Abi Burton describes herself as a doer: “I like to get things done”. It is a quality clear in a career of remarkable achievement amid significant adversity. The Trailfinders and England back row will not turn 26 until the start of March but has already been to two Olympics and won a Rugby World Cup, battling back after spending 25 days in a coma with auto-immune encephalitis, having to learn to walk and talk again and experiencing redundancy twice.
There is little, then, that Burton has not experienced since making her senior bow as a 17-year-old, which makes her an apt individual to take on a role of real importance. For the first time, female players in England can now rely on the support of a bespoke women’s rugby board formed by the Rugby Players’ Association (RPA), with Burton the first chair of a nine-strong group containing a representative of each Professional Women’s Rugby (PWR) club.
“I feel like I’ve been through everything,” Burton explains on the day she chairs her first board meeting. “I’ve been made redundant twice [with Wasps and England Sevens], come back from illness. I wouldn’t wish those experiences on anybody. But they’ve happened to me, and all I can do now is give that knowledge on to be able to help shape things going forward.
“I’ve been part of PWR since I was 17, so I’ve been there when I was playing at college, as part of the sevens programme, just playing 15s – I’ve done every part of it so I thought I had a good knowledge level to share with people, and represented a lot of different groups and have had lots of different journeys in rugby as well.
“When the position of chair came up, I thought about it and I kind of do all the bits that a chair would do anyway. I’ve sat on quite a few of the PWR meetings talking about the league and how we can make it better, I’ve been part of the medical advisory group with the RPA. I’m not afraid to share my feelings. I think sometimes we need that as female rugby players, to be representative of people who don’t feel comfortable standing up in a room and sharing an opinion. I feel confident enough to do that so I wanted to put myself forward to be able to be that kind of voice for the players who don’t have that voice already.”
The board has been formed after years of work by the RPA to expand their membership throughout PWR, with 260 players from the league now signed up. Christian Day, the union’s general secretary, was elected on a manifesto that included giving every elite women’s player the option of membership in the same way that men’s players in the Prem do. Former England centre Rachael Burford has been another significant voice in this next step as the organisation’s Head of Women’s Rugby.
The board is drawn from broad backgrounds, from current England squad members to internationals from other nations. Vice-chair Jenny Hesketh, of Bristol Bears and Wales, will be a fine foil to Burton, with the pair providing complementary skills. Top priorities include pushing to make sure that minimum standards are not just met but exceeded across the league, and sharing experiences to ensure player welfare is managed properly, with stories of fundraising for surgery not hard to find.
Most of the board, and league, is semi-professional – but Burton can attest to how quickly things can change, having gone from turning down a GB Sevens contract after Paris 2024 to a World Cup winner in 12 months. “After I left my contract with the sevens, I didn’t know what my career was going to look like,” she details. “I had to get a job at the same time I was playing. I didn’t know what that would look like. When you don’t have a support network around you, that can seem scary.
“It is also our job as RPA representatives to be able to align the clubs with what we deem as important. It might be different. They might not see what we find important.
“I truly believe that now, with this year being so transformative, the infrastructure is there for change. It will take a little bit more support and a little bit more awareness to be able to push players beyond the cusp of being semi-professional, having a job around playing, and to the next level. How do we not leave behind some of the players that are keen players part of PWR clubs and push them forward? I truly believe we have the infrastructure to do it, it’s just implementing it now. If we have more girls professional at clubs, it’s going to increase the level of playing, and will be a positive cycle for everybody.”
The Red Roses no longer work directly with the RPA, having followed England’s elite men’s players in partnering with Team England Rugby (TER) to manage their contracts, commercial deals and other affairs. Day is hopeful that the two squads may one day tighten ties again with his union once again – England’s men’s footballers partnered again with the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA) two years ago, having split in 2006.
For now, though, voices like Burton will be key. “I feel like I’ve experienced the best of it, but also experienced what it can be like when it’s not, so I feel like I have a broader range of vision to be able to help people and have those challenging conversations as well. It’s taken us a long time to get to this point in the women’s game, but now we are at a point where change has happened, we need to keep the momentum moving forward. We need to have a strong group of women, which I believe we’ve got, to keep pushing forward.”
