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Steve@Mose View Drop Down
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Steve@Mose Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: R360
    Posted: 03 Jun 2025 at 13:05
Players would risk England futures in rebel league

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England players who participate in rugby union's prospective new breakaway league will risk becoming ineligible for the national side.

Plans are under way for a revolutionary franchise league that hopes to attract the game's biggest stars.

The competition, known as R360, is scheduled to be launched next year, with benefactors from across other sports reported to be interested in investing.

Organisers insist the new league will not clash with international rugby and say players will be able to continue to represent their countries in tournaments such as the Six Nations.

However any player who quits the Premiership to compete in R360 risks curtailing their international career.

Under the terms of the new Professional Game Partnership (PGP), the Rugby Football Union is contractually obligated to only pick players who play in the Premiership.

Sources have told the BBC there are no plans to rewrite the terms of the PGP - an eight-year deal for which was announced in September 2024 to much fanfare - with one leading administrator saying there is "zero chance" R360 will get off the ground or attract the players required.

But plans for the rebel league continue to develop in a bid to shake up rugby union's world order.

In a prospectus seen by the BBC, R360 says it can give the sport its "Super Bowl moment" with a global league that would be the "pinnacle of rugby".

With an aim to attract the top 300 men's and women's players in the world, the franchise competition would be played predominantly in the summer in some of the world's major cities - with London, Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Cape Town all mentioned.

R360 has also vowed to "unlock the potential of the women's game", with American superstar Ilona Maher featuring on the promotional material.

But a number of senior figures in the game believe the proposals lack substance and will struggle to get either the approval needed from the governing bodies or the required investment.

"It's the world 12s again," one source told the BBC, referencing a shorter format of the game that never materialised., external

R360 plans to take place in two blocks – April to June and August to September – and while this would not clash with the men's Six Nations or the November internationals – it would overlap with both the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship and the women's Six Nations.

R360 is headed up by World Cup winner Mike Tindall and former Bath captain and director of rugby Stuart Hooper.

Tindall says in the prospectus that R360 is being launched as a response to a club game that has "failed to capture the same level of interest and investment as international rugby".

"Clubs around the world are feeling the strain and are being propped up by the international game," Tindall added.

"Rugby's lack of innovation and ability to change risks losing its appeal to new audiences and its younger market."
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Steve@Mose Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04 Jun 2025 at 00:07
Club rugby needs a radical fix – but is R360 breakaway league the cure to its ills?

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There is one passage in the sales pitch for R360, rugby union’s new breakaway league, on which everyone ought to be able to agree. “Clubs around the world are feeling the strain, and are being propped up by the international game,” the proposal goes, and it is true that there is not a single team in the Premiership making a profit, seven of the 10 owe more than they own. Worldwide, at least 12 professional sides have gone out of business in recent years. It is just a shame about the rest of it, which has more holes than Newcastle’s defence.

R360 is brought to us by the team of Mike Tindall, Stuart Hooper, whose management career at Bath was one seven‑year lesson in the Peter Principle that organisations tend to promote people to the point of their incompetence, player agent Mark Spoors and John Loffhagen, who had a 13-month spell as the chief legal adviser for LIV golf.

Their idea is to create two superclub competitions, one between eight male sides, one between four female sides, which would sit above the club structure. They would compete in a 16-match season in two windows from April to June and then August to September, with rounds taking place in a different city each week.

The words are cheap, but what they are promising sounds very expensive. They say they want to hire the 360 best players in the world on double their salaries, mention S£o Paulo, Barcelona, New York and Los Angeles as potential venues and plan to run “a week of live events”, including gigs before every game. Investors from the Premier League, F1 and the NFL are said to have “expressed interest”, and “dozens” of players have apparently signed letters of intent. All of which will be good for nothing but hamster bedding unless the organisers can fulfil their end of the deal and raise all the necessary capital by September.

There is (there always is) a lot of ready talk about emulating the runaway success of the Indian Premier League, which is built on the support of the largest single-sport market on the planet, and LIV golf, a competition launched by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund as a screw‑you to the PGA Tour after it refused to allow their players to compete in the existing tournaments. It is amazing what you can do when you have a billion fans with no worthwhile domestic competition to watch or the backing of a trillion‑dollar petrochemical fund run by a man with a grudge.

What rugby does have, according to a Nielsen report from 2021, is 800 million supporters worldwide. That is 800 milllion supporters who like the game more or less the way it is and don’t necessarily want to tune in to a match between two newly minted teams designed by committee, see their favourite players creamed off from club rugby by a rival competition or ruled out of the next Test because they are playing in a domestic game that clashes with southern hemisphere internationals scheduled to take place in the August‑September window.

That is if anyone who makes the hop across to the new competition is even allowed to carry on playing for their country. Right now, anyone who signs up would probably be ineligible to play for England unless the “exceptional circumstances” clause was triggered. That won’t happen unless World Rugby votes in favour of the enterprise and that won’t happen unless the unions are on board and all the anti‑doping and insurance regulation issues are resolved (all of which, you can be sure, would happen surprisingly quickly if R360 can persuade PIF to spend a few of its spare billions on all this).

Unless that happens, it seems the large part of the money is supposed to come from, well, us, the paying public. In May last year, Tindall talked it all through with his former Gloucester teammate Mark Foster, who went on to become an executive at LIV, on an episode of his podcast The Good, the Bad and the Rugby. Tindall’s main complaint is that rugby is not extracting enough money from its fans. Foster explains that a new business model could conceivably involve charging £75 a ticket, and “£100 a day easy on food and beverages” so by the time you have bought your new team jersey “everyone there is spending £300 to £500” at the match.

