Twickenham is on course to secure a new England player agreement with the Premiership clubs by the end of the season after the Rugby Football Union’s council accepted the broad terms of the deal.
The current agreement runs out at the end of June. Signed in 2008, it was worth £110m and gave the England head coach guaranteed access to players outside official international windows and by its end was worth £180,000 per player to the clubs.
The new deal, the fine details of which will be hammered out in the next six weeks, will run for four years, covering the contract of the current head coach Eddie Jones and the 2020 Six Nations. It has been cut in length because the international calendar will be changed after the 2019 World Cup with talks on a global season set to next year.
The RFU and the clubs had originally hoped to have the new agreement in place before last year’s World Cup. Once England were ejected early from the tournament, they were put on hold as the search for a new head coach was mounted and when Jones was appointed, he had to approve what his predecessor Stuart Lancaster had already agreed.
There will be changes in the new agreement which will be worth around £90m over the four years. Under one, welfare concerns mean that England players will have a mandatory two rest weekends when on club duty at a time in the season to be decided.
Premiership Rugby has told the RFU the policing of the salary cap will be tightened up after some clubs were last year investigated for alleged breaches. All 12 sides in the Premiership from the start of next season have to make a declaration of compliance before the campaign kicks off and have to receive a certificate by the time it ends.
In the Six Nations, Wales’s bid to have the default position for the roof at the Millennium Stadium set as closed from next season has been rejected. The current policy is that it remains open unless both sides agree to it being shut. Wales proposed that it be closed unless both captains agreed otherwise but the other countries feared it would give them too much of an advantage.
The Six Nations is considering inviting Georgia and Romania to take part in its under-20s tournament. It has so far refused to offer the two countries a path into the senior event despite a growing clamour, but recognition at age-group level would be a start for Europe’s leading second tier nations.
The RFU will next month submit a planning application for the proposed £55m redevelopment of the East Stand at TwickenhamTwickenham’s East Stand. If granted, the RFU will bear the costs itself rather than borrow.
