The Welsh Rugby Union board faces mounting pressure after a week of high-profile calls for directors to stand down. Hayley Parsons, founder of Go.Compare, Wales rugby great Jonathan “Jiffy” Davies and other prominent figures have questioned the union's leadership.
Much of the debate has focused on the WRU's decision to reduce Wales from four professional men's rugby teams to three. But one crucial part of the WRU's statement last Saturday has received little attention and may be the most important part of the entire debate.
Criteria revealed
The WRU stated that, in determining the future operating model for the men's professional game, its board considered factors including “population and accessibility, rugby infrastructure, financial sustainability, player pathways, sporting performance, fans' support and heritage”.
That paragraph begins to explain not why there will be three professional teams rather than four, but how the WRU intends to decide which three will receive licences. As matters stand, either the Ospreys or the Scarlets will go unless the two clubs agree to merge, while the Dragons receive first refusal on the eastern licence and Cardiff take the central licence.
The WRU has yet to adequately explain why the process is structured this way, although it has promised more information soon. The explanation cannot come soon enough, because if the WRU makes a decision that could determine the future existence of one of Wales' professional clubs, the process matters as much as the decision itself.
Process questions
The first question is geographical: what is the WRU's definition of east, central and west Wales, and why is it necessary to divide the professional game into those areas? Population may be a useful consideration, but it is a blunt instrument when used to determine the strength and viability of a rugby club. If population were the decisive factor, Birmingham would have a professional club, while Leicester, Northampton and Bath would struggle to justify theirs, yet those clubs are among England's most successful.
Rugby has its own geography. Llanelli is considerably smaller than Swansea, but the appetite for rugby in Llanelli and its wider hinterland is enormous. Its history, supporter base, schools, clubs, academies and contribution to Welsh rugby cannot be reduced to a population figure.
The WRU's list of criteria is potentially important. If population is merely one factor, how will the others be measured? How much weight will be given to financial sustainability? How will player pathways be assessed? How will sporting performance be compared? How will “fans' support” be quantified? How will heritage be assessed?
These are not academic questions. They could determine which club survives. There appears to have been no meaningful public consultation on the criteria themselves. If the WRU has developed a methodology for deciding which clubs survive, the clubs and supporters should have had the opportunity to understand and challenge it. There is also a strong argument for involving independent academics and experts in sports governance, economics and data analysis to test whether the criteria are appropriate.
Independent scrutiny needed
Instead, the impression is that the criteria were established internally and are now being applied to the four existing professional sides. A governing body has to make difficult decisions, but it also has a responsibility to ensure the process is transparent and fair. It cannot simply say: “We are the governing body and this is how it will be.”
The impression previously given by former WRU chair Richard Collier-Keywood was that all four professional clubs would have to bid for three licences. That would have been a perfectly understandable process: set the criteria, publish them, allow all four clubs to make their case, assess each application against the same criteria, and award the three licences. That does not appear to be what is happening. Instead, Cardiff and Newport appear not to have to compete for the central and eastern licences, while the Ospreys and Scarlets compete for the remaining western licence.
That raises questions about transparency, fairness and potential bias, especially because the WRU has a direct ownership interest in Cardiff Rugby. That does not prove bias, but it creates a perception issue. If a governing body makes the rules and has an ownership interest in one of the organisations affected, the case for an independent process becomes stronger. There should be an independent assessment of the applications and an independent appeals process.
If the WRU wants to reduce the professional game to three clubs, it must demonstrate that the process used to decide which three are chosen is rational, objective and fair. It must explain why the geographical model was adopted, the meaning of its criteria, how those criteria will be weighted, why two clubs appear to have been effectively allocated licences while two others compete for one remaining place, and what safeguards exist to prevent conflicts of interest.
None of this means the WRU cannot make the difficult decision, nor that the Ospreys or Scarlets should automatically be saved. It means that if one is to disappear, the WRU must demonstrate that it was the result of a fair and transparent process, rather than a decision whose outcome was effectively determined before the competition began.
Welsh rugby has been through years of financial problems, political infighting and institutional turmoil. Supporters have repeatedly been asked to trust those running the game. Trust is not created by telling people what the answer is; it is created by showing them how you arrived at it. The WRU has now told us some of the factors it intends to consider. The next step should be to show the evidence, methodology and independent scrutiny behind them. Because if the future of a historic Welsh rugby club is at stake, “trust us” is not good enough. The WRU needs to prove that the rules of the game have been applied equally to everyone. If it cannot do that, the argument over whether Wales should have three professional clubs may become secondary to a far more fundamental question: can the body governing Welsh rugby be trusted to decide its future fairly?
