It’s been a positive season for Welsh rugby on the field, with Wales finishing second in the Six Nations, Cardiff Blues winning a European trophy and the Scarlets still in the hunt to retain the PRO14 title.
In the second part of his interview with rugby correspondent Simon Thomas, WRU chief executive Martyn Phillips reflects on the regions and what the future holds for them, amid plans to replace the Rugby Services Agreement ahead of schedule.
PART ONE OF THE MARTYN PHILLIPS INTERVIEW: GATLAND, MAJOR CHANGES TO NDCs AND ALCOHOL AT THE STADIUM
Q: As the season comes towards an end, what do you reflect on as the main pluses for Welsh rugby?
A: I will start with something you wouldn’t expect, which is the participation side.
I’m very excited about that.
We know boys and girls numbers are growing and we are experimenting with minis into the summer. We have got 70 odd clubs doing that.
We are working with the Urdd, girl guides, disabled rugby, touch and mixed ability. I just think we have turned the oil tanker. We will get more people interested and engaged with rugby, which is brilliant for the long term. We are getting people to fall in love with the game again.
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There were festivals going on everywhere last weekend, with hundreds and hundreds of kids playing and parents watching. That’s really positive.
Q: What about the state of the regional game at present?
A: Overall with the regions, I think we are definitely improving, but we have got to be careful not to get carried away.
When you and I were growing up, Welsh teams used to pretty much win everything at club level and I want us to get back to that. I think that will take time.
The Scarlets have obviously kicked on again and had a good season. Hopefully they can finish that off. Them progressing in Europe to the extent they did was pretty impressive given the resources they have relative to some other people.
It was great for the Blues to win the Challenge Cup. That was probably ahead of their and others expectation. You need to enjoy that massively, but they need to improve quite a lot again next season.
The coaching team at the Ospreys has real potential and they have some iconic players there. Them kicking on and getting back to where they have to be for next season needs to be a real focus.
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Then the Dragons is always a strange one because we know what’s going on off the field, which is all about foundations and that has been really good. But we need them to win a few more games next season.
This was always a three to five year project, so they need to be better next year and win some more games. But equally we shouldn’t get carried away and think they are going to be winning the majority of their games because I don’t think they are at that place yet. I would still go for sustainability with some winning rather than trying to be heroes for a season.
Q: With the Dragons, do you find yourself spending more time on them given you now own them?
A: Not at all. I have probably spent less time with them than the other three.
When you buy something, you have to be really clear why you are doing that and what you are going to do with it. We did all of that work even before we got involved. They have just got to go through the next three years in the way we planned, which has afforded the opportunity to spend more time with the other three.
We are literally now hand in glove with the regions. We are getting close to being one organisation as professional rugby. We spend almost no time now in conflict and politicking. We are just trying to improve the thing and get better all the time. All the energy is going into that, which is really good.
Q: Is it right that you have had to cover some losses for the Dragons in this first year?
A: It’s well documented that only a handful of professional entities in rugby make money. So there’s nothing happened at the Dragons that overly concerns me or wasn’t what we thought or expected.
The obvious thing then is why are we doing it for the Dragons and not the others? But people don’t know what we are all doing for each other. Sometimes we need help from the regions and sometimes they need help from us.
We don’t see it any more as an “us and them”. We see it as there is five of us trying to perform in a professional environment and we’ve got a range of resources that we need to use effectively between us.
Q: I understand you have brought in a consultant called David Lovett to look at the professional game in Wales. What was the thinking there?
A: We have guys at the regions and the WRU that know how to run professional rugby. What David is bringing is some expertise around the financial side of it and how we might bring financial stability. He’s a very precise expert in that space. It’s a case of him bringing expertise and independence, but it’s our project. We haven’t out-sourced it.
Q: What has he come back with in terms of his findings?
A: He’s an extra pair of hands on financial modelling. He is helping us to forecast what the long-term picture may be for professional rugby, what might happen with the costs, where are there opportunities to do things together that could save costs, where might you make investments.
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Q: I hear the phrase Project Reset bandied around. Is this all part of that?
A: In effect it’s saying we have a Rugby Services Agreement (RSA) with the regions which we hope to supercede at some point with a new agreement. That’s just a project that’s doing that really.
Q: The RSA was due to run until 2020. Is it right that out are looking to put a new one in place well before that?
A: That’s exactly it. We will never get to 2020 on the old one because it’s very focused on rugby and not focused on business at all. We will have a new agreement in place between the five of us that will say what our rugby ambitions are and what’s our plan to deliver on those and how do we resource it. Then on the business side, how do we drive our revenues, how do we increase our attendances and govern ourselves properly.
The RSA is a very good rugby document, but it doesn’t really address how you run the businesses effectively and you can’t have one without the other.
Hopefully those letters drop from our vocabulary at some point and we move on to a new arrangement that says how are we all working together here with the assets we have got to perform.
We are talking about calling it the Professional Rugby Agreement and we want to get it done this summer. We are in a hurry to get it right. It would help everybody to have certainty by the start of next season.
We will have a Professional Rugby Board. We will all sit on it every month and run pro rugby. There will be an agreement in the background, but when it comes to where we want to spend money, what games we want to stage, there will be one forum which makes those decisions, which will be really powerful.
If you take the Blues, Shaun Edwards going in there has made a really big difference to how they have performed this season. If in future a region comes along and says it has a problem with some aspect of the business, we all own that together, which will drive the whole thing forward.
Q: Is the plan for the new agreement to have a fixed term like the RSA?
A: No, having a cliff-edge contract doesn’t really help. This will be what we all agree to make Welsh professional rugby work. It will be a shared responsibility for all of us, rather than big bad WRU coming along and saying you haven’t done this or that. We will collectively own the delivery of that plan, with the Professional Rugby Board holding each other to account on that.
Q: To cut to the chase, will the new agreement mean more money for the regions from the Union?
A: That’s the bit we are working through at the moment. The majority of money in rugby comes out of the international game, so we have to take that seriously. There’s what revenue the regions can drive themselves and the things you can do together to be much smarter on costs. As soon as you look at it as five, the opportunities pop up much more readily. It’s all three of those we have to work on to drive additional investment in the game.
Q: You now own one of the four professional entities. Is there a desire to have a stake in the other three or more of a say in the way they are run?
A: I am not a huge fan of control. Having a plan for the professional game is the first thing, then a professional board that drives the plan. Giving people the space to run the club in the way they want to run it is really important.
Q: Do you see the four professional teams continuing pretty much as they are then?
A: We have got ourselves to the place where four feels the right number for Wales, but when it comes down to money that’s tough. So objective number one is to do everything we can to help all four be sustainable and successful, while recognising they all move forward at a different pace.
The Scarlets are the region performing best at the minute. Is it in our collective ability to help them go a stage further next year? Yes it is actually.
If you take the Blues, they have won the Challenge Cup and now are in the Champions Cup. Nobody wants them to go in and lose every game in that tournament, you want them to be competitive in that. So what’s that going to take? But that’s going to be really different to what the Scarlets need to win it.
At the end of the day though, it’s all about working together towards a collective goal.