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Stacks of cash under the bed and £6,000 transfer fees: Community rugby’s ‘Wild West’
Special report: Semi-professional status brings ambiguity and player payment is the subject of whispers up and down the country
Charlie Morgan,
SENIOR RUGBY WRITER
17 April 2024 • 12:00pm
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Community rugby special report lead image
The issue of player pay and salary caps is a thorny one in the lower tiers of English rugby CREDIT: Custom image
The accusations began back in September, about half an hour into the first competitive game of the season. Having just been promoted into the seventh tier of English rugby union’s league system, Teddington stormed out of the blocks against Hove, only for their opponents to begin sneering: ‘Phwoar, how much are you paying?’
A 72-17 victory set the tone for Teddington’s campaign in two different ways. Firstly, they kept winning, securing another promotion. But they would also continue to cop similar jibes.
“Every week, it’s been: ‘You haven’t won the league, you’ve bought it,” explains Teddington’s fly-half, Bob Beevers.
To the uninitiated, this may seem like an odd allegation - but player payments all the way down rugby’s pyramid are rampant. And, according to the gossip swirling around the Counties 1 Surrey/Sussex league, Beevers is paid £500 per game. This very claim was made independently to Telegraph Sport about a month ago.
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“Other than playing at Twickenham last year, that could be the highlight of my rugby career, people thinking that this slightly pot-bellied fly-half is on £500 a week,” the 35-year-old Beevers laughs. “I’d gladly take it, but it’s not the club we are.”
Teddington insist they do not pay players. However, chatter swells quickly. History is littered with clubs bounding up the pyramid before hurtling back down – and sometimes disappearing entirely – when cash runs out.
The issue of player payment in the men’s ‘community game’, defined as the third tier and below, is causing exasperation around the country, and a murky omerta shrouds the area.
Semi-professionalism is inherently ambiguous, and players are thought to have received as much as £300 in match fees in the eighth tier. Others have been persuaded to move clubs over a £20 difference in match fee. Telegraph Sport has even been told of a transfer saga that saw a £6,000 sum exchanged between two fifth-tier teams.
One interviewee recalled a prop, still in his kit, being passed an envelope containing £300 by a sponsor on the touchline. The former skipper of a side in National 1 stockpiled a stack of £50 notes, worth around £10,000 in total, under his bed. Some particularly creative money men are even thought to cover their squad’s phone bills and weekly shops.
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“It’s more than the Wild West; it’s deliberately destructive to itself,” was one scathing description of the current semi-professional landscape, where it is not unheard of for players to ask fourth-tier clubs for sign-on bonuses.
Given three Premiership clubs and the professional arm of Jersey RFC, who had just topped the Championship, have all unravelled since September 2022, how can so much money be sloshing around lower leagues?
Teddington Rugby Club celebrate a victory over Eastbourne
Teddington celebrate winning the Surrey 1 title after beating Eastbourne in March CREDIT: Simon Ridler
‘Salary cap’ workarounds
National 1, the third tier, should widely be considered a jewel of English rugby. John Inverdale, chairman of National League Rugby and former BBC presenter, argues that the division’s “commitment and quality” means players “deserve to be remunerated.” The division spans from Devon, where Plymouth Albion is situated, up to Darlington Mowden Park. Travel alone for teams is an expensive slog.
A ‘soft’ salary cap operates in the community game, with the RFU designating upper limits (‘thresholds’) for spending on players, known as ‘gross payments’, at each level. Clubs must submit declarations, and breaches are punishable by withdrawing benefits such as travel support. The RFU’s ceiling for the third tier is £250,000 with a supplementary £25,000 towards two player-coaches. For the fourth tier – the three branches of National 2 – that goes down to £125,000 plus £20,000 on player-coaches.
Regional 1, or tier five, allows for a £50,000 threshold with £15,000 more towards player-coaches. In the sixth tier and below, no official payment is permitted to players, save for a single player-coach being allowed £10,000. Reading the small print helps because any ‘material benefit’ must – or should – be declared. Clubs can build an on-site gym, for instance, but not give out memberships to commercial gyms without that being classed as a material benefit. They can provide food at training, but not money for food.
