The Premiership season is back, with very little hype, even smaller attendances, clubs going bankrupt and limited international stars present. It all begs the question, is Premiership Rugby heading for irrelevancy?
Now clearly, the easiest markers to judge commercial success is attendances, viewing figures and the viability of the 13 club’s finances.
So, when using these factors as a barometer of success its not hard to determine that Premiership Rugby isn’t doing well.
Yet, as mentioned by the Leagues Chief Executive just 6 months ago, the Premiership has so much brilliant potential to be a commercial success.
It has all the ingredients to make a great league; competitive matches, star players, old/intense rivalries, a core/passionate fan base. But yet, the league commercially is still hardly growing.
Average attendances are abysmal. Sale last year only achieved 5000+ 4 times in the entire season. This is a squad that features international stars (Raffi Quirke) Manu Tuilagi and World Cup winner Faf De Klerk.
The international game, in my view needs to be bear more responsibility with trying to grow the domestic game. The 6 Nations draws in millions of fans, most are casual fans who purely support their national team. This is a huge market, that needs exploiting. England Rugby and the host broadcasters could do so much more to promote where else you could get your rugby fix, whether that be in the fallow weeks or after the tournament has ended.
The 6 Nations is also the best tournament in the world, surely this must inspire more fans to continue watching the game. More must be done by international teams to encourage fans towards the domestic league, especially on social media. The market is out there and so is the product of the Premiership, but they need to be introduced together more frequently.
Other smaller types of improving engagement with the domestic league would be to move more community games to Friday evenings, or Saturday lunchtimes, meaning amateur players of the game have more chance to watch and attend the Premiership.
Between the three of us on the podcast, three huge rugby fans, we only went to about four premiership games last season. Surely that is telling of the problem with fan engagement.
On the podcast this week, the issues we highlighted centred more on ticket prices, the accessibility and the fan experience at the games.
While some clubs, Tigers, Bath, and Gloucester regularly pull in near full attendance crowds, not many other clubs have such an attraction. The correlation is that these clubs have a hugely loyal fan base, but its also the location of the grounds that mean the fan accessibility and game day experience is enhanced. Compared to the AJ Bell, the Ricoh or Sixways, which are all the situated in a car park, out of town centres, off motorways.
Now without picking these grounds up and moving them to city centres, more needs to be done to improve the game day experience. We have seen the model work in Cricket with the Hundred, where you create the right family environment, making the match day an experience to remember and making tickets affordable.
A bigger change would be to reduce the size of the league to a 10-team league, meaning more international stars play more often. And although that would mean less home games, it would surely increase attendances in the long term. The likes of Smith, Itoje, Farrell and Watson could become the centrepiece for promoting the league.
The market is there for rugby to attract, no one is disputing that. The ingredients are there to make the league a success too. But the start to this years season has felt incredibly flat and uninspiring.
In a World Cup year, now is the opportunity to seize the initiative and think outside the box commercially. Domestic rugby is slowly but surely moving into irrelevancy unless something drastic changes.
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