The potential future of English club rugby has been laid bare: a breakaway ring-fenced league, ‘tarted up’ trips to America and China, midweek games, more marquee players and a £300million television deal with the likes of Sky and Amazon.

The Mail on Sunday has seen the full 45 pages of minutes from a series of Premiership Rugby board meetings at the Sofitel Hotel in Heathrow Terminal 5 in the build-up to the £200m deal with private equity giant CVC.

Following lengthy negotiations over tax and controlling committees, the funds are expected to kick in during the first months of this year as CVC looks to drag rugby into the ‘21st century’.

Rugby is facing a big shake up as Premiership Rugby lines up a £200million deal with CVC

We could be facing a possible breakaway league, the scrapping of relegation, and rising wages

Their chairman Donald Mackenzie will oversee the project following his controversial investment in Formula One between 2006 and 2016. The then deputy team principal of Force India, Bob Fernley, accused CVC during that time of ‘raping the sport’ in search of profits, and we can reveal that Mackenzie consulted former billionaire F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone before moving into rugby.

Offering his thoughts on the deal for the first time, Ecclestone told The MoS: ‘I spoke to Donald the other day when he was talking about going into rugby and he asked me what I thought. I told him it looked as if it was a very undervalued sport in every way. If you got hold of the guys and tarted them up it would be better than American football. They will grow it to make a profit, I’d have thought.’

It has been named ‘Project Webb’ and, in selling CVC a 27 per cent stake, club chairmen will hand over control of the commercial committee in an attempt to maximise the league’s returns.

In the minutes, Premiership Rugby chairman Mark McCafferty outlines his ‘deep dive’ meetings, and targets are set for a 50 per cent increase in broadcast and sponsorship revenue in 2022.

‘We need to take our sport on to another level and that means going out into the commercial world and exploiting it,’ said Bristol owner and financial services billionaire Steve Lansdown, before the MoS saw the minutes. ‘The deal makes a lot of sense and CVC is a great partner for us to do that with.

There will also be more overseas games, and an attempt to break into China under the deal

‘There’s a brave new world of streaming, social media and sponsorships and CVC is in a great positon to go out and exploit that. The infrastructure, the stadiums, the training facilities, the fan experience; there’s room for improvement across the board. We need to push forwards. This will help us become a major sport on the international stage.

‘Rugby has been a bit of an old-fashioned sport and it’s coming into the 21st century now. I’m sure there will be a few complaints along the way. You don’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. They’ll ruffle feathers and at some point, some people might say “Why did we do this?”

‘To put it bluntly, the sport needs to be shaken up and I think they’ll do that. They are highly incentivised to make it succeed. If they succeed, we succeed.’

CVC partners Pev Hooper and Nick Clarry outlined their business plan, which includes gauging ‘the potential appetite of Sky in due course for the media rights because it recognised it has largely lost its rugby households’.

The Premiership’s £200m broadcast contract is up for renewal and industry expert Andy Sutherden, the global head of sports marketing for H+K Strategies, believes the deal will be the ‘pointy edge’ of CVC’s motivation. ‘The value of TV deals in club rugby are underweight and CVC will want the sport in rude health by 2021 so it can improve its contracts,’ said Sutherden, who worked on the Premiership’s sponsorship deal with Aviva.

‘If CVC succeeds in building a global fan base and attracting a younger fanbase then it is not unreasonable to assume that a 70 per cent increase can be achieved in two years.’

Growing TV clout could lead to occasional midweek fixtures to satisfy the broadcast audience.

‘The deciding factor is how many games you can physically play,’ said Lansdown. ‘We’ve already got Friday, Saturday, Sunday games in the Premiership. Will we see the odd game in the week? Maybe. Television will dictate when we play. That’s happened with football. We will see those habits changing. That may not be best for the fan experience but we’ll get used to it.’

Perhaps more controversial is the collective desire to scrap promotion and relegation. CVC is expected to seek commercial consistency — with high-quality stadiums, training facilities, databases and centralised marketing.

In a meeting last April, club chairmen discussed ‘unilateral action’ following stalling negotiations with the RFU to ring-fence the Premiership. Any breakaway league from the governing body would be hugely disruptive, difficult to execute and would jeopardise the annual £30m Professional Game Board funding from the RFU.

The report highlights collective losses of £25m+ at Premiership level. It also reveals that the RFU has offered a period of four to five years without promotion/relegation — which was last night denied by the RFU — after a review by accountancy firm Ernst & Young concluded that the Championship is not financially sustainable.

Former F1 boss Bernie Eccleston believes the new shape of rugby could be bigger than the NFL

The clubs discussed how change would be controversial and the stakeholders would need to manage ‘external noise’, justify the approach with CVC and be ‘single-minded’ in their execution. The review stated: ‘If the RFU were to be unwilling to support change, we shall need to ensure access to match officials and player insurance cover (as this is a joint policy), as this would potentially become an unregulated competition.’

Asked about scrapping promotion and relegation, Lansdown said: ‘It’s got to happen. You’ve got 13 teams, including London Irish, with infrastructure that reaches Premiership standards.

‘The Championship is a very competitive league but, from a monetary point of view, it’s a total disaster. What I’m in favour of is closing the Premiership but making sure clubs have the ability to be promoted later down the line, probably through a play-off with the bottom team in the Premiership.’

A ring-fenced league will damage the ambitions of aspiring lower league clubs, with former champions Exeter Chiefs being the pin-up success story of a team who have risen through the ranks.

‘Can I ever really be an advocate of stopping promotion and relegation? Deep inside, not really,’ said Exeter chief Rob Baxter. ‘That was a big driver. With the influx of this money from CVC, can I understand why a business investing £200m with 13 shareholders would think differently? Yes, it’s common sense.’

As part of the tax discussions, it was also decided that each of the 12 clubs who have a share in the Premiership would give their £100,000 CVC allocation to Exeter, given the Chiefs’ profitable accounts would result in a significantly lower net receipt from the payment they would receive. In his presentation, Clarry emphasised the importance of expanding the sponsorship base and developing new markets.

CVC found money growing on sand dunes during their previous project in F1 — controversially adding circuits such as Bahrain to the season despite questions about their added value to the overall spectacle. There is a ‘USA Strategy Development’, which includes sourcing US talent.

Lansdown also believes there is potential in the Chinese market, saying: ‘We’ve already tried the States a little bit. It needs the right promotion and the right marketing. CVC I hope will be good for expanding the game. If that takes us to the States and China, that’s a good thing. That’s where the money is and where the people are.’

They will look to boost the clubs’ social media presence, which according to sports agency Esportif is lower than teams in France and the Pro14. Esportif figures also show a multi-million-pound revenue deficit between English and French clubs which, in part, comes down to sponsorship deals.

Hannah Bowe of Esportif said: ‘If you consider the English Gallagher deal versus the French deal with Orange, SocGen and Land Rover, then those numbers are pretty different. If you look at French shirts you can potentially see why there is a revenue difference.’

Only time will tell what the impact will be on the national team. According to Sutherden, Premiership clubs could be allowed to sign up to four marquee players if CVC decides to follow the Premier League model of having the best talent on one stage.

‘There probably will be a change in the wage structure,’ said Lansdown. ‘If you’re selling rights to be the best league in the world, then you have to have the best players in the world.

‘It’s happened in football. I see salaries going up, unfortunately. Those players also make your home-grown players better. However, we also have to guard against a Chelsea situation where you have 50 or 60 people on your books who close the pathway for local players. The game has got to aim for the stars, hasn’t it? If we don’t, we’ll just bumble along.’