Expenses are allowed, which is one way these rules are bent. One source explained that one of his old clubs, in the sixth tier that season, used his family address in Cardiff – 152 miles away – to legitimise a match fee of £160. He believed that seven team-mates were on similar deals at a level where, officially, only £10,000 on a player-coach is authorised.
Competitive clubs will push boundaries, and this has been exacerbated by the widespread feeling that RFU benefits have become negligible since the pandemic, thereby weakening any incentive to stay below the salary thresholds.
That said, it is too primitive to tarnish payments universally as a bad thing. Match fees could keep someone in the game who would otherwise be lost to weekend shift work, for example. And not everyone sacrifices sustainability at the altar of player payments.
Havant are bound for the fourth tier and considering whether and how to introduce remuneration. Rams have an annual wage bill of around £140,000 and have just finished second in National 1 for the second consecutive season. Spokespeople from both clubs stressed the importance of solid infrastructure in case revenues dry up. Relying on a single benefactor is perilous…
Charlie Robson scores a try for Rams
Charlie Robson scores for Rams in a 19-13 over Richmond CREDIT: Paul Clark
When a ‘sugar daddy’ disappears
In 2015, Hamish Barton moved to Old Elthamians, who had risen impressively from a spot in the seventh tier to National 2 South. There was ambition, driven by director of rugby Gavin Lach, and big backing from Kobus Paulsen, a businessman specialising in cybersecurity.
Heavy spending and a distinctive set-up – the club played home matches at Eltham College on a pitch 100m away from the changing rooms – formed a “very powerful siege mentality”. There were boot deals, free trainers and free kit. When Old Elthamians earned promotion to National 1, there was even a fully funded trip to Marbella. There is no suggestion payments went above the permitted threshold.
Match fees were generous, which makes it no surprise that Old Elthamians picked up players coming out of the Premiership and Championship. “When I started at OEs, I think it was £100 a game and £100 a win,” Barton continues. “Then, by the end, it was £150 a game and £150 a win with various retainer payments in there as well. When I completed the full pre-season, I was given five grand and then another five grand when I’d played 10 games and then another at 20 games. I think there was another clause for a bonus point of another £50.
“It all used to be paid in cash on the second Thursday of every month, and you’d get an envelope with £50 notes in. I remember when I’d been there about 18 months, I’d stored all of the cash under my bed – literally. My wife was looking for something under there once, found this stash of envelopes full of £50 notes and was like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It was like: ‘Ah yes, that’s my rugby income.’”
“An existential rise and fall” is Barton’s concise overall reflection. Old Elthamians would have reached the Championship had they beaten Ampthill in March 2019. Then, in December of that year, Paulsen died. The money was tied up in probate. Solicitors’ letters flew around, and players drifted away. One coach was left £45,000 out of pocket.
East Grinstead, who shared a league with Teddington this season, are another tale of boom and bust. Gavin Gleave, director of rugby and chief investor there until a dispute with committee members saw him pull out in 2016. He estimates that he spent around £500,000 guiding the club that he and his three sons represented up to National 3 London & South East, the fifth tier, spending within the allowed thresholds.
His vision was for East Grinstead to develop in its advantageous location, 10 miles from Gatwick Airport with “no Premiership or Championship club as far as the eye could see”.
Adam Clayton captained East Grinstead for the final two seasons before Gleave left the club, and coaches like Justin Bishop, the ex-Ireland wing, joined. Payment for players, including an influx from New Zealand, varied depending on experience and negotiation. Clayton “absolutely loved” his spell at East Grinstead, while Gleave maintains that his maximum match fee was £125, with most players picking up solely £25-£100 in expenses. He helped players into jobs, too, and makes one point that resonates with multiple sources: “A big thing was players being able to puff their chest out at work and say ‘yeah, I get paid to play on a Saturday’. It’s an ego thing, isn’t it?”
