Why rugby union’s future lies in league’s back yard ...Middle East

Former England captain Nigel Melville is calling for the Rugby Football Union (RFU) to approve the Premiership’s push for franchises in a revamped top tier of English rugby, and for one of the franchises to be a new team to represent the whole of Yorkshire.

“It is a golden opportunity for Yorkshire and for the game of rugby union in England,” Melville told The i Paper.

A system of franchises with stakes available to be bought by corporate or institutional investors is being floated by the existing 10 Premiership clubs, with the RFU Council who have regulatory power over the league structure due to discuss the idea in June. Implementation is possible as soon as 2026, if the RFU approve it as Melville is urging them to do.

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.

“Everyone you speak to at board level in England agrees we need a team representing Yorkshire in the Premiership,” Melville says.

“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.”

Melville wants strong northern franchises based on Yorkshire, the north-east (Newcastle/Northumberland) and the north-west (Sale/Lancashire/Cheshire) to drive each other on and support the English game as a whole.

“What if all the club owners walked away?” Melville says.

“Or what, alternatively, if we could work together as a group, and build something that’s nationally important, and globally significant?”

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.

It is also, of course, a heartland of rugby league – the great schism between the two codes took place in Huddersfield in 1895.

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.

Yorkshire have provided more than a dozen England captains including John Spencer, Melville, Mike Harrison, Rob Andrew and Mike Tindall.

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.

Otley, Rotherham, Headingley, Wakefield, Morley, Doncaster and various iterations of Leeds including the Tykes and Yorkshire Carnegie have been in the top two divisions without getting established in the Premiership.

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.

“There are over a thousand girls playing in Yorkshire, what’s their pathway?” Melville says.

“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.

“And for a player from Yorkshire, that should be in Yorkshire. Young kids coming through in the county will aspire to play for the franchise team. Yorkshire players as a result of this will play for England, they will play for the Lions.”

How would it work and how much would it cost?

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.

There has been reported interest from Red Bull in Newcastle Falcons. The drinks giant already has a stake in Leeds United FC, who happen to be the team Melville supports. He intends to talk to potential investors.

“It is mostly private equity, sports investment funds, sponsorship from owners or individuals,” he says.

“Look at Leeds United, my team. You have got a bit of Red Bull there, you’ve got the 49ers Enterprises. At Newcastle United you have got the PIF guys.

“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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The Premiership – working with the RFU – would be selling the franchises.

“To get into any franchise league in the world, there is an entry fee,” Melville says.

“So you’d want to buy a P share, that’s currently valued at around £13 or £14m. In return, you get an annual return from central distributions. There are also A shares and B shares from being in the league, that bring additional revenues.

“You’d want a stadium, or to rent a stadium. And there is a wage cap, currently £6.4m.”

So, a figure of around £30m to get started?

“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?’

“You want me to invest in a team that might get relegated, that becomes a difficult investment. An expanded Premiership without relegation is a different prospect. Investors want certainty and stability. You want guys to come and build something, a community.

“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.

“In Yorkshire’s case it made it a lot worse, to the detriment of a huge hotbed of English rugby. Leeds were relegated, Rotherham were relegated, Doncaster Knights have not been able to get up, and so on.”

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.

“Why do we have to do the same as everyone else? As long as you control your sponsorship, ticket money and a percentage of the hospitality, why do you need to own a stadium? We could talk to Headingley to host big games – if there are 10 home games in a franchised Premiership, you could have two ‘Big Games’ against the northern opposition.

“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.”

The younger Melville aspired to play for the old Yorkshire county team, with a white jersey and emblem of the white rose.

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 history can be part of where it goes. There are so many people passionate about rugby in Yorkshire, we need to give them something to be excited about.”

The challenges

A problem in the past has been fragmentation; getting all the interests in Yorkshire to work together.

Melville has spoken informally to Steve Lloyd, Tony de Mulder and Sir Ian McGeechan at Doncaster Knights, who passed the Premiership’s entry criteria this season but failed to win the Championship.

“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.

“The Yorkshire rugby union, they want county rugby. The Premiership, they want something in Yorkshire. The RFU, they want to grow the game – they are already running the Yorkshire academy because there is no Premiership team to do it. We lost rugby development officers in Yorkshire. We need inspiration.

“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.

“Newcastle have struggled for investment in the last few years. They are producing players who are leaving for somewhere else. [Falcons owner] Semore Kemore has put loads in. The burden cannot fall on one individual for every bloody club.

“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.

“If the England team is successful, more money comes into the game. The Premiership get a share, yes, but so does the community game. And the Premiership owners love England.

“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?

“Yorkshire are not going to be Bath overnight. But they will bring players through. That’s the beauty of franchises – you have got time. It’s not boom and bust. It is an opportunity to build something.

“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.

“It would be nice to re-engage with those who went before. Peter Squires, Bryan Barley, Peter Winterbottom from my era, Rob Andrew, Rory and Tony Underwood. So many of us came through and went. Brian Moore – I met him at under-16 Yorkshire schools, he was on the bench. He played for Nottingham RFC when he went to university, and then Harlequins.

“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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