Something's rotten in the state of England

Something big is afoot in English rugby league – it’s just difficult figuring out what. English rugby league itself probably doesn’t know quite yet.

Late last week, Nigel Wood stood down as the chief executive of the Rugby Football League, the sport’s governing body in England.

Late last year, he had been voted off the board of Super League, which is supposed to be – essentially – a marketing body for the top flight.

The important thing to understand from an Australian perspective is that Super League’s relationship to the RFL is not like the NRL’s relationship to the Australian Rugby League Commission.

Super League still has promotion and relegation. The teams in Super League can change. So the clubs outside the top competition have far more say in what happens than they do in Australia.

Last year the Super League clubs apparently decided to give Leigh “a parachute payment” when they were demoted, from their own funds, to save players from being out of work.

Leigh sacked players anyway and hired new ones! Would the clubs have felt as charitable towards non-heartland side Catalans had they gone down?

But I digress.

Wood was replaced on the Super League board by representatives of all 12 clubs. He stuck around for a month or so as RFL and Super League CEO and then left the Rugby Football League completely.

It took one weekend for something we all suspected to be confirmed: Nigel Wood was named the new CEO of the Rugby League International Federation. John Grant, on the way out of the ARLC, is expected to replace Wood as its chairman.

(AAP Image/Paul Miller)

The only thing that can go wrong for Grant is if Peter Beattie insists on taking the job when he is given the ARLC chairmanship. The ARL endorsing someone with whom it is no longer connected as the chairman of an international governing body?

It’s perhaps an indication of how much the ARLC gives a rats about international competition.

But I digress again.

The day after Wood was named RLIF chief executive, the RFL’s brightest young light – RFL commercial chief and Super League executive director Roger Draper – also walked.

The former tennis administrator claimed he always intended to be around for only two years but things at the RFL’s Red Hall headquarters and Super League’s Salford Quays offices are starting to look a bit chaotic.

They are looking to fill five positions (an ‘on field’ admin role was mentioned in the media release, plus the two jobs Wood and Draper each did) and counting after just ten days of the new year.

Another thing to understand about the difference between rugby league in Australia and Britain. Working in rugby league is just a stepping stone to bigger and better things for many administrators in the UK.

In the case of the NRL, many people spend a large chunk of their lives wanting to work there; in recent times that has often led to disappointment and a short tenure when they walked through the front doors of League Central.

An interesting clue as to what this all means is Super League inviting Toulouse and Toronto to play as special guests at Magic Weekend in Newcastle on May 19 and 20.

The decision put a lot of other Championship clubs’ noses out of joint but Super League seems to have designs on these expansion franchises as the means of leveraging new markets.

However, so does the wider RFL and the lower division clubs.

They expect some pay off when that North American television deal is eventually signed – and were promised one this week when it was explained to them they must allow broadcasters to cover their home games against Toronto this season even though there is no money on offer for it.

There is now a power vacuum and a race to fill it. Politically, the (comparatively) junior officers left manning the good ship RFL had better batten down the hatches as storm Super League Owners closes in.

On Monday, the Batley owner Kevin Nicholas said he had seen correspondence which hinted at a power play by the Super League clubs.

“I was able to see a letter from October 7 that (Wigan owner) Ian Lenagan sent to all Super League clubs, some of it expressing reasonable criticism of the RFL, making it clear that Super League should be making all the decisions on where all the (TV money) goes, and should have complete control – not the independent RFL board,” Nicholas told League Weekly.

Would a breakaway between fulltime and part-time clubs in England necessarily be a bad thing? Maybe not as long as the part-time clubs weren’t left bankrupt.

But the portents for the international game are already worrying.

Clubs in Australia appear to have stopped England playing New Zealand in the United States.
Read that sentence again.

While Super League clubs can reasonably be expected to be less isolationist than their NRL counterparts (they’re playing a comp game in Wollongong a month from today), will they listen to the new RLIF led by a man they just ousted?

And will NRL clubs be more pliable in the face of an RLIF chaired by a man they just ousted?

What a mess.