The end was shaped by plans to install an artificial pitch intended to “wash its face over a period of time” thanks to rental agreements. Serving the local community was vital to Gleave. Fundraising stalled, though, and resistance to change from influential non-playing members eventually won out. Six months before the end of the 2015-16 campaign, Gleave resigned himself to cutting ties. “It was gut-wrenching for a lot of people,” he admits.
An urban legend tells of Gleave visiting the Saint Hill ground and taking radiators off the walls. He welcomes the chance to set that record straight. “I’d put a bar and a gym in there,” Gleave said. “When we left, the scoreboard still had two of the sponsors I was involved with [on it]. They took the plyboard down. That was it.” The upshot was East Grinstead taking a hiatus and resuming in Sussex 1, at level nine, for 2017-18.
Race to the ‘top’
Spending generates ripple effects, as Gareth Lewis has found out. The Rotherham Titans head coach has been involved in semi-professional rugby union since 1998. As a coach and director of rugby with Huddersfield for a decade up until last year, he witnessed a great deal.
“We had one of the lower budgets in National 2 [at Huddersfield], and we did punch above our weight quite considerably,” Lewis explains. “But it was very difficult to recruit and retain a playing squad. In Yorkshire alone, it’s very competitive, and you have a lot of teams at that level – Otley, Wharfedale, Harrogate, Rotherham and now Leeds. There’s a small pool of players, and keeping them was very difficult.”
Money distorts the natural order of things, rendering a club’s level less significant than its paying power. “There are numerous examples I’m aware of in Yorkshire where clubs are paying considerable match fees at levels seven and eight – payments of £200-300,” Lewis continues. “I’ve seen players leave clubs for £20 more per game. It is crazy.”
Further up the leagues, players can be coaxed out of the ‘fully professional’ grind for healthy match fees that complement a nine-to-five job. “You hear of Championship players on full-time salaries of £12,000,” Lewis says. “You could fully understand why someone would get a full-time job in the city and supplement that with a semi-professional contract at one of the London clubs, perhaps.”
Gareth Dyer had two separate spells as director of rugby at Preston Grasshoppers before stepping back in 2022. A mass defection was so dispiriting that it tipped him over the edge. “We’d got promoted back into National 2 and had a nice, young squad,” he says. “I was excited. Then four players left because they could double their money from £150 a game to £300 a game.”
“I’ve got a job and a young family, and I was spending too long thinking about this nonsense,” Dyer adds. “You wake up at two or three in the morning agonising over certain decisions. Should I pay them more? Can I get this player from that club to replace them for less money? Can we increase our budget by taking money from elsewhere in the club? And I just thought, ‘why am I doing this?’”
Recounting one episode, centring upon a three-year contract for a player in the fifth tier, causes Dyer to laugh, as though he is still struggling to believe it: “We found a player, put him on about £170 a game on a three-year contract. The next thing is that he knocks on the door saying that he wants to move closer to home, bearing in mind he is only travelling 15-20 miles to play with us. We all knew he’d been offered a lot more money to move to the other club, which was Rossendale.”
Dyer recalls Rossendale engaging the RFU, who told them the contract was legally binding. Rossendale would have to buy out its value. “That came to £6,000, effectively a transfer fee, and it was paid,” Dyer says. “It was just absolutely ridiculous.” Yet the trend continued. Over Dyer’s tenure, similar situations cropped up half a dozen times. Preston, who “played hard ball”, received around £13,000 in transfer fees.
Such was the arms race over players that Preston needed to protect their prolific junior section and found themselves “in a battle” to retain 15-year-olds who were already being tapped up by local rivals. “It felt like mayhem, really,” Dyer says. “It’s more than the Wild West – it’s deliberately destructive to itself.”
As if to accentuate the vicious cycle, Ian Jackson, the chairman of Tarleton, at level seven, claims Preston are a club that “preys” on his squad. “When they’re offered 50 or 100 quid a week, players think ‘after a season, I’ll have a thousand pounds and I can take my girlfriend on holiday’,” says Jackson, who prioritises coach trips to every away game – which costs around £6,000 a year – over paying players.
