'We need more central funding': Doncaster Knights president Steve Lloyd on Champ Rugby rebrand

The Rugby Football Union’s Tier 2 Board unveiled plans this week for a rechristened Champ Rugby which will bring back promotion and relegation play-offs to a division that for too long has been overlooked.

The Tier 2 Board has reimagined the league as “the proving ground”, seizing on the fact that a number of players selected by Andy Farrell for this summer’s British and Irish Lions squad played in the Championship on their journey to the top.

By reintroducing promotion and relegation play-offs - the latter should be music to the ears of the once-more upwardly-mobile Rotherham Titans and Leeds Tykes - into a 14-team league they are hoping that jeopardy and aspiration will increase bums on seats and the profile of the league.

But the big hurdle to overcome is actually gaining entry into the Premiership, that for clubs like Doncaster and the now two-time champions of the second tier, Ealing Trailfinders, has for too long felt like a closed shop. Indeed, of the 13 clubs to have played in the Championship over the past two seasons, it is only Doncaster that have passed the RFU’s minimum standards criteria to gain promotion.

Even though it would make his own team’s chances of winning promotion more difficult, Lloyd wants to see more clubs passing the audit and given a chance of breaking the glass ceiling. Simon Gillham, the chair of the Tier 2 Board, said on Thursday: “we’ve had discussions and an oral commitment to revisit those minimum operating standards because what happened this year (with Ealing) was not satisfactory.”

He also said that he wants clubs to receive more central funding but gave no definitive answer on how much that would be. Over the last half decade central funding has been cut from £600,000 to £160,000 per club. Gillham said an increase would be dependent on “several parameters which are sponsorship, gates, discussions with the RFU”.

But Lloyd is urging the governing body to back this new venture with a greater initial outlay to the clubs.

“In business you speculate to accumulate, if you think something is a good idea then you back it,” Lloyd told The Yorkshire Post.

“Whether that’s equal funding over a year or two, or diminishing funding as commerciality kicks in, it’s absolutely essential.

“Let’s not forget the drop - it was more than £600,000 when you added in what Premier Rugby gave us, it was more like £750,000.

“We lost all of that bar 100-and-odd thousand in two tranches. The first tranche we were told we weren’t meeting requirements, but nobody knew what those requirements were, and that stung a bit.

“Then several months later Covid came and we were all willing to take another cut, and we were told that would be replaced when Covid went away. When it went away we asked for that secondary reduction of another £150,000 to come back to the clubs. In recent times we’ve found that others that had the reductions have got it back, but the Championship hadn’t, and that was a really poor decision.

“And Premier Rugby funding disappeared altogether. It left a bad taste in the mouth.

“So the RFU, and Premier Rugby to some extent, should play a part in creating a healthy second tier.”

Doncaster are in the unique position of satisfying the minimum standards criteria set out by the RFU, relating primarily to ground size and infrastructure.

But in order for Champ Rugby to be a success, Lloyd knows the league needs more than just themselves and their Castle Park home to be a viable Premiership option.

“If the winners are Ealing again next year, and if they qualify, then yes they should be allowed up, we shouldn’t be discriminatory about who can go up,” he said. “If you can’t lose you’ve got no right winning.

“That’s what we fight for and that’s what creates the jeopardy that the crowds actually love. I’d wish any other team luck - but we’re working damn hard to make sure it’s us.”

Lloyd has already made public that having got the audit, next year he wants his club to cash it in and they are already assembling a squad he hopes is capable of doing that, under the continued guidance of the high-profile coaching duo of Sir Ian McGeechan and Joe Ford.

Doncaster have shown their potential in a recent run of seven wins in a row that has rescued a hitherto underwhelming season and taken them up to fifth. Fast forward to next season, Sunday’s trip to third-place Hartpury will have play-off seedings riding on it.

“The play-offs are an incentive for the boys that are playing but also an incentive for the crowd to come and watch it,” said Lloyd.

“Our crowd is trickling up, it’s not going up as fast as we’d like, but this is where our argument comes with the ground capacity: why put 10,000 seats in if you’re not filling five?”

He concluded: “The Championship needed a rebrand. The acid test now is whether they can use that rebranding with commerciality, media, TV, streaming, to get the matches out there in front of people.”