Bill Sweeney

More than a decade ago, Steve Hansen told Bill Sweeney that England would never win another World Cup. England just weren’t set up for it. When Bill got the chance to prove him wrong, he had just a few problems to overcome, starting with 119 redundancies and a global pandemic.

In the aftermath of their 33-37 London SE2 defeat to Old Alleynians, the clubhouse of Dartfordians RFC was its typical self. The air filling with tall tales from the front row and memories of the 80 minutes of rugby that went before already fading fast as the impact of the post-match elixirs begin to take their toll. 

As is the case in rugby clubs the world over, the clubhouse was slowly falling into age-order formation, the younger folk at one end, the older generation occupying their comfortable well-worn spaces at the other. 

Bill Sweeney, the man who runs English rugby, found himself with the latter and, perhaps in true timeless CEO-style, he’s waving a GOLD card. “It’s ten at night and there’s still about 450 in the bar, it’s absolutely buzzing, I think they took about £5,000 that night,” recalls Bill. “Anyway, I’d been there for the game, and the captain comes up to me and says it’s great I’m staying, but as a warning, ‘there’s this bloke called Les, and when he gets to you, it’s a nightmare, he’ll bore you to death. He’s the club stalwart, former second row, great bloke, but he’ll bore you to death and so you’ll need this’. 

“The captain hands me this card with ‘GOLD’ written on it and says ‘you’re allowed to use it once a night, it’s not transferrable, but show him this and Les has to walk off’. The GOLD stands for Get Out of Les in Desperation’. Sure enough, he comes up, and he’s a great bloke, life and soul of volunteering, but he’s deadly boring – and I’ve got this card... ... but you get stuff like that in every club.”

Dartfordians are one of many community clubs Bill has visited during his tenure as RFU chief executive, which began in May 2019. “The last eighteen months have been a blur,” he admits, referencing the pandemic. “There’s some days I wake up and I think I’ve been at the RFU for years, and it’s only been two and a half years, and then other days I wake up and I think it’s only just started.

“When I started, I made a commitment to go to a community club every weekend rather than a Premiership game and I reckon I’ve been to about seventy now.

“Last year it didn’t seem appropriate to go on holiday, as we’d just made 119 people redundant, so for our summer holiday, as my wife is Kiwi and loves rugby too, we took one of the trucks and a load of stuff and headed around rugby clubs.

“We started in the midlands, Northumberland, Lancashire, down to Gloucester, then back across country.”

Bill is proud of the fact that not one club of the 1,900 under his jurisdiction went under due to the lockdown, but he does admit there’s a lot of work to be done in growing grassroots rugby once again. “It’s phenomenal that we didn’t lose a club,” he says. “We did our small bit with getting the emergency fund of £7m and really instrumental was the government support [512 clubs received £18.2m in grant funding], and we had to spend a lot of time explaining to government what rugby clubs do. Rugby clubs have different rules because of their facilities, so they are a community hub, they can distribute food parcels and food banks, they can bring kids in, they can offer other types of support and government really got that afterwards, which is why we’ve got that disproportionate amount of grants and loan support.

“And none of that came from us, it just flowed through us, to the clubs. But probably the biggest factor was the volunteer network out there: how they mothballed clubs, understanding the costs, and finding new ways to raise revenue. All of a sudden they become revenue-generating clubs outside of the pure rugby.

“Look at most of the clubs financially and they’re okay, but we need to make it a more stats and data-based conversation and we’ll have clubs like North Dorset, Preston, Dartfordians, and they’ll be saying things like ‘we’re running six teams instead of five’, or ‘we’ve got two women’s team out instead of one’ but then you go to another club, where they’ll say ‘we’re really struggling with players’, they’re down on income, they can’t field colts and have no front rows – I don’t understand why you’ve got these differences.

“So, what we’re trying to figure out is what’s supporting the successful clubs and what’s one of the issues going on at the ones that are less successful. 

“For instance, we’re finding that some of the working-class clubs have problems because players are worried about getting injured because they need to make money.

