The Breakdown | Premiership rugby needs financial fair play now more than ever |

Paul Myners well knows the devastation a financial crisis can cause. He was the finances services secretary to the Treasury when the world recession hit in 2008 and, as he was drawing up his report on the Premiership’s salary cap, sport went into lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. He laced his findings with reminders to a business that was already struggling to become sustainable with timely warnings. “Their long-term financial viability was not assured before this moment,” he said of the Premiership clubs. “It is far less so now.”

Lord Myners viewed the cap as a safety valve against unsustainable losses and, although he was too polite to couch it in such undiplomatic language, he clearly viewed the current regulations as a pile of manure, designed neither to ensure nor enforce compliance.

It was not so much the wording he despaired at as the application, with the clubs who drew them up interfering in the disciplinary process and acting primarily out of self-interest. Breaches before the ones that cost Saracens their place in the top flight were covered up and the process was shrouded in secrecy. As ye sow …

The clubs acted like unions in the amateur era, turning their backs on those who were funding the game– television, sponsors and supporters – and regarded their business as private. Small wonder that Myners dropped into his report the suggestion that Premiership Rugby took a look at its corporate governance.

He came up with a series of recommendations that, if implemented, would place a distance between those who drew up the regulations and those who applied them, strengthening the position of the salary cap manager and drawing club officials, players and agents into the group that needed to be held accountable for any breaches.

He urged his reforms be voted on as a package rather than individually, but that is unlikely to happen because one of his recommendations – that the provision for two marquee players who are paid outside the cap be reviewed – has already exposed divisions within the Premiership. The Bristol owner, Steve Lansdown, said this week he would not support a move to end marquee players, nor any bid to reduce the salary cap, which will be £7m until the end of next season.

“It is clear to me, and to many others within clubs, that the marquee players exemption completely cuts across the objectives of equality and competition and creates unhelpful inflationary pressure on wages,” Myners wrote. “The time is ripe for a review of their continued usefulness.”

A number of clubs, including Northampton, Harlequins and Wasps, agree with him as they try to run their clubs at a time when income has reduced to a trickle and no date has been set on the season’s resumption. With matches likely to be played behind closed doors for some time and fears that a second wave of the virus will disrupt next season, they appreciate that controlling costs will be a priority for at least the next…