Exiles set for Exile?

[GB72]

Traditional TV needs to show more games and highlights.

If people can't see the game because they don't have Sky or BT, then the only rugby they see are internationals.

How does the young boy or girl who might play at school or for a local club learn about Premiership rugby if he /she never sees it.

It would be great if free to air TV wanted to show live rugby but I suspect that they do not save for the odd match. Cannot see any channel showing 2 or 3 matches a week every weekend, which is a shame. The only way I an see it happening is if it was a condition of getting rights to England matches.

[GB72]

I agree with RG, I think the traditionality of the sport could well be holding it back. We need to get away from the Ra, Ra perception.
Another issue I see is the laws, football is easy to understand, maybe we need some celebraty explaining some of the laws and plays like Greg James does for the Hundred

The laws are an excellent point as there are literally hundreds of them. However you only need to understand the basics to be able to enjoy the game. A beginner’s guide would be an excellent idea.

The idea of looking for a new demographic is also key, with students being an excellent idea.
Where Freddie Burns has just finished playing, in Dunedin, they have a students only area, big university in Dunedin, called The Zoo, which can get lively.
We have 2 universities in Leicester, 1 in Loughborough and 1 in Derby all with excellent train links. How about setting aside an area of the clubhouse end stand, not sure of its current name, for students. Offer discount tickets give them a daft free hat each. Any supporter who currently sits in that area offer them a free upgrade to a different part of the ground.

Not sure what happens these days but back in the early/mid 1990s the club were great with Leicester Uni, always ticket deals going, they sent players to the uni rugby club end of season do every year (including a young Martin Johnson), uni players trained with the development side as it was then and if we took a bus down to Twickenham to watch the Tigers, they always kept an eye out for our shirts and sent someone out to collect programmes for signing and thank us for turning up.

It was also affordable for students then, tickets were cheap.

I know the 2 unis play against each other at Welford Road every year (that did not happen in my day, but there was only one Uni and a Poly then) but not sure what else goes on.

[Roadsweeper]

I don't disagree, but finding the highlights these days is a bit of a mission.

When it was on Ch5 at 7pm on a Monday you knew where to go.

[TigerFeetSteve]

Traditional TV needs to show more games and highlights.

If people can't see the game because they don't have Sky or BT, then the only rugby they see are internationals.

How does the young boy or girl who might play at school or for a local club learn about Premiership rugby if he /she never sees it.

It would be great if free to air TV wanted to show live rugby but I suspect that they do not save for the odd match. Cannot see any channel showing 2 or 3 matches a week every weekend, which is a shame. The only way I an see it happening is if it was a condition of getting rights to England matches.

I've long said that the solution I see (which won't happen because it means the RFU, Premiership & DCMS all need to work together for each other's benefits)


They need to sell Prem rugby to free to air TV.

The only way to replace the money for this being sold cheaper is to sell the rights for the 6N, but needs the DCMS approval to do it and the RFU to give that money to the Premiership.

This would work I reckon because it puts REGULAR sport on free to air, not 5 weekends a year, that captures fans, especially the ones without sports subscriptions (who are the only group of sports fans not saturated with content) get people watching the game, and the interest would get generated.

[GB72]

I don't disagree, but finding the highlights these days is a bit of a mission.

When it was on Ch5 at 7pm on a Monday you knew where to go.

Totally agree, last time I managed to find highlights it was at about 11.00 at night on ITV2.

[loretta]

A few posts suggesting bells and whistles and cheap/giveaway tickets to build long term support. Didn’t work so well at Wasps, did it?

[Rugbygramps]

A few posts suggesting bells and whistles and cheap/giveaway tickets to build long term support. Didn’t work so well at Wasps, did it?

Think you’re missing the point. Wasps were trying to build a core support by literally giving away thousands of cheap or free tickets.
Tigers are averaging over 20000 per home game, what is being suggested is offering discounted tickets to certain groups, students for example, to try and get more people interested in the game, and attract future generations of fans, which if you listen to Mckellar interview is something he is keen on.

Completely different scenario to Wasps, and their £35 million debt wasn’t caused by free tickets

[jgriffin]

A few posts suggesting bells and whistles and cheap/giveaway tickets to build long term support. Didn’t work so well at Wasps, did it?

Think you’re missing the point. Wasps were trying to build a core support by literally giving away thousands of cheap or free tickets.
Tigers are averaging over 20000 per home game, what is being suggested is offering discounted tickets to certain groups, students for example, to try and get more people interested in the game, and attract future generations of fans, which if you listen to Mckellar interview is something he is keen on.

Completely different scenario to Wasps, and their £35 million debt wasn’t caused by free tickets

There are, however, times when I'm glad we are not a premium investment target.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/ ... tment-fund

[CrumblingTerrace]

Prem Rugby already have a less valuable 'product' to sell to TV with the number of teams reducing from 13 to 10. Selling the rights to a lower (terrestrial) bidder might have some long-term benefit, but short-term it'd probably send more clubs under.

[Roadsweeper]

I just had a glance at the club's 2022 accounts.

