THE SUNDAY HERALD WRITES


All of a sudden the northern hemisphere’s top clubs are awash with cash and attracting the world’s best players, reports Alasdair Reid
Comment
YOU MIGHT hesitate to put your daughters on the stage, but if market forces carry on the way they've been going recently then you'd certainly want to point your sons in the vague direction of a rugby pitch. For while it may still be in its infancy as a professional sport, the rewards the game offers players have lately been heading towards the stratosphere. Among the best of them, wage inflation is running at a level that would give Alastair Darling a fit of the vapours.

That much was highlighted by Edinburgh coach Andy Robinson just a couple of weeks ago in response to questions concerning his summer recruitment plans. It is not so long since Edinburgh - albeit under different management - could hail the imminent arrival of Australia's World Cup- winning fly-half Stephen Larkham, but Robinson made it clear that the price tags now attached to players of a similar calibre have reached levels close to the prohibitive.

"The market has changed," said the former England coach. "There has probably been a 50% increase in foreign players' salaries since I came here at the start of the season, so that a player who was worth £140,000 would now work out at £210,000.


"The thrust for us has been to keep the young players who have been performing for us. We have to make sure that Edinburgh is not seen as an academy for the English Premiership or the clubs in France, and that we develop players who really want to play for us and stay with us."

Robinson's conspicuous success in developing young Scottish talent - in stark contrast to Glasgow's equally conspicuous failure to get the best out of their high-profile overseas stars - is grist to the mills of those of us who have long held the view that big names on big money do not necessarily deliver big performances at that stage of their careers when they are clearly coasting towards retirement.

But there are more interesting figures in the rugby marketplace today than the collection of withered Wallabies and superannuated Springboks who used to tout themselves around the clubs of Europe. Instead, the top sides in England and France, and to a lesser extent in Ireland and Wales, are now looking to players at the top of their games, players whose best days may yet be ahead of them. Saracens' signing last week of the South African flanker Wikus van Heerden, one of the stars of last year's World Cup, was an emphatic statement of high ambition from the club which became the new home of All Black Chris Jack just a few months ago.

Van Heerden will join the Watford outfit in November when his commitments in South Africa are finished. But he is likely to be just one of a raft of new faces in the English club game, for rugby's bush telegraph has lately been abuzz with rumours of southern hemisphere internationalists who are set to move north. Nick Evans, the All Blacks second-choice fly-half, has already signed on at Harlequins for a salary rumoured to be in the region of £300,000. Dan Carter, New Zealand's first-choice playmaker, may be about to move to the eye-wateringly well-funded Toulon for a figure said to be about twice what his understudy Evans will be picking up.

And there are more. Jerry Collins, he of the snow-capped hairdo, is also said to have been suffering itchy feet of late, his condition no doubt exacerbated by the thought of the £500,000 salary he would collect if he swapped the delights of Wellington for somewhere more northerly. Clermont Auvergne are reported to be in the market for some more peripheral New Zealanders, their asking prices hoisted by All Blacks coach Graham Henry's policy of capping almost everyone who plays the game in the land of the long white cloud.

But what forces have been at work to up the ante in the rugby jobcentre? If Robinson's figures are correct - and they certainly seem to be in the right ballpark as far as the big names are concerned - how come values have suddenly shot upwards? What can be fuelling the fire of rugby's inflation?

THE GLOBAL CYCLE The trend in recent years has been for players to sign contracts that end after the World Cup. The effect of that was seen last year when a glut of players came on to the market at the same time. Some of the biggest names in the sport were up for grabs - 11 of the New Zealand squad carried on their careers in Europe or Japan - but just as scarcity raises prices, an abundance of any commodity can have a deflationary effect. The players who cashed in last year must now be wishing they had waited a few months.

COMMERCIAL SUCCESS Barely a dozen years have passed since the blazers who ran the amateur game were routinely declaring that professionalism would be the death of rugby. They could scarcely have been more wrong as crowds, sponsorship and television revenues keep heading up and up. Scotland may be a worrying exception, but rugby is awash with cash across Europe at the moment, and it is the players who are benefiting most.

SPECIALISTS It's all very well being a jack of all trades, but if you want to fill your boots with rugby's new mullah then it's best to be the master of one. And in recent seasons, the highest values have attached to players in the most critical positions - namely fly-half and tighthead prop. The mighty Carl Hayman joined Newcastle earlier this season for a sum not far off £300,000 per annum, while the All Black number 10 is expected to collect double that when he finally makes his move to France. Others can be grateful that they have raised the bar so high.

SALARY CAP Few expected the salary cap to work when the ceiling was first imposed on English clubs nine years ago, but it has been a surprising success. True, some clubs found imaginative ways to circumvent the rules, but broadly speaking it has helped to create a more stable environment for the English game. Time moves on, though, and the clubs agreed recently that the cap should be lifted from £2.2m to £4m. While conditions have been built into the new arrangement to encourage the development of homegrown talent, a Guinness Premiership spokesman conceded that the new limit will make it easier for top clubs to go out and buy the big names.

LES SUCRE PAPAS Rugby in France has always been well-funded, with commercial interests and even local authorities carrying much of the burden of running clubs, but a new breed of super-rich owners has arrived in the game over the past few seasons and the competition is on to see who has the deepest pockets. Current favourite is Toulon president Mourad Boudjellal, who has redirected a large slice of his fortune into attracting players of the world-class calibre of Tana Umaga, Victor Matfield, George Gregan and Andrew Mehrtens to the club which still plays in the second division of the French championship.

Dan Carter is understood to have signed a deal (dependent on them being promoted) as well. Other bank-busting backers for whom money is seemingly no object include Max Guazzini at Stade Francais, Racing's Jacky Lorenzetti and Biarritz's Serge Kampf, said to be one of the 10 richest men in France.

INTERNATIONAL RULES While the International Rugby Board dithers on the matter, English clubs have already agreed a protocol that will see England players rested in the weeks before Test matches. One consequence is that clubs have to look further afield for quality backup. Premiership regulations also limit the number of non-EU players who can take part in a game, a factor that can only enhance the values of players from Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

This article was posted on 18-May-2008, 07:33 by Hugh Barrow.