Scottish rugby enters a brave new world

IAIN MORRISON


EXCLUSIVE: Radical big-money proposal to buy a pro team and move it to Stirling is set to change the Scottish game forever, reveals Iain Morrison

‘Roy (Carver) is a far more hard-headed businessman than me; I am getting a little philanthropic in my old age. But we both see this as a commercial venture that will make us a return in the long term’

SCOTTISH rugby has never been more in need of some good news and the game finally has something to cheer about in the unlikely alliance between an Aberdeen businessman and an American millionaire that promises to revolutionise the Scottish professional game - provided they are given the go-ahead from the SRU.

Scot Graham Burgess made a proposal to the Union back in the middle of February. It is not a franchise deal but rather a simple purchase of a pro-team by a company formed for that purpose, which would see the pair take over and run one of Scotland’s three professional teams.

American Roy Carver agreed to lend his support to the deal after the two men were introduced to each other during the weekend of the Welsh international. No formal reply has yet been received from the game’s governing body but the early indications are that, pending some hard bargaining, the bid is likely to be approved.

Carver is the American whose family’s fortune was made from the USA company Bandag, the largest re-treader of tyres in the world. He was originally wooed by Phil Anderton and when the former chief executive resigned, the American was assumed to have walked away from Scottish rugby. Thankfully, he kept in touch with several people involved with the game north of the border.

After flying over for the Wales match, he was introduced to Burgess and the pair, having found they shared a common vision, agreed to work together. Having a partner on the ground in Scotland that he trusts to manage his investment has brought the 34-year-old American back to the table.

Burgess is a business consultant specialising in the oil industry whose nine-to-five job entails bidding for ailing companies and putting them back on their feet, so he comes with the right credentials to affect a turnaround in one of Scotland’s sick pro-teams. Now a 51-year-old, Burgess played for Edinburgh University and Leith Accies in his youth and he is a long-time Scotland rugby supporter.

"If the Union approves the deal, we think it will give us an opportunity to make a difference to the way the game is run in Scotland and build a decent business at the same time," Burgess said last week.

"Roy (Carver) is a more hard-headed businessman than me; I am getting a little philanthropic in my old age, but we both see this as a commercial venture that will make us a return in the long term.

"The proposal that we presented to the Union talks about winning the Celtic League in the short term but, to use the Manchester United analogy, we want to aim high. It is only in the big European competitions that you make any money so the final rounds of the Heineken Cup are our real goal."

The deal would see the pair, possibly backed by other interested individuals, invest as much as £1m every year for the immediate future and it would take a brave Murrayfield mandarin to turn down that sort of injection of funds.

The Union’s finances are stretched to breaking point and the concept of attracting outside investment was approved by the clubs at the last sgm. Indeed it is something of mystery that the deal is still in the "pending" tray, although in fairness the SRU has had plenty on its plate in the last month.

All this is to be negotiated but the consortium is asking the Union to invest £2m for three years, dropping to £1.5m thereafter. To take just one example, Glasgow will cost approximately a little less than that to run this year when the figure is netted against any income the pro-team raises.

So if the pair buy Glasgow Rugby, the SRU would be paying marginally more than at present but only for three years after which they start saving money, and that ignores the 30% of any income that the Union is due thanks to their minority shareholding in the new venture.

The deal would also slow the steady exodus of players out of Scotland, with Sean Lamont only the latest of several big names to move to wealthier climes. Indeed, had the Union moved earlier on this deal, the likes of Lamont would surely have stayed put and it is not too late to stop some others from following in his footsteps.

Burgess declined to offer any details of the proposal that has been languishing in the SRU’s in-tray for well over a month but Scotland on Sunday has discovered the essential elements of the deal.

"Rugby Development Ltd" (RDL) to be set up to acquire a pro-team with the Union retaining a 30% holding and two seats on the seven-man board.

RDL to assume employment contracts for its playing and coaching staff.

RDL to arrange and/or develop a 5,000-seat stadium that will be enlarged to a 10-15,000 capacity over the next few years.