“It’s starting to get back to normal, but our number of matches cancelled is up two per cent on previous years; it’s not drastic, but we’re keeping an eye on it.”

There’s been a lot to keep an eye on during his tenure and, as Bill alludes to, he arrived at a comparatively rare time in recent history, when the RFU’s finances have been scrutinised. “A lot of the conversations were focused around the financial state of the RFU,” he admits, “there was a lot of noise around it not being in good shape, headlines around overspend on the East Stand and basically being in a difficult financial situation.

“I was quite surprised that when I came in, it wasn’t as bad as it was made out.”

Nonetheless, the situation did see the loss of the community rugby coaches. And, says Bill, even as the world settles down and Twickenham seats are full once again, don’t expect to see them return. “I don’t know if that’s the right way to do it, to be frank,” he says of community rugby development. “Forget about the money for a second, the RFU, historically, when a problem occurred – and post-2015 we were very, very financially fine because the World Cup was a bumper World Cup – we threw a load of money at it. So, there’s an issue, let’s recruit 30 people and see if we can fix it.”

Now, undoubtedly inspired by his tour, he believes the future could lie in closer collaboration with clubs. “Take Scarborough as an example, they’re running more women’s and men’s teams than pre-covid,” he says. “They don’t have state schools playing rugby, but they’re having no problem getting kids in from the local area. 

“They have a guy there called Charlie, a youth development manager – a person paid by the club – and they’ve got some really good, best practice happening.

“What if you created regional hubs and, say, gave Charlie responsibility for fifteen clubs in that particular part of Yorkshire, and maybe gave him another person, and we said ‘right, we’ll fund 50 per cent’. Then you’ve got a partnership and joint skin in the game.

“I think that’s a far better way to do it than just employing somebody and sending someone to go out there and figure out how to make it work.”

Another challenge for the grassroots game is the competition, not just from other sports, but life in general. “Nowadays, it takes on average 47 players to sustain a first fifteen,” he says, “because people have got the annual golf tournament, a stag do, family commitments or whatever... 

“And that balance between recreational life, professional life, and family life, particularly below level four, is very different these days. There’s a lot more choice as to what you do at the weekend.”

How do you counter changing society? “We have to make the experience as enjoyable as possible: players don’t want to travel as far, players don’t want to play as many games.

“The administrators down one end of the club might say, ‘how could you shrink the league from sixteen to fourteen, that’s two days of revenue gone’, but when you talk to the players they want to play less, more like fifteen games than 32.

“That’s one of the biggest challenges, making the game as relevant as possible,” he says. “Part of that conversation is around contact: do you have more versions of non-contact, can you offer that experience at a rugby club? And then can they evolve into contact if they want?”

More regional leagues is something already on the cards – “most clubs want that,” he says, adding: “Sometimes you’ll hear ‘I want to win my league but I don’t want to be promoted, because I want to play against that guy again and have a beer with him’. 

“People want more regionality, more derbies, there’s also the question of whether or not you need leagues – I can have that debate with 100 people, and I reckon it’d be 60/40 in favour.”

Ambition is always there, a blessing and a curse. Since the turn of professionalism, clubs at all levels have struggled with the introduction of payments to players and coaches, whether it’s paying a £50 win bonus at level seven or trying to find a way to pay for a full-time coach at level five or building a squad of part-time professionals for a push to the upper-echelons of the pyramid. In nearly every case, including even those that should know better, the money that goes out doesn’t even begin to get matched by the money that comes in. 

After covid and a general tightening of rugby belts, can the days of paying players below the top divisions come to an end? “It’s difficult to legislate that, otherwise we go back to the days of the brown envelope,” says Bill. “We rely on them to voluntarily declare what they’re paying out and to be within the salary caps, so £250,000 for level three; £125,000 for level four; £50,000 for level five.

“But how do you stop a businessman from Norfolk who wants to start taking his team up the leagues and paying players? 

