Belinda Moore

As women’s rugby in England enters a crucial stage in its development, Premiership Women’s Rugby was launched with Belinda Moore as employee number one. An average ice skater, but with every professional credential you could want, she might just be the game changer the sport needs.

In Los Angeles earlier this year, World Rugby gathered the power brokers in the women’s game to help achieve what the men have failed to do in almost thirty years of professionalism: create a unified calendar where there’s a place for everything, and everything has its space.

At the table were all the key unions putting their rugby world to rights with just a solitary league represented: the Allianz Premier 15s or, to give them their new official moniker, Premiership Women’s Rugby [PWR}.

At a crucial point in the women’s game, England’s premier division was at the top table. A gathering point for not only the best in English, Welsh and Scottish players, but also American, Canadian, Spanish, Irish, Italian, and even Japanese, the division has comparatively quickly become the world’s biggest domestic league. “I was with World Rugby in Los Angeles for three days doing the global calendar year,” Belinda Moore, the CEO of PWR tells Rugby Journal. “And we were the only league that was there, which is brilliant. Everyone else was a union so it was amazing to be at the table.”

“We all want to make women’s rugby work,” she continues, while acknowledging the challenges faced by the league. “We need to make it work on a financial level for the clubs and also for the RFU. And those financials will hopefully come out of growing the perception of it. Growing the profile of it, making it something people think, ‘yeah, let’s go and watch women’s rugby this weekend’. Which, aside from the hardcore, isn’t in people’s psyche yet.

“What we need to do is convert those who quite like rugby, but haven’t thought about going to a game and get more bums on seats. We’ve also got to get more people watching on TV, and we’re working on the broadcast deal at the moment. 

“We want to get international deals,” she continues. “We want to look at white-label highlight packages. The RFU have done an amazing job [building the league], but they were also trying to juggle 1,500 other jobs as well. What’s great is that we have a single focus on this now.”

The new independent PWR organisation headed by Belinda features a board made up of the RFU and the partner clubs, but it doesn’t come with an endless budget. “We need to be sustainable, that is the most important part of this,” she says. “We need various ways to do this – obviously the renumeration cap is a huge part of that, but it’s very intentionally a ‘renumeration cap’ and not a ‘salary cap’. We are not yet into the space where we have enough money in the game to be paying huge salaries to play. So, we need to be very honest about where we are in this.”

For the 2023/2024 season the cap is set at £190,000, which was arrived at before Belinda’s appointment. “Now it’s about finding that right level to set it at,” she says, quickly adding, “it’s tough, you know, it is not an easy space, I’d love everybody to be paid and I’m sure athletes would all love to be paid. Especially when you look at the men’s game and see those salaries. 

“And, long term, getting a squad of 45 all being paid is absolutely the North Star,” she continues. “We need to be realistic about the amount of money paid, because if we end up bankrupt in the first two, three years...

“But, the more money I can make, and essentially distribute out to the clubs, the more we can raise the profile and turn that into revenue into clubs, the more that [paying everyone] will start to happen.”

It’s perhaps refreshing that, for such an important role, rugby has chosen someone for their professional credentials, and not just because they were a half-decent rugby player. Too often in the men’s game, roles have been found in the offices upstairs for favoured sons, whether they have the right experience or not. Belinda Moore, ex-European Tour, ex-Team GB, ex-BBC, stacks of agency and commercial experience, is a bona fide, first-class candidate. 

But, even those closest to her won’t vouch for her sporting prowess.

Ice skating was the sport of choice for Belinda Moore. Not that she was very good at it, she admits, but it was top of the list of sports she wasn’t good at. “I’m useless at all sports,” she says, “everyone in the family will tell you that. I have no talent, but I do make up for it all in enthusiasm.”

Not that it matters for her new job as the first-ever CEO of the newly formed, named and branded, Premiership Women’s Rugby that are now running the top flight of women’s club rugby in England. But it did help her score her first job, having just graduated with a degree in theology. “I ended up with the then National Ice Skating Association just after Torvill and Dean had won gold and I was doing admin for them,” explains Belinda. “And then a chance meeting led me to Live TV in the days of Kelvin MacKenzie.”