Revenue was £22m of which £9m was commercial revenue £3m released from the CVC deal, £4m from TV rights and £6m from actual rugby. Costs are not sufficiently broken down to enable a split between matchday/rugby costs and other costs.

Total staff costs were £13.2m including playing staff, presumably up to the cap for players.

Loss before depreciation was £0.75m. If you go back a few years in 2020 before the pandemic, the accounts include numerous exceptional items, so adding those back the club made a "normalised EBITDA loss "of £4.8m, in 2019 the loss was £0.6m.

Net debt this time last year was £18m, presumably secured against the freehold. Within debt was £6.9m coronavirus support loan, repayments for which started in March 2023

My conclusion is that the ownership of the ground and other freeholds allows the club to borrow and support its rugby activities, but eventually this will have to stop. Maybe they will sell something to repay the debt?

I am sure the directors are cognisant of their business model , but clearly we are dependant on the ground to underpin everything.

[Wayne Richardson Fan Club]

I first went to watch Tigers on a free Schools ticket, very different times but it gave me a reason (& by default my Mother) to start going to games.

I have little confidence in PRL or the RFU in their present forms, creating a pathway to success for the pro. game.

[sk 88]

Presumably all of the central funding and TV money will now be shared between 10 teams instead of 13 so this will give clubs extra income which should make up for losing home games.

Sort of yes.
Sort of no.

Thanks to our corporate "P share" structure not only have we all lost our gate money from the home games but "we" have had to pay Wasps & Worcester's administrators the sum of £9.8m (EACH, so £19.6m in total) for PRL to buy back the P shares. Wasps administrators were receiving income from the P shares until April 2023 when the purchase was finalised. I am sure Worcester's will have gone to around the same date, but have not seen it confirmed in an administrators report yet.

So from next year we will have that greater %, however we will also have to purchase back London Irish's P shares now (at a price determined by the current year's distributions, so could be higher, could be lower), and BT Sport/TNT have been reported as wanting a rebate on TV rights as they will now only cover 20 weekends, rather than the previous 26 weekends.

Where PRL have got £19.6m from to give to the creditors of Wasps & Worcester is anyone's guess.

[GB72]

I read posts like this about the finances and am concerned whether there will even be a next season (I am exagerating but not massively).

[sk 88]

I was going to say "that is a bit defeatist/ott." but thinking more it's just a bit simplistic.

Ok, wages they can't afford, like deciding two "excluded players" was a good idea.

Ultimately, the point is wages are too high for the profile of the sport.

This I agree with and I for one do not think that it is being too defeatest. I really do think that without some dramatic changes, the Premiership could be in the last few years of existance. We lose one more club and you have to think that it is all over in the current format. You may then be left with 3-4 clubs with stabler finances and with enough fan appeal to be attractive to other leagues.

The problem is that the salary issue is a vicious circle that we are in at the moment. You develop a player in the academy and get great value, the player is then picked for England, you then see a massive increase in wage demands and the player is available less and so you need solid back up as well. You do not meet the wage demands, you lose the player to another club. You let them go and develop a replacement, they excel, they get picked for England and the circle continues.

Thing is, with crowds as they are and revenues as they exist, most rugby players should be on about £30k a year, similar to County Cricket. Who is going to put in the work and take the medical risks for that. Plus, if you pay what is realistic, players go abroad, the product on the pitch gets worse and then fans disappear. How would Tigers fans react if we got rid of our top half a dozen earners to be financially prudent and gave up on challenginf for honours.

I really cannot see a way that it works without the dreaded central contracts and a big reduction in the use of higher paid overseas players.

What figures are those based on?

Typically sports teams in Europe spend 55-70% of their turnovers on wages. Rugby can be seen to be a more cost intensive business as TV rights are a lower proportion & more medical costs are incurred. So let's take 55%.

Typical turnovers for the big clubs commercially (Quins, Saracens, Tigers, Saints, Bath) are around £20m. So total wages should be in the ball park of £11m. Given the cap with all add ons/exclusions comes in around about £8m the rest of the staff can cost around about £3m, or roughly £40k for roughly 75 off field staff. That £8m for players would see roughly £2m on the top handful, £5m cover the top 30 who are in the main cap at around £150k as a mean average, then the last £1m cover the 30 or so young lads in the development/academy/fringes on an average of £30k, all figures inclusive of employers NICs.

So, I suppose on one side I agree with you as in that scenario "most" players are actually in the bottom category at any one time.

Really we need to hold the line for a relatively short period, perhaps as short as 5 years just to recalibrate spending (on everything) down by roughly 5-10% as a proportion of our income. Incomes have generally risen very impressively since professionalism, consistently out performing nominal inflation for instance so we have seen huge real underlying growth. We've just let costs consistently sit between between 5-10% ahead of them.

[sk 88]

Traditional TV needs to show more games and highlights.

If people can't see the game because they don't have Sky or BT, then the only rugby they see are internationals.

How does the young boy or girl who might play at school or for a local club learn about Premiership rugby if he /she never sees it.

Youtube.

And we've had loads of games on free to air TV in the last few seasons, there are 5 league games plus the final and a game every round of Europe, so 14 free to air club games of rugby union this season on ITV.