Ayr president on the future of club rugby

I hear all this doom and gloom about Scottish club rugby then I look at Ayr and I don’t understand.  We have five hundred and thirty playing members throughout the club.  Our under-16 team is top of the national league and haven’t lost a game; our under-18 team are top of their league and have only lost once; our women’s team have only been going for two years and finished second in their league with Emily Irving being capped this year; our 2^nd XV are second top of the national reserve league; and our 1^st XV are fourth in the Premiership but we’ll do better next year.

 

I’m not saying that because I want to boast about Ayr - it’s because I don’t see why other clubs can’t do the same.

 

I’m definitely for creating an eight team super league as the SRU suggested back in December.  We need to identify the strongest eight clubs in the country, with a geographic spread across the country, and present it is a fait accompli, because too many clubs fear missing out and will always drag their feet - but we can’t carry on drifting like this.  It’s up to the clubs that don’t initially make it into the top eight to work hard to get there.

 

I spoke to the guys from Jersey when we played them in the British and Irish Cup.  They told me that the get £26,000 a month from the RFU.  Now, if the top eight clubs could get £10,000 a month they could do a huge amount with that cash.  People think that would all go on players but about sixty percent would be on marketing, coaching, administration, and so on.  I don’t think it would be that hard for the SRU to raise the money when you think about the value to the game of raising the standards.

 

By improving the club game you are then widening your potential revenue streams - through sponsorship, gate receipts, hospitality, broadcasting rights, and so on.  We do pretty well in raising cash at Ayr, but I can see there are a lot of untapped areas still to be exploited.

 

The league needs to be given a sensible level of autonomy.  They should be allowed to find their own sponsors so that the competition really has its own identity, and they should be free to spend their money however they see fit (with the SRU reserving the right to audit the clubs to check that their contribution is not being wasted).

 

Club rugby is too squeamish about money and paying players - but that is the world we are now living in and you are burying your head in the sand if you think that ambitious players - and administrators for that matter - are going to be giving up their time for free in six years’ time.  But we should work a bonus system, and that goes from the national team down.  So you are paid when you train, you are paid some more when you play, and you are paid even more when you win.

 

- Billy McHarg, Ayr RFC president.