It’s worth a listen, not least because they say so much right about what is wrong with the game. Tindall absolutely has a point when he says that piecemeal change, when repeated tweaks are made to the existing game, have not worked and that something more radical than the Club World Cup is needed. But he has a long way to go, and a lot of money to find, to begin to persuade anyone this is it. You do not need to be a medical expert to know someone is sick, but it sure helps to be one when you’re trying to find a cure.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Steve@Mose Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 2 hours 47 minutes ago at 20:39
R360 rebel circuit is flawed - Premiership boss

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Premiership Rugby bosses say that a proposed rebel breakaway rugby circuit targeting some of the league's top stars is fundamentally flawed, and would wreck the pathway producing new talent.

R360, which has been fronted by former England centre Mike Tindall, plans to launch next year, promising bumper contracts, a globe-trotting itinerary and new revenue streams.

However, Premiership Rugby chief executive Simon Massie-Taylor says he has had no contact with its organisers and doubts their ambitions can be realised.

"The R360 thing is a distraction, sure, but it's not grounded in the same amount of work and detail that we've been doing," he said.

"It's not a threat per se, but we have no idea how it could ever work full stop - definitely not for the club game in England, in France, the United Rugby Championship, in the southern hemisphere."

R360 plans to run in two blocks - from April to June and August to September. Its organisers hope its schedule might co-exist with the men's international rugby calendar in the northern hemisphere, however it would put it on a collision course with domestic rugby in Europe.

England are contractually obliged to pick players from Premiership clubs, meaning any R360 recruits would immediately risk their Test career.

Any new event may not be sanctioned by the game's governing bodies and would require significant investment to lure players, hire venues and market itself to fans.

With the new Nations Cup tournament beginning in 2026, a first Club World Cup cleared for launch in 2028 and new, deeper agreements between the existing club and international game, Massie-Taylor believes the start-up competition risks the gains of recent years.

"Rugby needs roots, it doesn't need pop-ups," he added.

"There's an international game, there's a club game that relies on it, and there's a community game.

"The whole thing's linked and the community game's inspired by both. Funding comes down to help the community game and that sometimes is an inhibitor to growth because you have to find a solution that compromises all these types of things.

"But without those roots it's very difficult to understand how a system could ever work."

Premiership Rugby says it has recorded 30% growth among fans aged 18-34, while this Saturday's Premiership final between Bath and Leicester has sold out in record time.

It is one of 30 matches to have sold out this season, up from 18 in 2023-24 and 13 in 2022-23.

Broadcaster TNT Sports have reported 10% growth in audiences for the Premiership this season, and recorded their biggest Friday night rugby audience ever for Bath's semi-final win over Bristol.

TNT boss Andrew Georgiou was more blunt about R360's claims that they can tap into unrealised audiences and income.

"If these folks believe that they are going to grow the revenue by putting this thing on, I think they're delusional," he said. "I really do.

"What it will do is further complicate what is already a well-functioning rugby ecosystem.

"I would just ask some pretty fundamental questions around is this a commercially sustainable model?

"The fact that it's being likened to LIV Golf, I think is a perfect analogy. It's commercially unsustainable."

'Big game' concept could go overseas

Following in the footsteps of Harlequins' well-established 'Big Game' concept, Bristol played their home game against West Country rivals Bath at Cardiff's Principality Stadium last month, drawing more than 51,000 to the Welsh capital.

Another club is considering the possibility of shifting a regular-season home game to a bigger stage for the 2025-26 season, with Massie-Taylor saying the league might test the waters across the Atlantic in the run-up to the Rugby World Cup in the United States in 2031.

Newcastle staged a home game against Saracens in Philadelphia in 2017, but the fixture fell well short of the hoped-for sellout, with the 18,500-capacity Talen Energy Stadium less than a third full.

Saracens, who were also the 'away' team for London Irish's more successful St Patrick's Day fixture in New Jersey in 2016, have shown interest in taking a game stateside previously, with then chief executive Mark Thompson saying in September they would "certainly" consider it, external if the circumstances were right.

The 2025-26 Premiership season will begin on a Thursday evening, with the opening round reconfigured to avoid any clash with the Women's Rugby World Cup final.

The Red Roses are hot favourites to advance to Saturday, 27 September's showpiece at Twickenham's Allianz Stadium.

The first matches of the season will be spread across Thursday 25, Friday 26 and Sunday, 28 September, with a number of clubs interested in testing out the timeslot on Thursday evening.

Next year's Six Nations will also begin on a Thursday evening, with French broadcasters keen to maximise audiences and avoid a clash with the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics the following day.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (0) Thanks(0)   Quote Camquin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 48 minutes ago at 22:38
Why does Mandy Rice Davies most famous line come to mind? 
"He would say that, wouldn't he."

Mind you, I still think the whole idea has been worked out on a fag packet 
At the moment, it needs a TV contract, sponsors, franchise owners, to pay for the hire of stadia and training facilities.

Once you have heads of agreement of that, then you need to recruit 400 players, dozens of coaches, etc.

And I just do not see how you get there.

In the meantime, there are rumours - albeit in Wales Online - of the URC replacing two Welsh franchises with ones in Chicago and Miami.


 





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