Beyoncé, English rugby and Twickenham’s £660m black hole ...Middle East

Here’s an idea for Beyoncé, the mega megastar, whose world tour will roll into London and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in June. 

How about you save yourself the tedious mucking with doing deals to play at Tottenham and other well-known sports venues, and just buy one of your own?

Twickenham sold its naming rights to Allianz for £10m a year and surely you could afford to buy it outright from the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and then play there for free and the rest of the time bank the £10m or so that comes in from every England men’s international match? Crazy right now, or what?

OK, the magnificent Mrs Knowles-Carter might baulk at the business case of a ground that is 15 minutes’ walk from a routinely overcrowded train station, and is served for cars by one easily clogged dual carriageway in and out.

But it is only a marginally more wacky idea than the RFU upping sticks from their home of more than a century and moving to Milton Keynes or Birmingham – or sharing Wembley.

Those were the various options floated by the RFU and its chief executive, Bill Sweeney, in recent months, even though it is widely accepted that the plan is to stay at Twickenham, which the union owns.

The point of this argument is to lean on the local Richmond Borough Council to free up the licensing arrangement and allow the run of concerts and other non-sporting gigs the rugby governing body has been missing out on, including – you’ve guessed it – when Beyoncé took her show to Spurs instead.

The RFU is a £170m-a-year business that is projecting to fall short of break-even for the foreseeable future, but it reckons it needs to spend £660m on upgrading Twickenham after the 2027 men’s Six Nations.

So finance was bound to be a topic as Sweeney met the press yesterday, and he was asked if there were still any legs in the idea of Chelsea playing at Twickenham if the Premier League club needed a temporary home while rebuilding Stamford Bridge.

Rather than slap the idea down completely, Sweeney said it had been discussed before and it was Richmond council, not the RFU, who would take a dim view. He also mentioned, with a twinkle, the name of Millwall.

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Sweeney has only recently survived an SGM that was called to demand his removal over a range of alleged shortcomings.

Perhaps you would have a twinkle if you had been paid more than a million pounds last year, including an incentive-scheme bonus, to lead a loss-making business. Or you might be stony-faced at every turn – though it has never been the English rugby way. Grin and bear it is the norm.

Except the bearing-it bit has become more problematic as both Twickenham and the private owners at England’s top clubs are pressurised by the financial challenges. Clubs have gone bust, rounds of redundancies are no joke.

As Sweeney pointed out, Simon Orange, at Sale Sharks in 2016, was the last major investor to buy into the English game. Both the RFU and the Premiership are looking for a fresh route to investment – to entice funds or individuals in far-off places, as has happened in cricket. 

It was in this context that Sweeney and the RFU sold, if not quite Twickenham’s soul, then everything the name means around the rugby world.

But to get back to that £660m… where will it come from?

“It wouldn’t be all in one go, you’d probably phase it,” Sweeney said.

“You might have an initial [spending] phase of say £200-250m, and you saw the figures in terms of our balance sheet and cash position, so we can invest some. 

“Given our financial stability, our reserves, our no debt, our ability to generate cash on a regular basis, it’s not difficult to raise funds from private markets. So you’d expect us to go into some level of debt and have it debt-financed.”

But wasn’t one of Sweeney’s major plus points as he staved off the rebels at the SGM to have that cash at the bank and an absence of debt? There may be more twists to come, although definitely not a sequin-studded Beyhive by the good old A316.

RFU could host Premier League matches at Twickenham

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) is open to having Chelsea or another Premier League football club playing at Twickenham, as the oval-ball governing body seeks ways of ­generating extra finance.

The RFU is projecting to fall short of break-even for the foreseeable future, despite bagging a 13-year, £130m Twickenham naming rights deal with Allianz.

They are also planning to spend £660m on modernising the ­stadium. This expenditure depends on the local council changing the stadium’s licence to allow more non-­sporting events such as lucrative concerts.

Chelsea have been debating for more than 10 years whether to upgrade their Stamford Bridge home – in which case they would need somewhere else to play while it was being constructed – or to move.

The RFU’s chief executive, Bill Sweeney, was asked in a media briefing at Twickenham on Monday whether the current licence permitted football at the stadium and he said: “It would allow it to happen, there have been conversations previously about possible Premiership clubs coming here.

“Richmond council is more concerned about that. I just think in terms of impact on local residents, numbers of fans and so on, they’re a little bit more sensitive. It may depend on which club it is.”

Asked about Premier League revenue, he added: “It would be a big financial number. I know Richmond borough would definitely have a conversation about that.”

Twickenham is limited to three non-sporting events with a maximum capacity of 55,000 per year.

Sweeney said: “[Richmond council] see the value that we bring to the area and they understand why we need to have more non-rugby events when you compare it to Tottenham, to Wembley, the O2. They can see why we need those non-rugby events to make the thing viable.”

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