Louis Rees-Zammit's NFL move is a warning for rugby union, but will it listen - Nick Westby

Barely two months have passed since Rees-Zammit, one of the brightest prospects in British rugby union, sensationally quit the Wales national team on the eve of the Six Nations to pursue his dream of playing American football professionally.

Two months later he has reportedly signed with an NFL team. And not just any NFL team. The very best NFL team, the Kansas City Chiefs, who have won the last two Super Bowls and three of the last five.

From catching passes on the Welsh wing to catching passes from Mahomes, the poster boy of the NFL, in just eight weeks.

That is the eye-catching headline anyway. The reality is a bit further off.

Rees-Zammit has progressed through the NFL’s international player pathway via a 10-week crash course to get up to speed on one of the more technical team sports.

He is expected to sign on to the Chiefs practice squad and has a number of hurdles to overcome before even getting close to the final 53-man roster the Chiefs will start the season with.

Yet the fact he has got as close as this so quickly, should be cause for concern for the game of rugby union.

Rees-Zammit has made it look easy and given others a blueprint to follow.

How many more of the game’s stars will look at what Rees-Zammit has done and wonder if they could do the same?

The English game is already coming to terms with a player exodus of its own.

Owen Farrell is one of a host of players turning his back on the ailing English club game to earn more lucrative contracts playing in France.

Farrell will move to Stuart Lancaster’s Racing 92 in the summer, while Manu Tuilagi is headed to Bayonne, and Kyle Sinkler and Lewis Ludlum are headed to Toulon.

They follow Jack Willis, Jack Nowell, Sam Simmonds, Henry Arundell, David Ribbans and Joe Marchant in crossing the Channel in recent seasons.

None of them can play for England under the Rugby Football Union’s strict guidelines that prohibits overseas players from representing England.

English rugby is suffering a talent drain.

Rees-Zammit’s rapid NFL rise merely heightens the concern about players looking elsewhere and should have alarm bells ringing from Twickenham to Dublin, Cape Town to Cardiff.

Will anyone heed the warning?

Four professional clubs went to the wall in the space of a season in English rugby’s top two tiers, three of them long-established clubs in Wasps, Worcester and London Irish. Jersey Reds followed them by over-spending in pursuit of the Premiership dream.

Nothing was done about that, no dramatic government intervention, not even a governing body warning of doom or call to arms, save for the press releases about how worrying it was.

The RFU have looked to the Championship as the scape-goat, threatening the teams therein with an ultimatum that you either sign up for a Premiership 2 or risk having funding cut completely.

Funding has already been slashed considerably over the last few seasons, from £600,000 per annum for each club to £160,000.

The Championship clubs, unsurprisingly, are kicking off and fighting back.

Steve Boden quit as director of rugby at Doncaster Knights, Yorkshire’s sole Championship club, in part because of his total lack of faith in the direction the game is headed.

Another warning sign that appears to have gone unheeded.

All this against the backdrop of players like World Cup winner Steve Thompson filing a class action lawsuit against rugby union’s governing bodies over brain injuries. The players are seeking damages from World Rugby, the Rugby Football Union (RFU) and the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) for negligence and failing to protect them.

How has this affected participation?, I asked Mark Saltmarsh, England’s national player pathway manager when the England national team visited York for a mid-Six Nations open training session earlier this month.

“We understand that concern,” replied Saltmarsh. “Our No 1 priority is safety, player welfare, even more than ever. In the age-grade game we really focus on training coaches and teachers, a lot of them are volunteers and parents, so it’s about giving them as much support as we can.”

Teaching kids about the tackle height from the outset is the theme, and Saltmarsh’s response and the RFU’s strategy was a reassurance that they are tackling - pun intended - that particular looming crisis head on.

Rugby union has plenty of uplifting stories that counter the financial concerns and players defecting.

Just this week, hearing tales from Alan Care after his son Danny retired from international rugby three weeks after becoming only the sixth Englishman to make 100 appearances for his country.

So is the return of former Leeds Carnegie player Andy Titterrell this weekend, taking charge of the England Under-20s team to take on France in front of 2,000-plus at Castle Park (see his interview on Page 6).

The amount of clubs represented at the first Yorkshire conference on rugby union in Doncaster last September. There must have been 100-odd from Doncaster Knights at the top all the way down to clubs in Yorkshire Four - the majority fielding men’s and women’s teams, boy and girls colts and minis - all with their issues like standard and treatment of referees, facilities and funding, but all united by their love for the game.

The stories of Nia Parsonage and Elena Bunbury, two trailblazing women who are refereeing men’s games, who were featured in The Yorkshire Post a year ago.

Rotherham Titans and Leeds Tykes duking it out at the top of National Two North, neither side willing to give an inch in pursuit of the one promotion spot on offer. Yes it’s the regionalised fourth tier, but just be pleased to see two proud names who nearly went to the wall looking upwards again.

And back to that day in York when Steve Borthwick brought Care and the rest of the England squad up for an open training session in front of nearly 8,000 people, many of them kids who had bunked off school, many of them mums and dads who had phoned in sick.

Their love for the game shines through but is not unconditional.

There are many issues rugby union needs to sort out at the very top of the game.

There have been enough warning signs. Rees-Zammit catching passes from Mahomes is just the latest. Hopefully the last.