Got to say, I’m intrigued to see how the Netflix Six Nations documentary covers the Welsh rugby crisis. Given that the Wales team are refusing to cooperate with the Netflix crew, denying them access to team meetings and even turfing them out of Alun Wyn Jones’s press conference last week, you have to wonder what sort of material is going to be cobbled together. Perhaps Wales will simply be pixelated out of the final product: a ghostly apparition at the edges of the screen, implied but never physically present, which, you might argue, is a pretty good way of describing their performance against Scotland.
But the indignities of a global streaming giant are the least of our worries here. With England visiting Cardiff on Saturday afternoon, the prospect of an unprecedented Wales player strike remains worryingly real. Ask the players and they will insist this is not really a dispute about money, but security and basic dignity: the dozens of players who, in the absence of a new funding deal, have no idea whether they will still be employed in four months. The sleepless nights and declined mortgage offers. The breathtaking ineptitude of a union asking players to take a haircut while furnishing the new coach, Warren Gatland, with a £2m contract and planning a range of new capital investments: an interactive rugby museum, a roof walk and a zip wire at the Principality Stadium.
There are significant local factors at work: the long, slow decline of Welsh regional rugby, the increasing popularity of football, the outsized effects of the pandemic, the amateurish arrogance of the Welsh Rugby Union, currently weathering a toxic abuse scandal and shedding executives at an impressive rate (which may explain the zip wire). Mismanagement, incompetence, broken promises, failed visions: all are present and correct.
But there is a broader picture to consider, a malaise that goes beyond the 60-cap rule or the regional funding settlement, that in many ways goes beyond any one sport. The question, put in its bluntest terms, is whether the modern international governing body is fit for purpose.
Let’s break this down. You’re the national federation of a medium-sized country in a global team sport. What’s your brief? You have an entire men’s and women’s setup to run, players and coaches and support staff, age-group sides, disability sides, training camps, pathways. Domestic competitions to organise: set the rules, appoint and train officials, adjudicate disciplinary cases.
You need to fund and administer an entire grassroots system with its thousands of amateur players. You need to negotiate broadcast contracts, find sponsors, sell tickets, print programmes, market and promote your game. You need to fight your country’s corner on international boards and in the corridors of politics. You may have a stadium to manage. All this from the same office, in an increasingly hostile financial climate.
And remember: you don’t have a big weekly product to sell. Your one real meal ticket is the national team and if your players are any good they will almost certainly make more money playing somewhere else. Maybe this made sense in simpler, more plentiful times. But is there not a fundamental absurdity these days in the very idea of this vast, bloated, disparate enterprise that somehow manages to disappoint everybody? Is it any wonder these organisations seem to attract so many of the wrong people?
Perhaps, like an ill-conceived hotel buffet plate, it is not the individual components that are the problem but the sheer ambition of the operation itself. Perhaps – and I’m going out on a limb here – running a World Cup campaign, running an under-11s league, devising a funding settlement for the professional game and building a zip wire are largely different jobs for largely different people.
In other sports, these tensions are playing themselves out in various ways. International cricket is in the first twirls of its death spiral, as the expansion of franchised Twenty20 eats away at its power and relevance. The bigger countries – India, England, Australia – will probably be fine; the rest are in varying stages of atrophy. Football has gone most of the way down this path, with domestic leagues in the ascendancy and the vast majority of federations essentially living for the next Fifa handout.
Rugby union is relatively fortunate in the sense that international competition remains the primary draw. But it remains trapped in a broader financial crunch. The listing All Blacks have reinvented themselves as a kind of travelling circus act, dancing around the world to the beat of private equity money. Irish rugby has mortgaged its long-term future to keep the show on the road, selling off 10-year ticket bonds and a permanent stake in future Six Nations and autumn internationals revenue.
None of which is to let the WRU off the hook. On the contrary: Welsh rugby is fortunate to have a group of players willing to stand up for their sport, even if it means forgoing the game of their lives. And who knows, perhaps the existential threat of a strike can instead be framed as a vital opportunity, a chance to bring this whole distended edifice down and build a structure fit for the modern professional age.
Welsh rugby may be in the eye of the storm. But the storm is coming for everyone sooner or later.
