London – and Tindall and Danny Care left for southern clubs to further their careers. Sale Sharks’ Joe Carpenter and Tom Burrow are two current examples of Yorkshire-born players who left to get on.
Melville also wants a Yorkshire team in the women’s PWR league, as a home for the likes of England captain Zoe Aldcroft and world player of the year Ellie Kildunne, from Scarborough and Keighley respectively.
“A player will always move faster than their club. If you have a player at level three or four, and they’re very good, they are going to leave. They should go with a blessing to a club where they can maximise their potential.
How would it work and how much would it cost?
Leeds Tykes have a long and storied history, winning the Powergen Cup in 2005 (Photo: Getty)All of rugby’s power-brokers have noted the sums of between £40m and £145m paid for stakes in teams in cricket’s The Hundred.
“It is mostly private equity, sports investment funds, sponsorship from owners or individuals,” he says.
“The Premiership rugby club owners have backed the sport with tens of millions of pounds. They would welcome new money, and cricket has shown examples of how the owners retain 51 per cent of the interest.”
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“To get into any franchise league in the world, there is an entry fee,” Melville says.
“You’d want a stadium, or to rent a stadium. And there is a wage cap, currently £6.4m.”
“Maybe not as much,” Melville says. “I talk to investors, and I have done in the last year, and the limitations have always been ‘what if?’
“They are doing it in football at Wrexham but football has got 92 professional league clubs. We haven’t in rugby, but still we have had to rely on promotion through the leagues to solve everything.
As to where the Yorkshire team would play, Melville says it could be multi-centred, as with Munster using Limerick and Cork, and he challenges the received wisdom that you need to own a stadium.
“York has a stadium and it is in the middle of the county. Doncaster is there in South Yorkshire. The Yorkshire county side used to play at Bradford and Hull. You have seen Bristol play South Africa A, we can have fixtures like that.”
Now 64 and living near Ripon, he says: “If there’s a Yorkshire franchise, guess what colour you play, guess what the badge will be.
The challenges
Melville says he intends to talk to investors about getting the idea off the ground (Photo: Getty)A problem in the past has been fragmentation; getting all the interests in Yorkshire to work together.
“We would speak with them to find a solution that works for Yorkshire,” Melville says. “Other Yorkshire clubs further down the leagues would continue to play in those leagues.
“We talk about participation and what’s going to drive it is a geographical spread. It’s about how you cover the country, and how else are you going to do it? Whenever you speak to a Premiership owner and say ‘a professional franchise club in Yorkshire, doesn’t that make sense?’, they would go ‘yes’. And they would also say there should be one in Cornwall and, to a degree, in Kent or south-east England.
“I saw a chart of interest in rugby in Yorkshire having brief spikes, and one was when Sale got to the Premiership final two years ago. Bath and Bristol pulled a crowd of 50,000-plus in Cardiff this month. I see a similarity to the old rugby county championship rivalry being developed in a new world and it’s exciting.
“The national schools final this year was Harrow versus QEGS Wakefield. I went to see it – my son coaches Harrow. QEGS had some really good players. Where are they going to go?
“Without a franchise system, you can’t do it. That’s where the RFU have got to see the benefit. If franchises are approved in the summer, it could be in two years’ time. So a kid in Yorkshire who is 15 or 16 years old could be thinking about it right now.
“Yorkshire has got to be a destination. We have a history, a depth, in rugby union in Yorkshire. It’s so sad to think it might be lost forever. This is how you fix it.”
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