Yet when the game went “open” in the autumn of 1995, professionalism came with a rush and led to a great deal of instability. Money came in the window; morality went out the door. At the start, rugby officials at every level were unable to put it, and all it involved, into a coherent context. Edmund van Esbeck, Irish Times rugby correspondent.
Thirty years after rugby’s Damascene conversion from an amateur to professional sport on August 26th, 1995, money continues to be front and centre as a consideration for the sport’s constituents, from players to clubs and unions and all points in between.
It hasn’t been the root of all evil that some who clung to the last vestiges of a bygone era warned, but professionalism, and its attendant financial implications, has proved the orneriest opponent, at times hugely detrimental to the stability and wellbeing of the sport. Especially for clubs who flew too close to the sun in seeking out the trappings of the high life and living beyond their means. Only their ashes remain.
Syd Millar’s words – “it’s gone” – as he emerged from the International Board (IRB, nowadays World Rugby) meeting in the Salon Moliere and strode across the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel on boulevard Haussman in Paris that fateful day provided an epitaph for the amateur iteration of rugby.
RM Block
Two of Ireland’s delegation, Millar and Tom Kiernan, titans as players, coaches and administrators, travelled to Paris with a mandate from the IRFU to vote against opening up the game to professionalism. They found few allies in rugby’s Alamo moment for amateurism and were engulfed by a consensus to “open” the game.
The course of action was dictated by outside events. Ross Turnbull, a former Wallaby prop with the financial backing of fellow Australian Kerry Packer, had proposed a potential breakaway competition, the World Rugby Championship (WRC) consisting of 30 franchises worldwide. In his book A Game for Hooligans, Huw Richards wrote that 407 player signatures of 900 sought had been collected by early August.
A couple of months beforehand, on the eve of the World Cup final between the Springboks and the All Blacks in South Africa, news emerged that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp had offered a £335 million deal to New Zealand, Australia and South Africa rugby unions, a 10-year agreement that would cover broadcasting rights to newly constituted Super 12 Rugby and Tri-Nations Championships, in addition to all inbound tours to the three nations.
By way of comparison, Courage Brewery’s sponsorship of elite level club rugby in England was worth £7 million over four years from 1993-1997 with a further £3 million in a sponsorship and marketing budget.
The word “shamateurism” had been bandied about for some time as northern hemisphere players watched the more amenable attitude south of the equator to their counterparts receiving indirect remuneration.
One of the first documented incidents in Ireland took place in 1991. An 11th hour rapprochement in the Finnstown House hotel in Lucan averted a threat by Ireland players to pull out of the World Cup quarter-final against Australia at Lansdowne Road. The issue was the IRFU’s failure to honour an IRB edict – “The Commercial Agreement” – that permitted the players to benefit financially, if indirectly, from their involvement in the World Cup.
This had come on top of a previous battleground between players and union over a 45-page document, The Participation Agreement, that every player had to sign to take part in the tournament.
Brendan Fanning in his book on Irish rugby in that transition period and beyond, From There to Here, wrote how the union blinked first in the face of resolute pressure from a delegation led by Philip Matthews, Des Fitzgerald and Brendan Mullin and agreed that the players could benefit.
“On the Tuesday night before Ireland played Australia in the quarter-final of the 1991 World Cup Roly Meates had dinner guests. They were about to go to the table when the phone rang. It was Des Fitzgerald. Meates and Fitzgerald were props. One was in his 50s, the other half his age; one a coach and chairman of the IRFU amateur status subcommittee, the other a current player. And they were friends so they could speak frankly.
“After minimal chitchat, Fitzgerald got to the point. ‘You can tell your friends on the union there won’t be any Ireland team running out on Sunday against Australia.’” Two days later the union gave the players their dues.
Philip Browne joined the IRFU in 1992 and would become company secretary initially and then its chief executive (1998), roles that he discharged with distinction. A shrewd, measured and diligent administrator and presence, Browne helped the union navigate turbulent times at various stages of the 29 years during which he enjoyed a front-row seat.
The volatile nature of global rugby politics provided him with an excellent grounding for the years that lay ahead. Before the 1995 World Cup in South Africa, he recalled how a resolution to an impasse between Irish players and union was resolved when Tony O’Reilly donated to a player pool, once it had passed the forensic scrutiny of the union’s amateurism subcommittee. Another World Cup standoff averted.
The mandate from the IRFU heading to the IRB meeting in Paris was unequivocal – to maintain the status quo. Unfortunately, the jig was up and there was nothing the Irish delegation could do about it; not the time to be the boys on the burning deck.
Tom Kiernan would later recall: “They [those representing their unions] knew that events had overtaken them. It was brilliantly done by Vernon [Pugh, Chairman of the IRB] and sort of everyone coming out of it [the meeting] said that ‘none of us voted for it, but we all agreed to it.’”
There was a different reaction back in Dublin. Browne explained: “They weren’t best pleased at the committee table. The Ewart Bells of this world, Billy Lavery and Ronnie Dawson were not one bit happy. But it was what it was, and the amateurism committee was reconvened and renamed the contracts committee.
“[Their] job was to work out how we were going to contract players, or pay players, how we were going to do it, and what sort of structures we should use. Tommy Kiernan was absolutely adamant that it should be the provinces [not the clubs]. As it turned out, Tommy’s instinct was right.
“Tommy was serious, he wasn’t worried what other people thought of him. He’d say whatever he liked and if you didn’t like it, tough. We needed tough people like himself and Syd [Millar]. They were comfortable in their own skin.”
The pair had a standing domestically and internationally that commanded respect. No one would bully Ireland at the negotiating table. A few tried and were found wanting when trying to stare down Kiernan and Millar.