“You might not be able to stop them paying, but what you can do is apply minimum standards, so if you want to go from level five to level four, you’ve got to have floodlights or women’s changing rooms, or changing rooms of a certain size or whatever... 

“That way you’re forcing them to think, ‘right, if want to pay players, then I’ve got to invest in the club too’. I don’t know how we would police this any other way.”

Together with the financial situation, and also intrinsically linked, the Championship was near the top of Bill’s in-tray when he took over. “It’s been debated at the RFU for a long time,” he says. “Nigel [Melville] was dealing with it and he had a number of different possible ways to approach it, including the buddy-up system with Premiership clubs.

“When I came in, I just went back to all the previous documents around the increase in funding that happened in 2016, when we doubled the funding and it went up to £7 million.

“There were five specific reasons why that was done with five specific goals laid out for them and when you looked at them all, they hadn’t been achieved, despite the increase in funding.

“Perhaps more importantly, there was a sense that, well, actually, it’s not just funding that’s going to address those issues. It’s something more systemic than that.”

The conversation, says Bill, had started going into Rugby World Cup 2019. “That was the first time we said, ‘look, a significant cap is going to come in because this money we’re providing isn’t achieving these objectives and we don’t think we’re getting the right return’.”

The cut was seen as brutal, more or less halving the £534,000 each club received per season. The funding, reduced over time, meant the RFU provided £1m of funding to the Championship (circa £80k per club) in 2020/21, although clubs also receiving funding from PRL [thought to equate to £140k per club]. Either way, it led to calls of ring-fencing. “One of the aims was to reduce the gap between the Premiership and the Championship, but over the last seventeen years, fourteen of those seasons have seen the team that has been relegated in the Premiership bounce immediately back up. 

“The gap in funding between a Premiership club and a Championship club is so significant that the RFU can’t bridge that, we’d have to spend probably minimum £4m per club, so we’d need, what £50m? We’ve got 1,900 clubs in the country so we can’t afford to do that.

“It was difficult though, people are passionate about their clubs,” he acknowledges, “and people don’t like resources being taken away.”

He points also to the support in the division. “The crowds haven’t grown, the average I think is around 1,200, and that’s probably inflated by a couple, the salaries are low and it’s a difficult sell to television. Even the Premiership had its challenges when it came to renew with BT, so people aren’t lining up [to televise the Championship] and it’s difficult to get centralised sponsorship.

“If you take away external funding, at the moment, it’s difficult for the Championship to sustain itself as a full-time model.”

Depending on who you follow on social media, when people talk of ring-fencing they often pick a different sport from a different country as a shining example of why we need to shut up shop. Others point to the more relatable French league where the second divisions seems buoyant, professional and with big crowds. “A lot of people will say ‘just copy the French model’,” admits Bill. “But the French model is very different for a number of reasons. 

“France is a bit more of a socialist country, so when they set up the ProD2, it was mandated by government that one third of the LNR [the French league’s governing body] broadcasting money had to flow down to two. 

“So, the new broadcast deal with LNR is about £100m a year, whereas the Premiership broadcast deal is £35m. So ProD2 is getting immediately 30 per cent of that £100m, almost the equivalent of the Premiership.

“Then you have some of these clubs in the rural parts of France and they’re very much the hub of that city and the municipality gives you the stadium for free, so they don’t have to pay any of the utilities or anything. 

“All you’ve got to do is put the players on the pitch and pay them and a lot of it tends to be linked into jobs as well and the average spectator base in France for ProD2 is 5,000 people. 

“You’ve also got to remember rugby is pretty much the national sport in France.

“It’s cultural as much as anything else. If we could just replicate that system, we’d love it, but it’s just not possible to do that.”

The dialogue, says Bill, is always ongoing, with meetings taking place regularly involving representatives from both Championship and Premiership clubs, not to mention conversations with ambitious individuals. “I’ve spoken to Dicky Evans quite a few times recently about getting that ground sorted for Pirates and I spoke to Mike Gooley [Ealing Trailfinders’ owner] the other day about their aspirations too. 

