Olympic Lessons

Team GB’s historic performance in the London Olympics has led many to ask what can Rugby learn from Team GB?  There has been the fawning over cycling’s “aggregation of marginal gains”, something England Rugby pioneered, and much admiring in some quarters of the aggressive centralisation of many sports. 

But the most important idea Rugby can take from the Olympics is the no excuse attitude that UK Sport and the British Olympic Association takes over results.  The best sports get more funding and the losing sports have their funding cut.  A prime case for the RFU to consider is the delivery of their Academy programme and the delivery of their outreach work.  Is every pound working as hard as possible? 

Currently all 14 RFU Regional Academies receive the same central funding from the RFU despite producing wildly differing results, in fact there have been murmurings that the underperforming Northern Academies getting more resources despite failing on their current budgets.  This would be the equivalent of the giving swimming a funding boost because it failed.  The logic is nice and friendly: give the failures a leg up so they can compete with the successful.  But that ignores the underlying reasons why those Academies have been failing and encourages other clubs to fail as there is no incentive to have a well run Academy.

There is no auditing of Academies, those that are there are there and aren’t going anywhere and any other club that wants an academy, well tough luck you’ve got to fund it yourself.  This is no way to run an elite performance plan.  The RFU should start straightaway an audit of all 14 academies, how many internationals have they produced?  How many premiership players?  How many hours a week do they train?  How many coaches do they have?  They should then accept bids from other clubs to have their facilities audited, such as Bedford, and grade the Academies.  The best Academies would receive more central funding providing the kept producing the results and the worst performing academies would have their funding cut until started turning things around. 

A similar system could be used to audit provision of community work with the best community projects receiving more funding and growing.  This would also make community funding independent of league position, currently the RFU outsource parts of the community work to the Premiership clubs which means that when Leeds get relegated on top of losing the £3.26m PRL centrally generated revenue they also lose £50k that was funding their community work in schools (even if that £50k only helped them reach 12 secondary schools).  Then if the Cornish Pirates were doing better community work than Sale they would be able to grow and improve even more.

Currently money is wasted on bad academies and bad community work by the lucky 14 clubs that the RFU have given the permanent Golden Ticket to, the B.O.A. or UK Sport wouldn’t stand for the waste and the RFU shouldn’t either.

7s and Rugby League

Do 7s and rugby league provide any challenges for Rugby’s future?  Definitely.  7s inclusion in the Olympics has to be seen as a positive for the proper version of the game, even if only 5% of the people who get drawn into 7s move on to 15s Rugby is in need of every boost possible outside its traditional base of 10 or so countries.  But there are some worries that come with this as well.  Sport Canada (their version of Sport England) has stopped “carding”, essentially government funding, for tight 5 forwards, in America there is a similar worry that the traditional college path ways will become blocked or clogged up with the big colleges focusing on the shorter version of the game.  The last thing 15s need is to lose reasonably strong countries like Canada.  But then Russia seems to be using 7s inclusion to drive standards and interest in the 15s game.

Rugby League also provides a challenge, as make no mistake, they will try and piggy back on the Olympic Inclusion just as much as Rugby proper.  That might not be a problem in established countries, even ones with heavy League history like England or Australia, but in countries where neither code is particularly popular League is as likely as Rugby to take advantage.  Beyond 7s though does League provide any challenges to Rugby?  The weakness of northern English clubs due to the defection almost 120 years ago is an ongoing challenge but that shows no signs of getting worse.