SRU to commit funding of £2m per annum for three years and £1.5m thereafter.

SRU to maintain a team in the Celtic League with access to the Heineken Cup. RDL to have all marketing and merchandising rights to the team and share of Celtic League/Heineken Cup income.

RDL will arrange suitable complimentary commercial facilities intended to include a members’ club, bars, restaurants, sports and medical facilities.

RDL would agree to ensure that 60% of its squad is eligible to play for Scotland.

RDL will affiliate with three or four Premier One teams and the same number of Premier Two teams offering coaching resources and modest levels of funding (£30,000 a year for clubs in Premier One, £15,000 a year for clubs in Premier Two) in return for feeding the pro-team.

RDL aims to break even in the first three years and make a profit thereafter.

RDL would like agreement by end June so that arrangements can be made prior to next season.

RDL is interested in any pro-team but reserves the right to relocate the team for reasons of facilities and commercial purposes.

This last part of Burgess’ proposal has led to a fevered rumour industry about the final location of the team, with speculation currently centring upon Stirling.

Burgess will not be drawn upon any plans to move the existing teams except to confirm: "We don’t care which team we buy but we do need the flexibility to move it for commercial reasons. We have made absolutely no decision about where to base the team but we are looking over various locations."

However, sources close to the Aberdeen man confirmed that he and Carver visited Stirling Albion’s cosy little ground at Forthbank and declared it an appropriate venue. The close proximity of all the added facilities at Stirling University and the Scottish Institute of Sport only adds to the argument.

The dressing room at Glasgow Rugby has been abuzz with talk about Stirling for several weeks now and one source suggested that the three Glasgow coaches have also cast their collective eye over Albion’s facilities. Situated at the centre of Scotland’s major motorway grid, access to the little ground would be relatively easy and its 5,000 capacity is the right size, at least to start with. The consortium is hoping for gates of 4,000 in the first season, and the central belt should be able to supply that number with relative ease.

The other factor in the equation is Kenny Logan, whom Burgess originally approached as Scotland on Sunday reported way back on January 30. Logan still has a couple of months to run on his SRU/Glasgow contract but he is rumoured to be joining the consortium this summer.

It seems to be a win-win situation, although such is the nature of the beast that the Union is sure to grumble at losing control. This is probably the deal-breaker since no investor who prefers a sports jacket to a straight jacket would consider committing millions of pounds into any enterprise while giving up control.

Looking at the English model, the RFU gives every club in the Zurich Premiership an annual handout of £1.8m, asking only for player development and player release for international duty, so this model is not dissimilar. Since Burgess/Carver are prepared to share revenues with the SRU, not something English clubs offer the RFU, they might even be erring on the generous side.

The Union might also quibble at just 60% of the squad being Scottish qualified but that figure is an absolute minimum and the squad is sure to start with a healthy bias towards local lads.

The real benefit of the new team is that it would be an end in itself rather than a means to an end, because at the moment the three pro-teams are struggling to establish their own identity while under control of the Union’s dead hand. If this new venture does take off it will completely change the dynamic of the Scottish professional scene and prove a template for the other two teams to follow.

One thing is certain; if this odd couple of Burgess and Carver is allowed to push forward with their radical plan, the landscape of Scottish professional rugby will never be the same again. And for those fans who have suffered nothing but year after year of hard luck stories, that can only be a blessed relief.

A rugby revolution has hit these shores at last to give Scots game a good shake

THE news that two businessmen are attempting to buy a pro-team is the best thing that could possibly have happened to Scottish rugby amidst the wreckage of a dreadful season both on and off the field.

On the face of things, the pair’s decision to invest several million of their own hard-earned pounds into an unloved Scottish rugby team seems madness. But in truth, all they are betting is that Scotland is not unique because there has been a revolution throughout the rugby world and the only place it has yet to touch is our very own backyard.

The numbers watching Super 12 are excellent, with crowds regularly reaching in excess of 30,000. This is good in New Zealand and South Africa, which have a long rugby tradition, but to get those numbers through the turnstiles in Australia is astonishing given that ten years ago you could count crowds in their hundreds rather than thousands and 20 years ago you’d be unlikely to run out of fingers and toes. The Canberra-based ACT Brumbies, in particular, are watched by sell-out crowds each week despite the fact that the side is based in an area which has no real rugby union culture.

