BY JOHN DAVIDSON
IT HAS been a mad few weeks for English rugby league and the RFL. Mass resignations, walkouts, board upheaval and the controversial return of Nigel Wood. It has left many people’s heads spinning.
There has little said publicly from the organisers of the coup – Gary Hetherington, Derek Beaumont and Eammon McManus – that delivered Wood’s return, apart from a long-winded and comedic PR statement, and the usual rantings on X.
Wood has done zero interviews, just this column he wrote for League Express on Monday. Let’s digest it.
Most of the work will be done in the background – the major narrative around the sport should always concentrate on the action and excitement on the field. The work streams of the Strategic Review will be finalised over the next week or so. We will look to publish these, together with details of the other contributors who have agreed to assist with the process.
Our sport is blessed with talented professionals, in clubs, at the RFL and Rugby League Commercial and indeed everyone, who will happily offer their skills, expertise and energy to move us forward.
Is that really the case? If that was true, then why is the sport in the position it’s in now if there is so much talent? One to ponder.
We also need to communicate much better – with clubs and other key stakeholders, and most of all with fans.
He is right. Communication is poor. It has been for eons. It was when he ran the RFL, and it is now. You changed that by putting yourself up for interviews, engaging with the media and fans. Not columns like this. It’s a million to one that communication will actually change. It won’t.
It has been a successful and enjoyable start to the 2025 season, which is credit to all concerned. Las Vegas was the obvious highlight, but don’t forget the record-breaking opening round of the Betfred Super League, or the much-improved early rounds of the Challenge Cup and AB Sundecks 1895 Cup.
But behind the scenes, it should be obvious that there are structural problems. The ongoing position at Salford is merely the most serious and obvious evidence of that.
You can’t argue with that. The handling of the Salford situation has been a disgrace from all angles. It’s been appalling.
I’ve been around the sport for a while, but I can’t remember there being a group of club owners, at all levels, with as much desire to drive its development, and the resources to make that a reality. Every month they demonstrate that commitment. But for those owners, we simply must start the process of re-setting the financial landscapes in which we are asking clubs to operate. This is what the Review Process is intended to address.
This is the crux of the coup – money. Clubs are losing too much and are not happy. Not enough of it is coming into the sport. And they believe the RFL is spending too much money with not enough return on investment.
It’s not just a Rugby League issue – you only must look at what’s happened in the other rugby code, with the loss of three Premiership clubs and another from their Championship, to see the position.
So far in Rugby League, our competitions have survived intact. But the message coming to me, and now through me, loud and clear from our club owners is that they continue to confront tough realities such as Covid loan repayments and recent changes to taxation thresholds. We can’t be complacent about our position – we need to act, with urgency.
In a nutshell, what can we do to address those business fundamentals, of income generation and cost control – and what are the best central support services that give well-run clubs at least the prospect of breaking even?
That will cover issues such as player supply, production of young talent and central overheads control. Are these game-wide functions as efficient as they now need to be, given the financial landscape that we face? Frankly we need to look at everything and test whether we’ve got it quite right in the current financial landscape.
Reading between the lines, Wood will be recommending a cutting of costs at the RFL. A tightening of belts. Could we see the end of RL Commercial? It wouldn’t surprise.
And of course, underpinning all this is whether we have the right governance structure and central support, benchmarking and market intelligence to ensure the delivery of the right services to the clubs, who week in and week out bust a gut to provide our entertainment.
The task is to set up the sport for the next ten years, to provide an exciting and compelling narrative, for growth.
The sport’s attack brand is the Super League, which is the wealth generator – and putting that back onto an upward income trajectory for growth is essential for the health of all the sport.
There is some great stuff going on right now around the clubs, some great case studies, some positive examples. How good would it be to get more of those, league deep and wide? What is our vision for our best competition over the next decade?
A similar exercise will be undertaken for the Community, Women’s and Wheelchair games.
There are genuine fears that Wood will recommend a reduction in funding for the likes of Community, Women’s and Wheelchair. He did the same at the RFL in 2014 when he cut development officers in London, Scotland and Wales. There is so much concern about the prospect of cuts to the women’s game that female employees at the RFL circulated an open letter about it, and criticising the coup, last week.
Grading has lifted standards and who can seriously object to that? We should not apologise for continuing to seek to raise those standards. Similarly, international rugby, both the national side and club internationals, can deliver more high-quality Rugby League events, all as part of a balanced calendar with the right flow and peaks.Â
Grading has lifted standards, agreed. But it has not lifted them enough, it could be said, and curiously there was no mention of IMG by name.
There are numerous external challenges that can blow us off course. The media and digital landscape are changing, as are viewing habits. Social habits are changing, and active participation patterns are varying. Again, these aren’t just issues for Rugby League – like every sport in a crowded marketplace, we must refresh, innovate and re-challenge ourselves to be even better, all the time.
If history teaches us anything, our sport makes most progress when we are all working collaboratively towards strong common objectives, with a clear sense of direction and a clear vision. That’s another immediate priority for me – working with all clubs, the RFL executive, staff and a reshaped Board, as well as Rugby League Commercial and other stakeholders, to ensure we are pushing as effectively as possible in the same direction.
To that end, the work has already started and will pick up pace this week. We will add three or four members to the Implementation Committee, which I have been charged to lead. We must remain compliant with Sport England’s Code of Good Governance.
By the time we report to the July Council meeting, we need to have laid the foundations for the necessary reset. It won’t be easy – but nothing worthwhile ever is.
In a nearly 1000-word column Wood does not mention IMG once, nor the current leadership of the sport, nor Sky or the current TV deal. You can read a lot into that, if you like, but it may suggest the beginning of the end of the RFL’s 12-year partnership with IMG.
We know many, many clubs across Super League, Championship and League 1 are unhappy with how much the deal is costing the governing body each year. We know many are critical, both on and off the record, about IMG, grading and their impact, or lack thereof since they were appointed in 2022.
In January Beaumont publicly called for the scrapping of the IMG deal. He suggested the RFL “simply stop paying”.
This makes you wonder, is the whole coup and review a pretext for getting out of the partnership with the global marketing consultancy? The end of IMG’s involvement in rugby league? It does seem that way.
On to the colourful Leigh owner, and recently I watched Michael Woolf’s documentary on Donald Trump titled Rewriting Trump. It was fascinating viewing on how Trump operates, dominates the news cycle and got re-elected in the US a second time.
It appears as though there is some Trump in Beaumont – the attention-seeking, the threats, the ego, the wild statements, the behaviour, the outbursts, the arguing on social media, the rails against media outlets, the lack of accountability and so on. The similarities are almost endless.
Beaumont, like Trump with Fox News and others, has been enabled by some in the media. They know getting quotes from him will result in clicks and interest, regardless of the damage or the unchallenged claims made.
It is all about grabbing publicity and getting attention. Not what is said, simply being spoken about. Dominating the news agenda and being the main drawcard. It’s the ‘any publicity is good publicity’ mantra. And you can argue it works, as Beaumont certainly has his supporters, despite his past and behaviour, and his star is on the rise. He is becoming more powerful in English rugby league.
We all now live in a post-truth world where facts no longer matter, behaviour is irrelevant, misinformation is king and those who shout the loudest seem to win.