Premiership Rugby is from Mars and Saracens are from Venus
We are often told that rugby union, at its heart, is a simple game. Run straight, tackle hard, score more points than the other lot and buy your opposite number a beer afterwards. How quaint. This weekend every clubhouse bar in the land will be abuzz with people discussing image rights, co-investments, legalese and business acumen, a reflection of a fast-changing sport if ever there was one.
Maybe that was always going to be the logical consequence of the professional era, now some 25 years old. The game is unrecognisable in many respects, not least in terms of fitness levels, global reach and commercial horizons. The price to be paid, however, is starkly laid out in Lord Dyson’s 103-page report into Saracens’ salary cap breaches finally released by Premiership Rugby. It contains heaps of detail but the most crucial element is conspicuously absent. Trust is meant to be the key element in every relationship: right now in English rugby it is nonexistent.
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There is certainly no need to dive too deep into the finer legal detail to conclude that, on this one, Premiership Rugby is from Mars and Saracens are from Venus. This episode has hardly been a showcase for lofty standards of governance but not since Bloodgate has a professional sports team been exposed as so divorced from reality. Want to help several of your star players buy a house each? Fine. Omit to inform the league’s salary cap manager you are repeatedly doing so and then complain when he queries your accounting? What planet are you from?
Oozing from between every line of the report is thinly-disguised antipathy on both sides. At Saracens, even now, there also seems to be an element of continuing delusion. Their former chairman Nigel Wray’s latest statement talks of “our vision” enduring despite recent events. No one disputes Wray has elevated the concept of employee welfare to a whole new level but for a highly intelligent and astute businessman he has been more cavalier, in terms of crucial detail, than an entire Vauxhall plant.
Reckless? Well, that is one word for it. It is not in the judgment but sources suggest that at least 10 lock forwards in the Premiership are being paid a basic salary that is higher than Maro Itoje’s. Given the latter is among the sport’s most highly-prized assets that would seem – let’s see now, m’lud – rather odd. Saracens clearly thought they were being clever when they invested in his image rights, even if it was said to be the idea of Itoje’s agent initially. The subsequent big difference of opinion over their precise valuation also looks strange, unless you take the charitable view that rich men looking to offset a bit of tax don’t always pay close attention to the precise size of the cheques they are writing.
Let’s also be kind here and describe some of Saracens’ legal gambits as high handed. Despite their owner and management supporting the concept of a salary cap, those representing Saracens initially argued it was contrary to competition law. Eh? If the essence of your defence is that you have basically done nothing wrong, how smart is it to start by trying to wriggle off the hook on a technicality and rubbishing the other camp? In one particularly revealing passage the independent panel describes Saracens as making “a serious attack” on the credibility of Mark McCafferty, PRL’s former chief executive. The report concludes this was entirely unjustified.
For a club with honesty and humility plastered across the top of their main stand, the report also shows Saracens’ curious struggle to differentiate between the letter and the spirit of the law. Saracens argued that the salary cap manager, Andrew Rogers, failed to make a proper distinction between sham loans and genuine ones. Rogers’ response cuts to the heart of this whole dispiriting business. “None of the arrangements would have been made … if it were not for the fact that they were Saracens players. The arrangements are designed to provide additional reward for playing for Saracens. There has been a concerted and deliberate attempt to create structures that supposedly take that reward outside the ambit of salary, for the purposes of the regulations.”
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The report’s conclusion is similarly blunt, describing the club’s failure to co-operate with the salary cap manager as “egregious … it took risks and is now paying the price for doing so …” Subsequently, of course, that price has grown even heavier, with relegation to the Championship now ladled on top of the original meaty sanctions – a 35-point deduction and a £5.36m fine – following Saracens’ failure to prove their compliance this season.
Which also means that, rather than drawing a clear line under the whole affair, the report’s release raises any number of fresh questions. Why, precisely, did Saracens opt to take relegation rather than opening their books for other years? Are those who allegedly dobbed them in squeaky clean? What else is lurking in the shrubbery? And, lest we forget, how let down are many of Sarries’ players and staff currently feeling as they face the prospect, in some cases, of finding alternative employment? English rugby’s unedifying blame game is neither simple nor remotely over.
