Rwc 2015 To Engage The Country, Says RFU Ceo
Ian Ritchie, chief executive of the RFU, believes that rugby has never had a better opportunity to grow participation and interest in the sport than in the build-up to the Rugby World Cup in England in 2015.
Speaking at the Nolan Partners Sport Industry Breakfast Club in front of a packed room of industry executives at Bloomberg’s central London headquarters, Ritchie laid out the organisation’s Rugby World Cup legacy plans, established in order to grow grassroots engagement and player retention across the sport.
The RFU CEO explained: “What we’ve got is the opportunity to not only hold a fantastic event, but also engage in the community. We’ll never get a better opportunity to grow participation and interest. And if we can get people throughout the country to engage with rugby, then that’s my raison d’être.
“Hopefully we’ll sell 2.9m tickets, and hopefully England will win, but at the end of it, it’s a five-year plan. There’s the 44 days of the event, but we have already announced our plans for a legacy – we need to build the amount of coaches, volunteers, and people within the game, so that if we do end up with queues of children who have been motivated by the World Cup, then we will be able to accommodate them.”
Continuing on the Rugby World Cup in England, interviewer Mark Pougatch questioned the lack of traditional rugby venues in the proposed list for 2015, giving the example of Welford Road missing out in favour of Leicester City FC’s stadium.
However, Ritchie explained: “There was an audit carried out by the IRB about things such as the length of the pitch, and Welford Road is four metres short, according to IRB regulations, for a Rugby World Cup.”
“The second point is, we want to sell 2.9m tickets, so we need larger facilities. For the same reason, lots of Premiership Rugby clubs have used football grounds over the past few years, so I don’t think it will make any difference to the attitude or atmosphere of the competition.”
Ritchie also welcomed the introduction of BT Vision into the rugby broadcasting market. “You have to see it as a positive,” he said. “Anyone who has been involved in buying or selling TV rights over the years wants competition.
“We have partnerships with Sky and the BBC that work very well for us, but it’s a balance between coverage and people bidding, so I just see the arrival of BT Vision as a huge positive and look forward to their commitment.”
In September, the RFU and BMW launched the BMW Performance Academy, which will now form part of the RFU National Academy Programme, and Ritchie stressed that involvement with sponsors is key to the sport moving forward.
“We would rather have fewer sponsors and a clearer message and a clearer opportunity. Recent deals that we’ve done with BMW and O2 have not just been about sticking a banner around a stadium, they’ve been about activation. With Canterbury, when we did the new kit deal, it was very important for us that they recognize the importance of 2,500 clubs in the RFU and whether they could put kit towards that. With sponsorship, everyone wants to see community activation and that’s very much what we want to try and do – no matter how big the sponsor is.”
Ritchie, who worked as CEO of the All England Club as well as on the Board of the Football League before joining the RFU, also called on football to embrace the use of technology in the game, having overseen the successful introduction of Hawk-Eye into tennis.
“I’ve always been a big fan of goal-line technology, why would you not have it? I just didn’t see an argument not to. There’s always that classic battle of ‘tradition’…but I didn’t get a single letter of complaint about Hawk-Eye. It’s been a tremendous success.”
“In any form of sport, if you’re not modern, innovative and thinking to the future, you won’t be able to compete.”
