The end of amateurism was like the fall of communism in eastern Europe: one day it was there and the next it had gone. When the then chairman of the International Rugby Board, Vernon Pugh, announced on 26 August 1995 that rugby union had become an open game, the reaction was one of surprise. Not at the decision itself, which had been a long time coming, but its timing: no one was prepared for the most seismic shift in the sport since the split into two codes, almost 100 years ago to the day.
The three major southern hemisphere sides were immediately able to contract their leading players, having signed a $555m television deal with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. No such deal was in place in Europe: in England, the league sponsorship deal with Courage was worth some £200,000 a year and the Five Nations did not have a backer. The result of the chaos was that by 1998, the Rugby Football Union had lost £10.3m: although revenues had by then increased by 228%, thanks to a television deal with Sky, and costs went up by 309%, largely because of an increase in the number of staff. At the end of the decade, the losses of the leading clubs totalled £20m.
“It was like the Wild West when the game went professional,” says Rob Andrew, now the Rugby Football Union’s professional rugby director but who in August 1995 was the Wasps and England fly-half and had, a few months earlier, dropped a late goal against Australia to win the World Cup quarter-final. “We all knew it would happen but the actual announcement caught everybody by surprise. No player had a contract and soon everyone was running around trying to sign us up. No one had a clue what we were worth: I was a chartered surveyor then working in London but within a few weeks I was on my way to Newcastle in what was a big leap into the unknown.”
Andrew has been in the front seat during the game’s 20 years of professionalism, first as a player and director of rugby at Newcastle, and with the RFU since 2006. He was one of the first English players to turn professional: after 26 August, the RFU announced a year-long moratorium on professionalism, creating a vacuum that was quickly filled by businessmen such as Sir John Hall, who bought Gosforth, then in the old second division, and turned the club into Newcastle Falcons. By the time the union came to terms with the change, the leading sides had turned from members’ clubs into ones that were privately owned. Andrew signed a five-year contract that was reported at the time to be worth £750,000 and he quickly assembled an array of international talent in the north-east.
“I came back from lunch a couple of weeks after 26 August and my secretary said Freddy Shepherd, Newcastle United’s vice-chairman, had rung and wanted me to call back. The call was out of the blue and when I spoke to him, he said Sir John had just bought the rugby club, which I knew because a picture of him passing a rugby ball was in that day’s newspaper. He said they wanted a chat with me because they were not sure what to do with the club: I might want to play for them. Newcastle United were at Southampton that weekend and on the Friday night I met Shepherd and Douglas Hall in London for a dinner that lasted four hours. A few weeks later I was heading north after a friend who was a businessman sorted out the contract. No one knew what a fair price was; it was a case of how about if I give you this.
“The registration system then meant that you had to wait 120 days before you could play for your new club. Wasps suggested I continue playing for them, which I did, even though Newcastle were paying me. By the time I signed Dean Ryan, Nick Popplewell and Steve Bates, Wasps decided it was not such a good idea and booted me out. I can recall that time as if it were yesterday: nobody could have predicted the pace with which the entrepreneurs moved in but that is what they do when they see an opportunity. Everything was conducted at the speed of sound.”
While the southern hemisphere adopted a common model of contracting players centrally, the European approach was fragmented. Unions lacked the means to sign players to them and it was not long before the clubs in England and the RFU joined the battle as businessmen sought a return for their investments at a time of mounting losses. The union agreed an £87.5m deal for international and club rugby with Sky but England were thrown out of the Five Nations because it included tournament matches at Twickenham; the English clubs withdrew from Europe in 1998-99 as part of a struggle with the IRB over control and the game seemed on a permanent war footing, with lawyers the main beneficiaries.
“It was a fascinating period,” says Andrew, whose Newcastle side became the first Premiership champions in 1998. “Rugby union had been growing strongly since the beginning of the decade with the 1991 World Cup [which was hosted by the RFU] when interest in the game here exploded and it proved to be a tipping point. We were not paid anything then for playing for England but the regulations then allowed us to benefit from, in classic IRB speak, non-rugby related commercial activity. We had a few partners we did marketing for and at the end of the tournament, having made the final, the 26-man squad received a grand total of £1,000 each, before tax.”
Sir John Hall lasted four years before giving up on rugby, having lavished millions on the Falcons. “He travelled to games with us and the league title pleased him but he was losing money,” said Andrew. “Even now there are still clubs making losses, which is why the agreement between the RFU and Premiership Rugby [signed in 2008, with Andrew brokering it, having joined the union two years earlier] is important as we negotiate a new one. No system in the world is perfect; New Zealand’s is the most national-team facing but they have challenges, as we have. We are all slightly different; no one size fits all.”
Rugby union had been a players’ game in the amateur era, Andrew’s Wild West scene applying on the field then rather than off it. Twenty years on, it is harder, faster and markedly cleaner, less individual but with a ball-in-play time that has doubled. “The game today has its different challenges but it is better for it. My era was not great [in terms of dirty play] but before that it was even worse. There is so much responsibility on everyone now in terms of interest and profile.
“Serious amounts of money are involved and players accept that. People are attracted to the family of rugby and interest, which is already going through the roof, will explode during the World Cup, which will be an incredible celebration of the sport. If someone had said in 1995 that the 2015 World Cup would see 2.5 million tickets sold and there would be 50,000 at St James’ Park to watch New Zealand play Tonga, people would not have been so sure.
“The challenge now is to manage the next 20 years. What we had to do in England in 1995 was produce a system that worked for us; it took a decade but now we have a much better understanding of what we are about: I think it is a huge strength for us that our leading clubs are now big businesses. The agreement we have with them works for the national team and the club game.
“We have learned that we cannot copy New Zealand, South Africa or Ireland. We are different. By having professionalism and relegation we have, and I say this as someone who supported ring-fencing when I was at Newcastle, allowed ambition to thrive. I am not sure there is any appetite in the game for another debate on relegation. One of the fears if you remove ambition is that you do not know the damage you will do until you are 10 years down the line.
“The partnership we have with the clubs has an emphasis on producing young talent: our school and academy systems are strong, as are our age-group programmes. We have made six under-20 world finals in eight years. The pipeline is working and it is starting to come through to the senior team. That is why it is important that the RFU and the clubs reach a new agreement.
“Players are bigger now because they are full-time athletes but the latest crop are skilful as well as big and strong. What we got wrong at the beginning was doing rugby all the time but now we are developing all-round people. Players respect where they come from and respect referees and supporters. That binds the game together. A challenge has been to keep our best players in England: some of them are in big demand across the water and it is hard to compete with some of the money on offer, which is why the policy of picking players for the national side if they play in the Premiership is so important.
“The last 20 years have been an extraordinary journey; you get flashbacks talking and thinking about it. There are still issues to resolve, such as a global season, and we have yet to deliver the concept that less is more but we have come a long, long way. The game is different now but, in the most important aspects, still the same.”