A blast-from-the-past, the now defunct television station lasted four years, from 1995 to 1999, and became infamous for its eclectic output that varied from Topless Darts to the curiously named talent show Spanish Archer to the weather read in Norwegian. Less spoken of amid such noteworthy shows however, was the fact it did have a decent sport offering that included conference football, Lennox Lewis boxing and the Cricket World Cup. “It did have all that other stuff, but it was a brilliant way to learn to do sport, because you did everything,” says Belinda. “And I mean, literally, everything. You went out and had to shoot the stuff, you edited it, you put the graphics on it. You sat in the gallery, you did everything. 

“We were doing everything from Canary Wharf, you’d be surprised where a lot of the people that worked there ended up, it was a brilliant place to learn.”

From there Belinda went to the BBC as a trainee producer, spending thirteen years in sport. “I did seven Olympic Games, Winter and Summer,” she explains. “I worked on everything from the Six Nations, Football Focus, Ski Sunday, the Boat Race, SPOTY, but then they moved to Salford and that didn’t work for us.”

While she hasn’t played the game, rugby has always featured in her sporting life, whether it be going to Quins games with her dad, including a Pilkington Cup final, or chance meetings with World Cup-winning coaches. “I met Clive Woodward when I was up at Whistler, covering the [Winter] games because he wanted to watch our feed of the Six Nations, and we just got chatting.

“Then, when I left the BBC, he basically said there was a role going at Team GB as head of athlete engagement.”

Ahead of London 2012, Belinda’s timing couldn’t have been better, especially as the role took her into close contact with the athletes. “I ran the nearest and dearest programme and we built a space for athletes and their families up in Westfield, right beside the village. It was somewhere very private because there was so much interest in everybody, being a home games, and when they won the medals, they’d come back there to meet their families. It was an amazing place to be, I still keep in touch with quite a few of the athletes.”

After roles with agencies, Belinda began a five-year stint with golf’s European Tour, where as well as working closely with America’s PGA Tour, she also had the task of keeping sponsors happy during Covid when there was effectively no sport. 

Rugby did, however, continue to play a role in her life. How could it not, when she’s married to ex-England hooker Brian Moore, whom she met at Sports Personality of the Year during her BBC days? Together, they have three children – seven-year-old twins and a teenager – and she also has a 21-year-old step-daughter from Brian’s first marriage, who she’s known since she was two. All of them girls. “I had always said categorically I would never work in rugby, because of Brian, because it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do. But sometimes something that is such an opportunity comes along...”

A friend had already mentioned what was happening with the women’s club game, and the role that the RFU would soon be recruiting for, before it was posted. “I remember going home and looking at the strategy online,” she says. “But the role wasn’t even existing then and then, finally, the job was released and I got sent the job description by three people saying, ‘you really need to have a look at this’.

“I read the job description and, like all good women, imposter syndrome kicks in and I thought, ‘I can’t possibly do that’,” she admits. “But, then I sat down and read it again calmly and thought, ‘okay, actually now I can do that and, yeah, I know that bit, and I understand that...

“I think I felt I’d got to the point where I’d built a reputation in sport and, yes, it’s great because I can talk to Brian about stuff but actually, having said that I’d never work in rugby, that moment was now in the past. Now I’ve built a presence in sport where I’ve been working in this industry for twenty-odd years. I know my space here.”

Belinda’s experience on both the editorial, production and commercial side of professional sport, made her perfect for the role. That she had the relevant target audiences in her own house, was a bonus. Each daughter, from the eldest down, had influenced the next youngest to play the game, meaning Belinda is now also coaching under-8s rugby. With rugby know-how from females aged from 21 to seven, she has quite the focus group, and a willing one too. “You’ve met the parents – no one is short of an opinion this house,” she laughs, “but actually I’ve got the best focus group in the world because I’ve got a whole range of age groups to run things by and go, ‘what do you think?’ and they are brutally honest.”

