The news at the weekend that the great baseball player Juan Soto is about to sign the richest deal in the history of professional sport got me thinking about how rugby here in Scotland could benefit.
In case you’ve missed it, Soto has left the New York Yankees after his best season ever, which included helping them to win the World Series.
A free agent at the season’s end, the 26-year-old Dominican outfielder will complete signing his new deal after medical analysis, but that should be a formality, and he will join the Yankees’ great local rivals the New York Mets – think Rangers’ best striker signing for Celtic or vice-versa - on a 15-year contract worth a staggering $765m, or about £600m. He specialises in getting ‘on base’ and does so almost more times than any other Major League Baseball player.
Over the course of his career, Soto will become a billionaire thanks to endorsements and other activities, but it’s the size of his salary alone that has shaken baseball and several other sports in the USA, the main question seeming to be ‘where will it all end’?
Mets’ owner Steve Cohen, a hedge fund magnate, can afford Soto as he is worth a reputed $20 billion, and he is determined that the ‘poor relations’ tag the Mets get when compared to the Yankees will be a thing of the past.
So how can such an eye-watering deal help rugby in Scotland? At first sight, it obviously cannot do so, but think about this – every child in the Dominican Republic will now be thinking ‘if he can do it, so can I’. Maybe not to the tune of hundreds of millions, but they will know if they are good enough and work hard enough they can make a decent living out of playing glorified rounders.
These thoughts occurred to me after I was reviewing the results of the schools cup finals that took place at Murrayfield last Wednesday.
The names of the finalists in the main boys’ tournaments were all too familiar. Every single one was an independent school, as private schools call themselves these days. State schools just did not figure, and no state school has won the Under 18 cup since Bell Baxter High School beat Dollar Academy in season 2006-07. But then they did have Peter Horne and Chris Fusaro playing for them. The Under-16 cup and its predecessor the Under-15 cup has a similar story – no state school has won that age group since Galashiels Academy in 2005-06.
Perhaps more worrying were the number of schools teams that were unable to fulfil fixtures earlier in the tournament with the main reason given on the SRU website being ‘insufficient number of players’.
I am well aware of the difficulties that have faced state schools’ rugby in recent years. The SRU long again realised that there was a problem with rugby in state schools and we are in the midst of a strategy that is trying to improve the situation, and I’m assured that it is working slowly but surely, with a claimed 176 schools playing some kind of part in the strategy.
The Covid-19 pandemic is certainly to blame for some of the problems facing state schools. Some youngsters just stayed away for two seasons and never came back.
Yes, independent schools suffered, too, but they bounced back better, so that they now rule the schools’ roost. It’s not a good look for rugby for the young people of Scotland if it appears elitist, and it certainly looks lop-sided when independent schools which have about 5 per cent of the school age population are winning cup after cup at Murrayfield and have been doing so for years.
I asked several top people in youth rugby why the independent schools still completely dominate our sport at that level and the answer almost unanimously was one word – resources.
State schools just cannot compete with those independent schools that pour money and coaching expertise into rugby, and even well-organised state school set-ups like Lenzie Academy and Peebles High School are playing second fiddle to the likes of George Watson’s College and Stewart’s Melville College.
Based purely on results alone, the rugby gulf between independent and state schools is widening. There is also plenty anecdotal evidence that young boys in general are not really into rugby these days, though there are more young girls playing than ever before.
There is one message that I think is not getting through to educationalists in the state sector. They should realise that pupils, male and female, could make a living playing professional rugby, and anyone with talent should be pointed in that direction.
Incentivise youth and make them at least think of rugby as a means of making a living. In Scottish rugby, no one will ever earn the sums going to Juan Soto, but why not get our youth to appreciate that in this professional era, there might be a paid career in rugby for them.