“What they sometimes fail to realise is that they might end up in a second or a third team, where you don’t get paid and which doesn’t have the same level of support and coaching as there is at their original club. Or they get injured and put on the scrap heap, so they leave. You’ve got short-termism from coaches, who don’t give a s---, so they’ll scattergun. Players get p----- off, and they leave the game.”
Other stories told to Telegraph Sport include the level six club experiencing “a huge divide” because the first team, who were relegated in 2023, gets paid, and the second team does not. Training, which doubles up as a selection shop window, can get spicy, and players have made themselves available for one team and not the other.
Somewhere else, a player left a non-paying club for another, six miles down the road and five levels up the pyramid. There, he was promised £150 a game for the first team and £50 for the seconds. After a few bench appearances in the seconds, he returned to his original club. When they went to re-register the player, they found that the bigger spenders had never even registered him because there was no intention of picking him for the first team.
Initially, Dyer hoped that Covid had brought about a recalibration. Soon enough, the expectations of players rose. “A well-paid player was getting £250 in National 2 in the north west,” he says. “Suddenly, that was well above £300 and became the baseline.”
The concept of “player power” and paying policies were raised by a different source connected to a fourth-tier club: “I’m getting front-rowers say that they’re worth £250 a game. Is the market just what you can afford, or is it what the club next door will pay? Do you condense payment into key positions or is it the whole team?”
Although the prevailing feeling is that retainers are increasingly rare, with pay-to-play match fees more popular and manageable, Dyer suspects that “a lot of clubs have done things like putting players on £100 per week and paying ‘boot money’ on top separately. They’ve just wised up on how to take the heat off themselves.
Taxation responsibilities and the amount of sponsor activity declared remain delicate areas, too. As ever, for the landscape to untangle, the issue might have to be forced.
Solutions needed
Building momentum without paying players must feel, at times, like a quest to capture lightning in a bottle. Success breeds success, and circumstances are instrumental. Teddington, who say that paying players would cripple them, have been helped by university graduates’ relocation to London. Their seniors now train once a week, which has proved popular, and aim to foster a welcoming atmosphere. Whether they pay or not, all clubs also bid to create a unique selling point, such as coaching quality or premium facilities.
In response to this report, the RFU acknowledged the challenge of monitoring player payments and encouraged anyone suspecting contraventions to contact them. They also insisted that they carry out spot checks and review regulations consistently.
The push to improve operating standards, which would theoretically act as a check of promoted teams’ infrastructure, will be discussed at an RFU Council meeting on Friday and was also highlighted by a spokesperson from the union: “Driving up operating standards and supporting facility investment within leagues and clubs is also important for financial sustainability; something we have been working on with the Championship clubs with a view to enhancing the league, driving commercial interest and attracting new fans to ensure the revenue to support player payments.”
Inverdale voices this more robustly. He believes it is finally time for rugby union to grow up. “You go back to 1987, when the leagues were set up,” he says. We should have thought about what that would mean. All of these conversations should have been thrashed out and set in stone. That was almost 40 years ago. The fact that we are still having this conversation is palpably absurd.
“It was always a very glib line in the early 2010s: ‘Oh, rugby union is the recalcitrant teenager that hasn’t got itself together yet’. Then, when it was 21 years on from 1995, [professional] rugby was in its final years at college trying to find itself.
“If you want to use that analogy, the game is now approaching 30. It’s getting married, having children and doing responsible things. And it still doesn’t think it’s important to have a grandstand to sit in. This is not good enough.”
Speaking to people around the country about player payments, you cannot help but be humbled by the enduring passion for rugby union and the dedication on which the community game runs. Yet intrinsic issues of semi-professionalism remain problematic. It is hard to blame the players for being compensated, but payments down the rugby pyramid must be scrutinised as fiercely as possible.
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