“We quite often get accused of ring-fencing,” he continues. “We’re not trying to ring fence the Premiership and the Premiership is not trying to ring fence itself either. They want a very competitive and more nationwide league as well. 

“Now what you want to do is encourage more Exeters and you want to discourage the London Welsh stories where a club says ‘I’ve got to get into the Premiership and get in there at all costs’. They end up paying players more than they can afford, they don’t have the spectator base and they end up plummeting all the way down through the leagues and have to rebuild themselves back up again.”

Bill says all options are still on the table: conference structures; more regionality; more National One clubs; Premiership second teams; English player ratios; age-restrictions (80 per cent under-23). “But then if you do some of these, how do you prepare a club that wants to go up to the Premiership?” he says. “All of that is what’s in the review.

“You’ve got to look at it in the context of what is best for the game,” he continues. “We don’t have a grudge against or have any ill feeling towards Championship clubs. They’re great clubs.”

With the RFU council set to hear the initial recommendations in January, England’s second tier, is going to remain in his in-tray for a while yet.

Although born in India, where his father [one of twelve] had worked in the shipbuilding industry as an engineer, Bill grew up in Birkenhead and then Surrey, playing both rugby and football. But it was in the latter he excelled, and stayed on the books of Chelsea as a central midfielder until he was eighteen, when he went to Salford University to study economics and marketing. “Even at university I kept in touch, with the hope of playing for Chelsea,” he says. “But when you lose those years from eighteen to 21, it’s pretty difficult to make the switch.  A few people have done, but it’s a pretty tough ask really.”

Instead he carved out a career in sport, working for some of the world’s most famous brands, including Adidas, where he came into contact with the All Blacks. “Whenever the All Blacks were playing in the northern hemisphere, they would send eight or nine players across to Nuremberg and they’d be there for a week and they do product testing and marketing appearances. 

“I would always deal with them and their favourite restaurant was a Japanese restaurant in the centre of town and I was there one night with the likes of Dan Carter, Ma’a Nonu and Steve Hansen.

“At one point Steve [who wasn’t head coach then, it was still Graham Henry] stood up raised his glass and made a toast, saying ‘you’re the only Englishman in here and you won the World Cup in 2003, so fantastic, well done, but you’ll never win one again.’

“He basically said we didn’t have the systems in place for sustained success, we’re just not set up to continually win. We had a great set of players in 2003, but that’s it, we’ll never win again. And that’s really stuck with me.

“Then, all of a sudden, you find you you’re in the RFU and part of the whole process. So that’s something we’re trying to shift.”

Bill talks passionately about the elite player pathway, ensuring there’s a conveyor belt of talent, and the appointment of Conor O’Shea, and later Nigel Redman, is clearly key to that. 

In the short term, however, those hopes lie with Eddie Jones. “I’ve known Eddie for 25 years,” he says, “from when I was with Adidas Reebok, and he was the Japan national side’s forwards coach and Glen Ella was doing the backs. 

“I had a friend in Adidas who was Australian and he said ‘there’s a guy in Tokyo now coaching the Japanese national team, let’s go and watch a game’, and that was Eddie. We watched a few matches, had some beers, and I’ve known him since then.

“There’s a lot of stuff talked about Eddie, his way of operating is renowned,” admits Bill. “And I know Matt Carroll, who was Eddie’s CEO when he was coaching Australia, and he would tell me some stories, but I think he’s mellowed since then.

“I really enjoy working with him, and on some occasions it’s his intensity and competitiveness that keeps me going as well. It’s difficult to just continue at the same pace over time, but Eddie’s relentless: he’s committed to winning.

“He’s an unbelievable student of the game, he’s forever sending me articles on leadership, different ways of approaching sport. 

“We’re in touch most days,” continues Bill. “I get up at five and I think he gets up at 4.45am. So, I get the first pings from him messaging me at about 5.15am.

“We’ll talk maybe once a week and I see him on Thursdays.”

