End salary cap and fat cats will take cream

There are plenty of jokes to be cracked about professional rugby’s hot love affair with cold-blooded capitalism, but what’s the point? Ninety-nine per cent of readers cannot afford to get them.

- CHRIS HEWETT

So let’s do away with the funnies and put on our serious faces, for the very good reason that the latest financiers to throw money at the sport – the Luxembourg-based private equity company CVC and the American technology investment specialists Silver Lake – are not in it for the giggles. These people get their laughs in the counting house, not the Comedy Store.

Finance is the first thing on the game’s mind as it starts peeking through the curtains of the pandemic in preparation for a return to full exposure. For the Premiership clubs in England, the f-word is not merely the number one priority, hence the rush towards an extended period of ringfencing as a Stateside-style form of sporting wealth management.

Most informed chroniclers confidently expect the Rugby Football Union to sanction a lengthy suspension of relegation from the top flight when the issue appears on its agenda in the coming weeks. In truth, Twickenham does not have a fat lot of choice, given the lack of appetite for a post-Covid ruck with the top-flight clubs and their contracted players.

Yet the governing body can still do the game a significant favour – hardly a familiar phrase in this corner of the paper – if, in return for its acquiescence, it insists on the maintenance of a half-sensible salary cap at Premiership level. Preferably, a cap without the “marquee player” exception – a mechanism open to all manner of abuse.