Starting the role of CEO in any organisation is tough enough, let alone one that didn’t have a name, a logo, an office, any staff – that didn’t even technically exist. Belinda has started from ground zero. Although she’s quick to highlight the support of her chair Genevieve Shore and the RFU’s women’s game director Alex Teasdale, Belinda was the first full-time piece in an as yet undefined puzzle of women’s premier club rugby.  “I mean, when I joined it was just me,” she explains. “So, we’ve had to build a team as I literally started as a one-man band. I first took on Isabel who runs the business piece, and found us an office, and then I took two from the RFU, James joined us from the Women’s Super League, and then Paul [Morgan, ex-Premiership Rugby head of communications], so we’re a small team with a lot going on.”

Even as we meet, there was a lot of organisational paperwork and deals still to be completed. “Imagine trying to get all the clubs and the RFU to agree to a whole suite of about fourteen legal documents? It just takes time,” she says. “There’s nothing particularly interesting going in, it’s just a lot of backwards and forwards with lawyers. Yeah, lots of points of order. You know, it’s just taking time, but we’ll get there.”

While comfortable and naturally excited about the challenges of her new role, as it is her first CEO position, she’s still had moments of realisation that the buck now stops with her. “The first thing I did was some of the rebrand work and we got to the stage of a decision having to be made. So, you’re sitting there looking at it, and thinking, ‘this needs to be signed off’ and then you realise, ‘oh, that’s me’.”

She does arrive in the position on the back of arguably the league’s most successful campaign, with non-London sides – Exeter Chiefs and Gloucester-Hartpury – competing in a final that attracted a raucous ten thousand. And, of course, the Red Roses also broke all records with their 58,498 crowd when they secured the TikTok Six Nations against France earlier in the year.

However, outside of showpiece games hosted by the likes of Harlequins, and with a few exceptions such as Exeter, regular club games rarely muster decent numbers on the attendance front. The Allianz Premier 15s hasn’t managed to do the conversion job of international fans to domestic. “We’ve been talking to football, talking to cricket about how they drove club attendance off the back of big international moments,” says Belinda. “Because if you compare us to cricket and football, we’re still not at the same level – we are at international, because they’re doing amazing things with the Roses, but we need people to then go back to a club after watching them.”

Belinda knows right now, the club game is essentially followed by a women’s hardcore, meaning there are huge opportunities elsewhere, from completely new fans to the game, to casual rugby fans with no club allegiance whatsoever, to men’s hardcore fans. Some though... “Are never going to change,” she admits. “And, do you know what? In the nicest possible sense, it really isn’t worth trying to convert someone if they’ve made up their mind that women’s rugby is nonsense. Actually, I’m probably never going to get anywhere with you. 

“But there is a whole open target over here,” she continues. “And that’s where I need to put my resource and energy. Then, maybe one day, we’ll get those others to come too, but actually, I need to focus on the audience that wants to engage or maybe don’t know they want to engage with our sport or perhaps just like women’s sports. That’s where there’s an opportunity because there are always going to be trolls.”

One thing that can help entice people to the game, is the players. Unlike the men’s game where most of the players have followed a club-driven academy pathway from a young age, the women’s game still has one foot in the amateur camp, in a good way. While the Red Roses are fully fledged, paid-up professionals, those without full-time contracts balance a working life with the training and conditioning schedules expected of a Premiership Women’s Rugby player. As you’ll have read in every issue of Rugby Journal, those who balance real-world jobs with rugby have great stories to tell, but it also has to be managed. “I think as well as supporting their rugby, we need to work harder to help players explain to employers that, yes, they’re playing in a semi-professional league, but actually, it doesn’t mean they’re all taking home tens of thousands of pounds, so they need their employer to be supportive.

“We need to help employers work with the athletes’ timeframes – that they need to be at training so many times a week, so how does that all work for everyone? That’s all part of the sustainability side too, so it’s really important to us.”

Even the Red Roses can benefit. “I think the dual career piece is also really important,” says Belinda. “It’s something we did a lot of work with in [London] 2012 with the athletes, ensuring they had something else. We also did a lot of work through the bobsledders actually, who were military-based with the army, and looking into what their exit strategy looked like. 