The IRFU engaged Dr Mary Redmond, one of the foremost employment lawyers in the country, and spent six months drawing up a player contract. It required two versions, a full-time, roughly £30,000, plus a £3,000 international match fee and other benefits and a part-time of between £10-12,000. Initially there were restrictions on how many of each the provinces were permitted. Anecdotally, it was two full-time and four part-time.
Browne said: “We ended up with professional players, semi-professional players and amateurs all in the one squad. [The players] had to parade themselves in front of Billy Lavery and myself to be told what they were going to be getting. And obviously there was the market in the UK. I remember we had a very nice meeting with Clive Woodward, the coach at London Irish [at the time].
“He came over and said he could solve all of our problems if we let him take all of our players. He was told to get stuffed in polite terms. But some of the players went.”
The majority of players in Ireland national squads then were based across the Irish Sea, as players sought to maximise their earnings.
There was an anomaly that Irish players could play for a club in England and their province in the same season. That loophole was removed with the arrival of the Heineken and Challenge Cups, the brainchild of Kiernan, Pugh and France’s Marcel Martin.
Browne recalled: “I was the company secretary and attended all the board meetings, which were generally fairly stormy.
“Tommy’s view was there has to be a club competition or some sort of competition that allowed everyone to generate the money that’s going to underpin the professional game.”
There was no TV money in those days.
“Tim O’Connor was head of sport in RTÉ, a wily old fox,” Browne said. “Effectively RTÉ had the rights to the [Five/Six] Nations free gratis.”
Mick Cuddy and Paddy Madigan, the IRFU’s commercial committee per se, brought in Laurence St John, a TV producer. Browne, Millar and St John met O’Connor to explain why RTÉ would have to start paying some money.
O’Connor proved a formidable adversary “pleading the poor mouth”, Browne chuckled. “But we got to a point, I think it was probably maybe 1994, where we established our ownership of the rights. RTÉ had to pay a pound for the rights.
“And once they had accepted our ownership of the rights, that was the end of it. After that, we were able to put the rights out to the market. Tommy Kiernan brought in Irish Permanent and it was probably the biggest sponsorship deal in the country.”
The television rights were subsequently negotiated on a communal basis but only after the accord between the Five/Six Nations was sundered by a power play from England and France who wanted to keep the lion’s share of the television money divvy.
There was a meeting in Cardiff. Brinkmanship didn’t butter any parsnips with Kiernan or WRU president Tasker Watkins, who told the Anglo-French axis that if they had no opposition other than each other to play there would be little or no television money. The French and English stepped back into line.
Next on the “to-do” list was to repatriate players. There were often a dozen or more players plying their trade in England in a 20-man Ireland squad.
Browne said: “Eventually, there was an acceptance that two full-time players [in a provincial squad] wasn’t going to do it. So, we went up to six.
“You can’t be half pregnant in a professional game. We accepted that we were going to [eventually] have to have full professional squads [in the provinces], full-time professional contracts; I can’t remember how many in each squad, maybe 25 or 30.”
The players returned home. Browne’s guesstimate was that it took about 18 months to two years from Ground Zero in improving the contracts sufficiently, for the IRFU to persuade the “Wild Geese” to flock home.
Browne continued: “The IRFU would contract the key players, and the provinces would then contract on our behalf as agents of the IRFU to balance [out] their squads with the approval of the IRFU. We ended up with a contracts committee. I think about 2000 or 2001, I said, ‘this is bloody ridiculous,’ I can’t do all of this, and do everything else that is required.”
Browne wrote a paper in which he advocated for a HR manager, commercial manager, head of legal affairs.
The IRFU had committees for everything. He argued that you couldn’t operate an organisation overseeing a professional sport on the basis of a committee-only structure. The pro and amateur wings of Irish sport came under the auspices of one committee. At the time there was an argument that they had more interest in the amateur side.
Appointments were made to key positions during the first decade of the 21st century but progress was glacial at times. A professional game board was established. Plan Ireland, a strategic initiative focused on elevating the performance of the national team and ensuring the long-term health of Irish rugby was launched in 2013.
It was incorporated into the union’s broader five-year strategic plan (2013-2017), aimed to achieve consistent top-tier rankings for the Ireland team while also supporting the success of provincial teams.
If Kiernan, Millar, Ronnie Dawson, Billy Lavery and George Spotswood were key players in the early days of professionalism up to the early 2000s, Browne singled out Tom Grace, Martin O’Sullivan and Pat Whelan as people who took over the responsibility in ensuring that the union remained on course.
“Eddie Wigglesworth was brave enough to say provinces need to be accountable to the union if we are spending this amount of money on the professional game. We can’t have four silos. We have to have four working with each other, and together.
“We can’t have medical silos, we can’t have physiotherapy silos, we can’t have strength and conditioning silos. We need to share the information and work together. Brian Porteous from Genesis came in and helped us with that.
“To be fair the CEOs [of the provinces at the time all accepted that. They had to give up some level of autonomy within the system for the benefit of all. Decisions in the professional game had to be taken out of the hands of amateur committees. However well-intentioned, the bottom line is that very few of them had the capacity or knowledge to make decisions around the professional game. That is where David Nucifora came in.”
Browne, who “rode shotgun” for Nucifora, praised the Australian’s immense contribution to Irish rugby, one that he argued was very player centric in getting the best players in the best environment and surrounding them with the best people.
What becomes abundantly clear when casting an eye around professionalism in rugby globally now is how Irish rugby owes a debt of gratitude to the frontiersmen of those Wild West transition days and years. The IRFU was dragged kicking and screaming into the professional era but as things transpired it was better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.
