Money has always been a bit of a dirty word in rugby. That was the original reason the union and the league went their separate ways back in 1895. It took another 100 years for the union to finally acknowledge that the players deserved to be paid for their time. In this respect, football was 90 years behind, which is highlighted in the passage from next piece written by ex-Ireland internationals Andrew Trimble and Dan McKeown.
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“Football came to terms with money in 1885, when the FA legalized professionalism England instead of losing clubs from the north who were already paying players. Football has taught how to run a professional sport for 140 years, rugby for 30. The management philosophy of rugby union was designed for the amateur age, and now it is being asked to do a job it was explicitly built to prevent.”
The rest of Trimble and McKeown’s excellent article explores the impact of that dissonance ab initio and explains in detail why the club game has suffered from the most fundamental fact that its financial stakeholders still have relatively little say in the decisions made about the game’s future.
The dynamic tension between the LNR and the FFR in France, and Prem Rugby and the RFU in England are just two of the most obvious examples of the difficult balance between governing power and investment power, and the dialogue between the two has rarely been straightforward. The question of how rugby absorbs private investment remains a major item on the sport’s ‘to do’ list.
All this is a far cry from the NFL in America or football in Europe. As Trimble and McKeown note, “The NFL owns itself. Thirty-two franchises own the league, the league owns the product, and no governing body sits above it—taking a cut or deciding when its players are available. . . . It all lands upside down with people who have a reason to reinvest time, capital, energy, and initiative.”
“(In soccer), Europe’s top-division clubs turned over €28.6 billion in 2024, (while) FIFA budgets about $13 billion over a four-year cycle. The international game in soccer is huge, but it’s structurally secondary to the club game. The clubs own the assets. The confederation rents them, and both sides do it very well.”
Brand new Nations Championship has become the biggest vehicle yet for bringing private investment into international rugby, and there is finally a chance to reshape the sport’s commercial landscape. The format of the tournament is dictated mainly by the support of Silver Lake and CVC Capital Partners.
CVC already has a big slice of the pie in Prem Rugby and the URC, and recently snagged a 14.3% stake in Six Nations Rugby Limited. Where Silver Lake wants to cash in All black people brand in which it invested, CVC took control of large parts of the European rugby economy, and both share the common goals of private equity firms in sports: to simplify the global calendar, fix multiple purposes in the hierarchy between club and state, and build a premium brand that is easily recognized in lucrative sports markets such as Asia and North America.
Hence the fourth Test of the RGR series was shifted to the M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, feeling a new crowd in the USA ahead of the 2031 World Cup. Hence the consolidation of the two July and November windows into one tournament.
The two-year competition provides a £500m baseline secured by 80 broadcasters worldwide over its first two iterations in 2026 and 2028, with a clear preference for free-to-air over pay-to-view TV, and a digital direct-to-view (D2F) strategy designed to maximize audiences and increase commercial factor for all users. Between them, CVC and Silver Lake have invested over £1 billion in professional rugby and this is their first major attempt to get some bang for their buck.
To be an investor, the sport must be understandable to new players, so many of the so-called ‘dark arts’ must be brought to light and made known to prospective fans. Judge’s decisions must be simple, clear and obvious. If the new people don’t understand what’s going on, there will be no profit for anyone. The Nations Championship isn’t about attracting die-hard fans, it’s about attracting a wider audience to rugby, all year round.
That’s why the first three rounds of the tournament in July averaged over 37 minutes of playing time, nine attempts and 63 points per game. The competition has also generated fewer than 18 penalties per game – fewer than the last major tournament in the north (Six Nations 2026, at 18.5) and the previous two in the south (2025 Rugby Championship on 20.3, and Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry 2026 series on 19.5).
As usual, the scrum is the one behind the queue as the sport develops.
Saturday’s match in between Sharks and Leinster at URC amply illustrated the problem with demystifying scrum. The referee was Welshman Craig Evans, generally regarded as one of the most promising officials in the league, but signally he did not do his most important job of returning the ball into play and restarting the game.
There were just four clean sheets generated from a total of 23 scrums, including five resets in just under 15 minutes with the game clock on in a total game time of 30 minutes and six seconds. Five of the six starters in the front row were experienced international players, but the game did not suggest any model that could be useful at the Nations Championship in November.
In all, Evans called 29 penalties, almost half of which were penalties (or penalty advantages) on the run.
Both sides won penalties almost exclusively from their own set-up, without making much, if any, impression on the opposition’s throw-in. The dilemma for the referee trying to diagnose technical symptoms in real time was greatly emphasized by the passage of the next three scrums.
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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 5, 2026
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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 5, 2026
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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) October 5, 2026
In all three sets, the wheel follows the natural rotation around Sharks loosehead Thomas du Toit. In the first case, the Sharks are penalized for stepping to the left before taking a walk; in another, Evans calls for a reset, prompting an angry response from Leinster’s whore and captain Ronan Kelleher; in the third, the second wheel gives the Sharks the lead with a penalty leading to a try by winger Vincent Tshituka. Three similar tackles produce three different outcomes, but to the naked eye when he first comes to a rugby game, there will be no differences.
The Nations Championship represents the first opportunity rugby has embraced to shift gears and tap into the huge potential of private investment in the international game. If there’s one quality rugby need above all others right now, it’s affordability. It’s time to educate, illuminate and demystify secret handshakes from the amateur era and make them available to everyone.
