Amateur rugby clubs ‘drowning’ as RFU chief cuts £1.1m pay

The Finchley RFC clubhouse is bustling with activity: men, women and children coming and going, laughing and joking, jostling at the bar, stroking the heads of well-behaved dogs.

We discuss the foundations of a container intended to house a pile of donated gym equipment, plates of curry handed out to first and second team players returning from matches under cold but clear skies, and, damn it, as Have you heard about Lily, the 17-year-old joining the England Under-18s next week? “Well done, Lily, we couldn’t be more proud!”

So, is now the time and place to introduce the subject of Rugby Football Union executive remuneration? The publicity has been fierce since English rugby’s governing body published its annual report three weeks ago.

An emergency meeting of the RFU Council will debate the scale and methodology of rewards on Wednesday, such as chief executive Bill Sweeney receiving a £358,000 incentive bonus on top of his £742,000 salary , for a salary of £1.1 million.

Rumors of votes of no confidence abound. The RFU’s operating loss totaled almost £40 million in a consistently difficult World Cup year. They insist that the underlying figures are robust and that “participation figures are now stable, post-Covid”.

And yes, here this Saturday, in this elegant but small clubhouse, they want to have the debate – and with a lot of common sense.

Finchley RFC Chairman George Loureda is Chief Engineer for the London Borough of Camden. He understands the world and the sport which is his passionate hobby.

His reaction is not the instinctive kind and is therefore all the more beneficial for the well-paid guys at Twickenham.

“It’s so detached from reality, from our point of view, it’s almost laughable,” Loureda says.

“It’s absurd; it has no relation. One million pounds is the lifetime achievement of our entire rugby club and a whole community of united volunteers. £300,000 bonus? There is clearly a contractual arrangement, and someone has approved it. I don’t think the rank and file would have approved of it.

The majority of incentive bonuses paid to RFU executives were linked to financial performance; furthermore, they achieved an unstated target on ‘community rugby participation for men’ while failing on ‘community rugby participation for women and girls’ and ‘rugby inclusion’.

Each of those latter three areas was only worth a maximum of 10 per cent of the payout anyway – but those are the specialties of Finchley and hundreds of clubs like them.

“Of course, pay people and attract top talent,” Loureda says, “but there has to be merit behind it.”

Formed in 1925, Finchley is in its centennial season. In the boom years they ran seven men’s teams here in the north London suburbs. Now it’s first and second men, a women’s team and occasional vets.

Yet the commitment is vast. On the main field, as Finchley narrowly lost to amateurs Ealing in an entertaining level seven match, Bryden Fraser, 43, was a head prop for fun and an electrician by trade: his company van is parked behind the posts and he drags the boys here too.

Then there is Lily Pereira Dos Santos. When her Brazilian father died, her South African mother sought help to channel her daughter’s energies and emotions. Lily found Finchley and Finchley acquired a talent. They had to sew up the holes in his boots first, but that was no obstacle.

The Finchley girls’ section started four years ago, when Chris Grilli brought his two daughters and his friend Nick Jordan brought one, and they added three friends to make an initial group of six.

Today there are 80 girls split into four age groups, and some of them have parents who earn millions of pounds, while others have very little, hopping on two buses and a tube to get to training from Tottenham.

Once they arrive, they are all equal and full of spirit. The under-16s reached the National Cup final in Worcester last season and the girls bought flowers for their opponents. In a recent Middlesex under-18 team, half of the 34 players were from Finchley.

And it’s great, and everyone says women and girls are the area where English rugby is going to grow. But let’s not blithely overlook another important point: Finchley doesn’t abandon anyone.

Almost half of their under-11s are completely new to the sport. Loureda says: “We have a state school nearby in Mill Hill that does a great job, and maybe the RFU just want them to train players, because they don’t have to pay.

“But we work with other schools, and the support base for national rugby is at the grassroots clubs. They are the ones who will get the international tickets and watch it on TV. That’s where kids fall in love with the game.”

As if by chance, a father comes to the table where we are discussing: can he bring his son tomorrow morning? Loureda exchanges cell phone numbers and the next day, the 13-year-old boy is there and his first weeks will be free. (Eventually, annual subscriptions of £200 will apply.)

The same morning, a six-year-old Iranian refugee plays his first game of tag; staying in a hotel, he revels in the outdoor space of Finchley. The decision not to charge the refugees began when they opened their doors to Ukrainians.

It’s not like Finchley has no connection to the higher-ups. Debs Griffin, the next president of the RFU, played here. A former MP member organized a match between the Commons & Lords team and Finchley at Twickenham in March.

The cost is £15,000. No problem, says Loureda – they’ll charge each player £300. No one here needs to be told how to make ends meet – not when the club’s total annual turnover is around £100,000. New deal with mouthguard supplier Opro earns 10 percent commission; that’s maybe £300 in income.

The RFU is providing money, with grants totaling £15,000 possible for improvements to facilities and social spaces, linked to next year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup in England.

But that raises another question. “Before, there were bigger subsidies,” explains Loureda. “We had £40,000 for drainage, £40,000 for main floodlights and £30,000 in matching funding for the changing rooms. These amounts are no longer available.

And with 40 redundancies underway among Twickenham’s 500 staff, Loureda laments the past withdrawal of rugby development officers and community coaches from the RFU.

“I never saw anyone from the RFU, apart from one or two subsidized people to make sure we had done the job properly. We need a regional liaison who says, “George, how are you, where do you want support”?

Almost everyone in Finchley volunteers. The first-team coach is paid per session, bar staff are paid minimum wage and expenses are paid to a physiotherapist who works for the NHS.

The club’s website lists 24 sponsors, but most of their payments are in kind. A searchlight pylon blew up in recent storms, and Fraser will take a look. The pretty bar is the work of a graphic designer member, another donated the mirror.

The red seats in the second grade stand were inherited from Arsenal. A separate toilet block for the girls would be great, the second team pitch could benefit from better lighting, and maybe an artificial surface next to it etc.

In 2023-24, the RFU invested £65.6 million per year in professional rugby, and less than half (£30.5 million) in the community game. The lesson here is surely to feed London’s fertile base with a flood of resources.

One of Finchley’s volunteer coaches chimes in: “The interesting question is: what is the RFU for? If it’s just about keeping that ball in the national team’s air, but everything is hollowing out underneath, where is it going?

“The English rugby pyramid can only reach as high as the base is wide. And if you don’t have a durable base, it evaporates. Someone needs to point out that we’re drowning, that we’re not waving, and that we’re not the only ones.