A World Rugby conference in Sydney next week will discuss how to reinvent the international game, something that can only be achieved by working with clubs too

The Welsh Rugby Union chief executive, Martyn Phillips, has backed calls by Agustín Pichot for action to be taken to secure the future of international rugby, saying the current formula does not have any long-term sustainability.

The WRU has announced a bumper turnover of £97m for the last financial year, up £22m, thanks in part to two Anthony Joshua fights at the Millennium Stadium, four Ed Sheeran concerts and a sell-out fixture against New Zealand. It will drop next year and Phillips expects the £3m profit to turn into a small loss.

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“If you keep running the same formula, has that got any long-term sustainability? My guess is that it will deteriorate and we need to be ahead of the change,” said Phillips, echoing the thoughts of World Rugby’s vice-chairman, Pichot, before a conference in Sydney next week that will discuss the future of the game.

“I was at last week’s meeting with Gus and Brett Gosper [the World Rugby chief executive]. They are marshalling people to be the architects of change and I am excited by that. There is a general recognition that we cannot find the best solution unless unions and clubs work together. We owe it to the game to ensure that happens.

“Very few products can go through life cycles unchanged. The most successful reinvent themselves and cricket is a good example. The opportunity in rugby is not necessarily around different formats but when and how competitions run and their jeopardy are factors. That is the opportunity. We recognise the need for change. The question is how fundamental it has to be.”

Unions throughout the world are under financial pressure, including the richest, England. An immediate problem for the Six Nations is finding a sponsor for the tournament after NatWest filled in last year. Its new chief executive, Ben Morel, does not start work until November, three months before the 2019 championship starts.

“Finding a sponsor is high priority,” said Phillips. “Everyone is operating on quite a thin margin and you want to beat last year’s numbers. We do not want to welcome Ben and give it to him as his first job.” The insecurity over Brexit has not helped but the issue is the value of the deal, not a shortage of interested backers.

It has been revealed in recent weeks that private equity companies have shown an interest in investing both in the Gallagher Premiership, which is run by clubs, and the Guinness PRO14, which is controlled by the five unions involved. World in Union is the slogan of the World Cup but the game has yet to march in one direction.

“If you consider the international, club and community games alone you bring about separation and that is unhelpful,” said Phillips, who in his three years at the WRU has overseen a revival in regional rugby. “I try and view it all as one: what would the optimum season look like for club and international rugby? How do you join it up in a way that works for players, supporters and commercial partners?

“It is not my job to organise that on a global level but in Wales we are close to producing a model that brings the four regions and Wales together. We are setting up a professional rugby board that will be responsible for the five teams as a collective and I hope it will relieve any tension between club and country.

“There is a generational change going on in terms of broadcasting and the way sponsors want to invest in sport is altering quickly. The barriers between the club and international games are breaking down, as they are between the hemispheres. The conditions are there to reinvent the game. There is a window of opportunity that is really exciting and that is why private equity firms are looking at rugby. They can see the potential upside and rugby entities are now thinking they want to lead that change, rather than somebody else doing it to them.

“Private equity invest in something because they believe they can get a return on it. They will have seen something that made it attractive. The model can work in the PRO14. It is about value, everything has a price.”

As the southern hemisphere nations well appreciate, with the Rugby Championship continuing to be played before relatively small crowds. The average gate in this year’s tournament is 33,627, little more than half that of this year’s Six Nations, 66,119.

It is a tournament in which New Zealand are too far ahead of the rest, never mind their defeat by South Africa in Wellington last weekend. The All Blacks’ first match in next year’s World Cup is against the Springboks in Yokohama, and should they be trailing by a couple of points with a minute to go, it is not unreasonable to assume they will attempt a drop goal that they will have prepared for.

Defeat drags New Zealand back towards the chasing pack in the world rankings. Losing to a team which in the previous rounds had been beaten in Australia and Argentina was a jolt but the way the All Blacks play in the Rugby Championship, as they do in Test matches outside tournaments, taking risks rather than kicks at goal, reflects where international rugby currently stands.

The World Cup organisers are considering raising the number of teams that take part in the finals of the tournament from 20 to 24 but what should be of more immediate concern is the game at tier-one level. New Zealand are not pushed enough in the Rugby Championship despite the presence of one of the game’s historic superpowers, South Africa, and Australia, who are returning to the mediocrity they inhabited before the 1980s.

The All Blacks have to make it hard for themselves. Super Rugby has been mostly a breeze for their players in recent years, tested mainly when they play another New Zealand franchise, and the Lions showed last year that when they are stopped at source they struggle to react, so used as they are to having it their own way.

It is only on tour in Europe, on murky, damp November afternoons and evenings, that they have to arm themselves with a measure of control and become strategic. They face England and Ireland on successive weekends in the autumn, matches that will better prepare them for the knockout rounds of the World Cup than frolics in the Rugby Championship: they have scored at least 25 points in their 16 matches in the tournament since the last World Cup, averaging 42, while their average of 33.5 points a match on their last two European tours is inflated by a 68-10 victory over Italy in Rome in 2016.

All the major unions need to look beyond their own borders at the meeting in Sydney. Australia have fallen to their lowest ever position in the world rankings, and no matter how many countries take part in the World Cup finals, there is no prospect of anyone replacing a country that has been in four of the tournament’s eight finals, winning two. If the All Blacks start to slide, and losing players who are either in the national squad or on the fringes, that undermines their Super Rugby franchises, and the Test game will be in trouble.

Phillips’s vision of the international and club games working together is the way forward, the means to protect rugby in the southern hemisphere.

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