“Because,” she continues, “funnily enough, army life is very similar [to professional rugby]; you have to look at how you transfer those skills into everyday life and how you create that next chapter of your life. It means you have people well equipped to go out beyond their rugby career or beyond their sport career.”

Goals are everywhere. In the next three years, PWR want the sides to be playing in a substantial stadium, with paid ticketing, and hospitality. “We need all these things to be put around the matchday experience, so even this year a lot more clubs will be in stadiums or at least do a lot more of their games in stadiums, but again from a financial sustainability point of view, this is an evolution not a revolution.

“Bear in mind, we’ve spent a lot of time in the last six months doing a lot of legal and governance and just trying to get the business off the ground. I mean, even stupid things like having a bank account. And it sounds really easy, but you’d be surprised how complicated that can be.”

There are also the television rights to be sorted, a deal which will be helped by Belinda’s ex-BBC contacts, who’ve spread throughout the broadcasting diaspora, many in key, influential roles. Getting the right deal, not necessarily financially, but for the league exposure at this stage, in its infancy, is key. Raise the fame and you not only have a stronger commercial case for next season, but you can also have a genuine impact on the girls that follow the game. “I think in particular, in an age of social media, there’s huge amounts of pressure put on young women and girls to look a certain way,” says Belinda. “And what’s amazing about a rugby fifteen is that they are made up of all sorts of different athletes. 

“They’re all incredibly fit incredibly strong athletes. But there’s tall, short, different ethnicities, sexuality – if you look at a fifteen, I reckon most people could find someone in there that looked a bit and felt a bit like them. 

“I think that’s a really powerful message at a time when young women and girls are under huge amounts of pressure from lots of different sources. And I say that not just in this role, but as the mother of four girls. That really matters to me. They see lots of different role models in their life and then also all of these stereotypes of what they have to be...”

Elsewhere, working groups have been set up with the clubs, ensuring communication at all stages. The game remains in a beta phase. Clubs are trying different models –  as one organisation with a professional men’s set up; as a hybrid with club and educational institution; or even run as a single club entity. Nobody really knows what’s going to work. “I don’t think it is always one size fits all across this,” she says.  “I think every club is setting up their women’s piece differently and choosing what route they want to go down for that.”

The same goes for recruitment. At one stage, London dominated as the home of Red Roses players, meaning clubs from outside the capital had to look beyond these shores for international-calibre players. That made the England Qualified Player ruling – whereby a certain number of players in a match-day squad must be eligible for England – a thorny topic.  “Ultimately, this is a partnership between the RFU and the clubs, and I think it’s really important that it is not about the RFU versus the clubs. 

“Part of that [remit] has to be to benefit the Roses, and to be an English league, but you know, to be fair, I think singlehandedly we’re pretty much developing the game in almost every country that’s going at the moment.

“The EQP for this season is thirteen in a match-day squad of 23, so that still gives you ten other spots to use players from wherever you want, and I think that feels about right. It still gives you plenty of opportunity.”

And, such is the growth of the game, that after the 2025 Rugby World Cup, the whole landscape could change again. “I think undoubtedly after 2025 we will start to see some of those [overseas] players want to play back at home,” she says. “Yeah, I think new leagues will start to happen, probably in the southern hemisphere first. Of course they will; we’re not naïve enough to think they won’t. But we also hopefully have the best league in the world and therefore the global superstars will want to come in. So, again, some of this may autocorrect because of how the sport will develop globally.”

Closer to home, there are more fundamental goals to consider. “Long term there is a break-even point where we need to start making the game financially sustainable in its own right,” says Belinda. “That’s further down the line though.”

As for how she’ll judge success, it’s not just a numbers game. “I think I’d like to create a league that, if you stopped people in the street, and asked them if they knew what it was, then they’d have heard of it, and maybe two or three players too.”

Having a home World Cup two years away, will also help. “I think the World Cup will build momentum and we have to get that right, that’s the biggest thing for me, to make sure we maximise that opportunity. If we don’t do that, then we’ve really messed up.” 

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by  Jamie Chung

This extract was taken from issue 23 of Rugby.
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