Rarely has professional rugby union scanned the horizon with such mixed emotions. In several parts of the world there is a sense of a sport which, financially, requires some fresh impetus to fulfil its potential. That is certainly the mood with England’s leading club owners as they meet on Tuesday to discuss the £275m bid from a private equity firm to purchase a major stake in the Premiership.

This initial offer is set to be rejected but it is just the first example of how times are changing. There will be other plans on the table soon enough, some of them outlandish, others merely contentious. Take European club rugby, for example. The Guardian understands there is a desire in certain influential quarters to reduce the number of competing sides in the Champions Cup from 20 to 16. Only the top five sides each year from the respective three European-based leagues, plus the winners of the previous season’s Challenge Cup, would earn entry. The idea is to make the competition more cut-throat and, theoretically, attractive by ensuring more big matches rather than as opposed to flooding European weekends with wall-to-wall, occasionally mediocre fixtures.

CVC ownership of F1 should serve as a warning to Premiership Rugby | Giles Richards Read more

It is just the start. Another suggestion is for a Ryder Cup-style weekend showdown in mid-June between the best club or provincial teams in Europe and their southern hemisphere counterparts. Imagine the five leading New Zealand Super Rugby provinces coming over to play the top five clubs in England. On the same weekend the three top Australian sides might play in Ireland while the five best South African sides are split between Wales and Scotland. The 13 fixtures would be spread from Friday to Sunday, all of them counting for one point apiece. The first hemisphere to register seven wins would officially be declared the stronger.

Would it capture the public imagination? With international tours now pushed further back in the calendar, the clubs can clearly scent a possible gap in the market. The problem, of course, is that the same players cannot play every week or they will be dropping like muscle-bound flies. The clubs reckon they have an answer to that as well: the squads of the future (some are already doing so) will contain over 60 players to enable them to field competitive teams in the newly recast and expanded Premiership Shield (formerly the A League).

The next step will be to stage these second team games in parallel with the Premiership, thus giving every club a home game – and extra bar income - every weekend. The clubs also want to look again at the issue of promotion or relegation, preferably in a way that does not leave them open to accusations of wrecking the chances of an ambitious club like Exeter or Worcester – or Ealing Trailfinders or Cornish Pirates – ever joining the established elite.

So how about this for a solution: promotion and relegation remains, but with a controversial twist which would see the Premiership Shield morph into the official new second tier of English league rugby. It would contain the 12 Premiership reserve sides alongside London Irish and the next best non-promoted side in the Championship which, last season, was Ealing. If London Irish or Ealing finish top of the heap they would go up; if one of the reserve sides win the league there would be no promotion that year. At the bottom there would also be a play-off to enable the champions of the next level down – maybe Yorkshire Carnegie or the Pirates? – to step up if they prove themselves strong enough to do so.

There are, clearly, conflict of interest problems here. What if Worcester’s second team and a financially beefed-up Ealing were due to meet in the final match of the season with victory set to ensure promotion to the Premiership for Ealing? And what if Worcester’s first team, coincidentally, were the bottom-placed Premiership side on the brink of dropping down from the top tier? It hardly takes a genius to predict that, if the rules permitted, the Warriors would send out their first XV instead.

There will also be many who see it as ring-fencing by stealth, a cosy way of insulating the big boys. They clearly have a point. But, pausing for a moment, imagine how things might look in 20 years. How many Championship clubs currently without their own 20,000-seat stadiums are likely to have one at their disposal in the medium-term future? Do they really want to head down the London Welsh route to potential financial ruin? Assuming there was sufficient compensation forthcoming from the Premiership clubs and/or the RFU might the new system also enable young players outside the academy structure to measure themselves directly against their supposed peers?

And what if, actually, there is no absolute right or wrong, merely a game wrestling with the stark reality that something has to change to make the club game profitable? Many of the owners will maintain that, actually, things are not that bad: even if they have lost somewhere approaching £300m on paper over the years, the valuation of their league at almost £600m – with power to add – suggests it could yet be an investment that pays off.

Like it or not, the clubs are not about to melt quietly back into the shrubbery.

The Breakdown: sign up and get our weekly rugby union email.

Cunning plan

Talking of new initiatives, the Ospreys head coach, Allen Clarke, has come up with a cunning plan to create more space on rugby union’s increasingly congested fields. As so often it is a variation on an innovation which has been a feature of rugby league for years.

It is simple enough: if a player kicks the ball from inside his own half and rolls it into touch in the opponents’ 22, his side will get the throw-in at the ensuing lineout. In theory that would mean defending teams would have to keep their wingers back to guard against conceding set-piece possession in their own half, ensuring fewer bodies (and potentially more space) in the currently packed defensive line. “It would be great to have a pilot scheme, just to see how it affects the game,” Clarke told the Sunday Times. “By taking at least one defender out of that frontline, it’s a different picture altogether.” It certainly rates as the simplest idea to decongest union that anyone has had for a while.

And another thing …

This week four more deserving individuals will be inducted into World Rugby’s Hall of Fame, which appropriately enough is based in Rugby in the English Midlands. Ireland’s Ronan O’Gara, France’s Pierre Villepreux, New Zealand’s Bryan Williams and Wales’s Liza Burgess will all be sworn in, with Australia’s Stephen Larkham also being recognised in his absence. The list spans an encouragingly broad range of different eras and rugby heartlands and also helps to reintroduce some old-time greats to a younger audience. It is a fine initiative with only one drawback: how do you possibly choose between so many deserving recipients?

• This article was amended on 11 September 2018 because an earlier version misnamed Liza Burgess as Liza Williams.