The 13-man code was what "rugby" referred to when the word was used in Australia but two World Cup wins and a determination to make the product as entertaining as possible has produced hundreds of thousands of union converts. The north may look down their noses at the "touch rugby" on display in many Super 12 matches but it has far surpassed even the success of English clubs in terms of pulling in the paying public who finance the whole venture.

Still the English clubs have grown the product enormously. Leicester’s home gate averaged 400 in the late 1970s and yet now the most successful team in Europe has outgrown even the 17,000 capacity of Welford Road and been forced into a groundshare at the new Walker’s Stadium with Leicester Football Club.

Scotland often looks to Ireland as a benchmark but the popularity of their provinces is a relatively recent phenomenon notwithstanding the odd day of glory against the All Blacks.

When Leinster played Munster at Cork’s Musgrove Park in 1996 (post professionalism) there was a debate raging about the value of even holding the inter-provincial fixtures. The crowd that day amounted to no more than 200 persons and the event is regularly brought up by current Leinster and former Munster coach Declan Kidney when he wants to highlight just how far the provincial game has come since then.

Just to underline his point, when the two teams met in the final of the Celtic Cup in December of 2001, a little known Australian coach called Matt Williams enjoyed his finest hour as a 14-man Leinster beat Munster in front of a 30,000-strong crowd at Lansdowne Road. There isn’t a stadium in Ireland big enough now to accommodate the fans should these two teams draw each other in the knock out stages of the Heineken Cup.

Only in Scotland has the opposite been true, with gates of four and five thousand not unheard-of for key amateur fixtures in the old days but the pro-teams now commanding little more than 2,000 per match and in some cases considerably less.

There has been much talk of Scotland disbanding its A team but in truth it has been running A, B and C teams for several years only they have been called "Edinburgh", "Glasgow" and "The Borders" because that is effectively what they are. Fans simply didn’t want to watch a state-run side and the new consortium attempts to address that problem.

If a player is to be rested it must be for the good of the team not on the say-so of the national coach. Frank Hadden claimed to have been central in signing Ben McDougall, but very few believed the Aussie had not been foisted upon Edinburgh. Perhaps the league convert is worth his place but at least with this new team it is them that will make any recruitment decision and then fail or succeed by it rather than resort to the sort of collective irresponsibility that Murrayfield specialises in.

They plan to affiliate their team with Premier One and Premier Two clubs in an effort to ease tensions between club and pro-team. The planned player-exchange up and down the system would require a change in the regulations by Scottish clubs but if it comes about it will mean that the feeder clubs are actively supporting the pro-team and vice versa.

Naturally all this is time-sensitive, with players leaking out of the system almost on a daily basis and several others lined up to follow Sean Lamont and Nathan Hines out of "Fortress Scotland".

An argument can be constructed that this is no bad thing, although both Wales and Ireland have profited from having the vast majority of their best players back home. In the case of the former, the general principle has several important exceptions, with Gareth Thomas and Stephen Jones both playing in France this season.

As well as Matt Williams, the Welsh and Irish coaches have pulled players from their club squads on a regular basis to fit in with their own national agenda, either for reasons of rest or because they need extra conditioning work. But if the new club venture takes off, the SRU simply will not have any authority over it. They can ask them to rest players but they are likely to get short shrift since the new club is a commercial venture whose interests extend no further than their own success. Any player development is incidental to the main purpose of putting a winning side on the field.

With this in mind, and especially if the other two teams go the same way, it will not matter a jot if Scottish players hone their skills in the Zurich Premiership or the French leagues because the national coach will have no better access to his home-grown players.

Certainly the prospect of using foreign clubs to develop the best of a nation’s players was used very effectively by the Irish football side under Jack Charlton, which, almost to a man, played in England.

This article was posted on 27-Mar-2005, 08:56 by Hugh Barrow.