Is he hard to manage? “I enjoy it,” insists Bill. “It’s difficult sometimes because he’s got such a specific profile. So, you do find yourself defending him quite a lot, or explaining whatever, but that’s just because of how he’s perceived on his profile.”

Any examples? “There was a great one during the last Six Nations,” begins Bill. “So, we knew it was going to be a tough Six Nations. We were particularly hit by covid leading up to it – although you don’t really talk about it too much because it comes across as an excuse and every team had to deal with it –  but we did have a significant covid issue in the  coaching camp. 

“Eddie himself got isolated, Jason Ryles was stuck in Australia, we were very disrupted and we knew we were undercooked that Scotland. 

“Then [after Italy] we had that weird Welsh game when we had those two decisions early on and felt it’s just not going to be, but then you pull it back, then three players come off the bench, three penalties, nine points down. You’ve chased the game, intercepted pass, game’s gone. 

“And then we played France. I remember talking to Eddie and saying ‘can we win this one?’ and he said, ‘yeah, no questions, we’re guaranteed, we will win this one.’.

“So then, we played pretty well and had a bit of luck [and won], we’re going for a walk down the river, and he’s saying, ‘I’ve got to keep the players focused, I don’t want them getting too carried away by what they read in the media about performance’. 

“He said ‘you’ve gotta keep growing and focusing because if they listen to some of that poison, it’ll be difficult to make that work’. 

“I said to him, you know, ‘just be careful what you say on that’, and sometimes a word just sticks and, of course, pre-Ireland media conference and he talked about poison and the media. We lost the game and we did get a bit of backlash, so I did have a chat with him after that one.”

There’s plenty more in the in-tray. The global calendar. “If you’re a top-class England player, you get to the Premiership final, you’ve played 26 weekends, a full run in Europe is eight more, then you play every game for England – eleven or twelve – that’s 45 weekends. Then you add the fifteen-week mandatory rest, and you’ve got 60 weeks. That’s almost two months more rugby. How do you fix that?

“It’s not as simple as saying stop the Premiership season, then start the international window – the only answer is we’re playing too much rugby, especially when you compare to other sports. Look at the NFL, their mantra is less matches but generate more value.

“Better competitions – such as a world club cup, which we support – is the only way to do it, as long as the players and owners are getting the same commercial return as they’re putting in.”

Also linked to this is player welfare, a topic, says Bill, that takes up ten per cent of his time. “Which is quite a lot, when you think of it in the context of your working week and month,” he says. 

The work on concussion is ongoing, but there have been some big leaps forward. “I think saliva testing is a real breakthrough,” he explains. “If you can have a situation where a kid in a community club gets a knock on the head and you can actually just do a saliva test – that you got from your local Boots – to check for concussion, then that’s great.”

One of the biggest positives from his time has been the women’s game. “I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the women’s game’s exploding around the country, wherever you go. 

“Every successful community club has a successful women’s section. it improves the social interaction of the club, it improves the commercial aspects of the club and improves the dynamics of the club. Everyone’s got it now.”

That the women have a clean slate on which to shape their game is a major plus point. “We’ve got the opportunity to manage that gap between tier one and tier two,” he says. “There’s a really positive conversation around professional clubs about making a successful tier one and tier two that are close in competitiveness, and, in the wider game, I think we’ve got a much better chance of influencing the calendar as a whole.”

The England women, fresh from their autumn victories over New Zealand and Canada, are in prime position to add to their world crowns next year and indeed have the talent conveyor belt for a sustained period of dominance. 

Next, he wants that for the men too, to alter the general fan dissatisfaction at England having only ever won a single World Cup. “I’d love to leave behind the best high-performance, world-class system in the world,” he says. “One where we’ve always got a strong chance of winning a Grand Slam and we’re always going to be in the last four at the World Cup.

“And then I can shove it up Steve Hansen’s... ... nose... one day.”   

Story by Alex Mead

Pictures by Nick Dawe

This extract was taken from issue 16 of Rugby.
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