End of season grades

Se7en,

Caldy arrived in the Championship through the same rugby model that it has now. As a club it never pushed to be a full time professional club, why would it aspire to that. Professional rugby doesn't work in the UK as 10 technically insolvent Premiership clubs attest to that. Technically insolvent in the sense that all 10 premiership clubs lose money, virtually all of them have balance sheets where liabilities exceed assets (and that is after listing their investment in P shares at a whopping £17m!!) and they are only kept afloat by the largesse of the RFU and by their owners who are all probably desperate for some sort of exit.

Over lunch last Saturday the President of the RFU set out for me and the other guests on our table the vision that new US Investors could buy in to the franchise model take out CVC and everything would be onwards and upwards for rugby in England. 

I don't buy in to this 'theory' at all. When every business in a sector is making a loss the sector is a basket case. With the concussion class action also hanging over rugby it will take a very brave private equity player to bankroll a franchise model in English rugby with the many hundreds more millions that would take.

 CVC take 27% off the top for their previous investment of a few hundred  million which probably gives them a workable yield but I cannot see the exit for them other than another private equity house taking them out. 

I liked rugby as it was and I like how Caldy go about things, I have no interest in professional rugby and the Premiership's broken cartel. Perhaps this makes me a dinosaur