Dan Carter will start earning his reported £1.3m this weekend when he makes his debut for Racing 92 against Northampton in the European Champions Cup in Paris. It will come at the end of a week that started with Manu Tuilagi signing a new contract with Leicester worth, according to different accounts, between £400,000 and £450,000 a year.
What rugby players earn in Europe is very rarely divulged. It seems to have been commonly accepted this week that Tuilagi will become the highest paid player in the Premiership. That would be surprising given that the rules do not allow Leicester to give him marquee status and take him out of the salary cap.
The idea of the marquee player system – clubs are now allowed two – was that they would be the highest earners at a club to get the maximum out of the salary cap. The New Zealand Herald reported a few months ago that the Gloucester prop John Afoa was earning £510,000 a year, presumably as a marquee player: clubs do not have to reveal publicly who they give marquee status to.
The Australia centre Matt Toomua is joining Leicester next season. Given the Tigers’ spending splurge this month, he will surely be one of their marquee players, never mind the hike in the spending cap that will come in the close season, and be on a comparable wage to Tuilagi.
Salaries in professional rugby are going up well beyond the rate of inflation, reflecting the income growth in the major unions, but even its best-paid player, Carter, is a relative pauper compared to footballers of his status. He will make in a year what Cristiano Ronaldo pockets in a couple of weeks from his club, Real Madrid, while Wayne Rooney will need 10 days to earn Tuilagi’s reported salary.
The death of Jonah Lomu last month robbed rugby union of its one global figures. When the Association of Accounting Technicians earlier this year published a list of the best-paid players in rugby union, one academic remarked that the sport largely remained rooted in its colonial past, lacking the broad appeal of football. The Rugby World Cup this year was a commercial success watched by billions on television, prompting David Beckham to remark this week that he preferred watching the sport to football because there was no nastiness among spectators.
The pay gap between the top players in rugby union and football may be wide but the 15-a-side code has retained its connection with supporters, not constructing shuttered palaces. Racing may have hired Ali Williams to act as Carter’s media minder but he will be used to help raise the club’s profile – and not only be seen on match days.
Profile is not something the leading football clubs have to worry about, domestically at least, although they do use their players to grow their presence in markets such as Asia and the US. Rugby union’s world is smaller: Perry Baker scored two tries to help USA defeat New Zealand in the World Sevens series last week but one of the quickest men in the game, and so one of the most marketable, is barely known in it. That may change after the Olympics in Brazil next year and it will take sevens to break boundaries for union, even if Japan’s victory over South Africa provided this year’s World Cup with a momentum it sustained.
And so England arrange a full international against Wales at the end of May, the day after the Premiership and Pro12 finals. It will be the third meeting between the sides at Twickenham in eight months, a match designed to raise money with the Welsh Rugby Union, which needs all it can raise to help pay for national dual contracts, set to earn £2m and the Premiership clubs also receiving a hefty wedge as part of the compensation package for delaying the start of the league season because of World Cup requirements for the host nation.
Even with the extra money, the WRU is having to be selective about the players it offers dual contracts. Their Lions No8 Taulupe Faletau this week announced he would be joining Bath next season, having agreed to remain with Newport Gwent Dragons. The region went to the union with the deal, about £325,000 a year, which would have been 60% funded by the governing body, and said it was rejected.
Faletau will earn about £400,000 a year at Bath and he will join a list of players who will come under the wild card category next season, those who turned down the chance of a contract with a region to play in France or England: Jamie Roberts, George North, Rhys Priestland and Faletau will be on it, so will Leigh Halfpenny, if he takes up the option of an extra year with Toulon. The Wales head coach, Warren Gatland, will be allowed to pick three wild cards in the 2016-17 campaign and with the scrum-half Rhys Webb interesting Saracens, he may have a tough choice to make.
Which makes it hard to understand why the WRU did not do more to keep a player who has been a mainstay of the Wales side for the past four years, even allowing for budgetary constraints. It has to be cautious and may have considered spending £200,000 on a player who would have been with a region playing in the European Challenge Cup next season, on current league position, a poor investment. In which case, why not have allowed the player to leave for Bath after the World Cup, as he had asked, and let the Dragons receive £200,000 in a transfer fee?
What is interesting about the Tuilagi deal is that it marks a change in direction for Leicester. They have operated a more socialist system than most, ensuring that everyone is well paid with less of a gap between the highest and lowest salaries of their first-team regulars, but the recruitment policy of French clubs has stoked wage inflation: Afoa was the only player not in the Top 14 in the top 10 of the best-paid rugby players, four of whom are at Toulon.
Twickenham in May had become an annual pilgrimage for Leicester supporters but the Tigers have been absent for the last two Premiership finals and only squeezed into the top four on the final day of the regular season this year. Having lost Jamie Gibson to rivals Northampton and Geoff Parling to Exeter, never mind the impact now being made by their former prop Kieran Brookes, who barely had a look-in during his time at Welford Road, they could not afford to let Tuilagi leave because of the message it would send to season-ticket holders.
With the Premiership’s salary cap increasing in the coming seasons, so wages will go up. The top players will see their earnings grow considerably and the gap between the best and the rest will grow, leaving clubs with the task of ensuring that the link with fans is not broken.
• This is an extract taken from the Breakdown, the Guardian’s weekly rugby union email. To subscribe, just visit this page, find ‘The Breakdown’ and follow the instructions.
