Post by Sean O'Loinsigh on Nov 26, 2024 10:48:34 GMT
Extracted this from The Telegraph as I thought it was a good piece.........
Shameless Bill Sweeney’s £1m payday a damning indictment of RFU lapdogs
Things are now about to get very awkward indeed for the RFU chief executive wherever he goes
Here’s a fun fact: Bill Sweeney’s £1.1 million pay packet is greater than the direct funding the Rugby Football Union provides every year to the 12 clubs in the Championship.
Needless to say, this might make things a bit awkward the next time the governing body pleads poverty in the interminable negotiations over the second tier of English rugby. In fact, things are about to get very awkward indeed for the RFU chief executive wherever he goes.
The RFU may justify Sweeney’s pay bump of 8.5 per cent, as well as a ‘performance-based’ payment of £385,000, on the basis of “stretch goals” in its long-term incentive plan (LTIP) – and if there is one area where the RFU is truly world class it is in its production of acronyms – but not one England supporter who funds the RFU’s largesse towards its executive will pay attention to this corporate gobbledygook.
What they will pay attention to is the record of the England men’s team that lost seven out of 12 matches this year. Or the record £37 million losses that the RFU has just announced alongside Sweeney’s pay packet. Or the most recent round of redundancies among RFU staff. Or the suggestion that he turned a blind eye to accusations Eddie Jones bullied staff (the RFU says it received no complaints about Jones). Or the patronising attitude the RFU has taken to Championship clubs. Or the even sorrier state of the grass-roots game.
Those with slightly longer memories will recall the loss of four professional clubs under his watch. Or the tackle height fiasco. Or the grilling that Sweeney received at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee when he was accused of being “asleep on the job” and a pitch perfect description from committee chair Julian Knight that “frankly, that you seem to be living in isolation in your ivory tower”.
Shameless cash grab
With all this in mind, supporters will see the words ‘performance’ and ‘based’ along with Sweeney’s £1.1 million pay cheque and rightly think this is a shameless cash grab. Even if the RFU’s remuneration committee felt that Sweeney had achieved whatever spurious targets it had set in its “multi-year challenging stretch goals”, it is tone deaf in the extreme to make him the highest-paid chief executive in British sport at a time when much of English rugby resembles a smouldering wasteland. Much like with Tom Curry’s selection two weeks after being knocked out, the RFU is simply incapable of reading the room.
Maybe Sweeney has a list of qualities and achievements that are hidden from public view; maybe his ability to consume canapes is truly world class. There are multiple instances of coaches continuing to pick players based on the performances in practice only to go missing on the pitch. The old ‘train like Tarzan, play like Jane’. Maybe Sweeney is Tarzan behind closed doors.
In my limited dealings with Sweeney, I have found him to be genuinely passionate about grass roots, and especially the women’s game. Most weekends, he will be pressing the flesh in clubhouses up and down the country. He seems mystified by a lot of media negativity. But what is the record of achievement that he can legitimately point to? Another women’s Six Nations title? A men’s under-20s world title? How does that justify a FTSE-level salary for effectively running a monopoly or offering a LTIP which is usually designed to stop a hot-shot chief executive from being poached (Sweeney is 67)?
Even the Professional Game Partnership that the RFU signed with Premiership Rugby, which Sweeney hoped might prove his defining legacy, is increasingly appearing like an inconsequential fiddling of the existing arrangements rather than the “transformational” deal that he promised.
The sums do not add up
None of this is to say that the role of RFU chief executive should not be well remunerated. English rugby supporters should surely want the very best person at the head of their organisation. Nor should they be put in stocks every time the national team loses a match.
But the men’s team drives 80 per cent of revenues and over the past four years they have only once managed to win more than two matches in the Six Nations (three in this year’s competition). That’s a staggering level of underachievement yet, when Steve Brown stepped aside in 2018, he was paid £400,000. The sums do not add up.
I am sure Sweeney will be able to justify this all to himself, as anyone who receives a pay rise in any walk of life would do, by saying it is an overdue recognition of his under-appreciated brilliance. The real blame lies with those who have waved it all through. Like with Tom Ilube, the completely inconsequential chair of the RFU. Apart from a rare sighting in that rugby hotbed of Desert Island Discs, the lesser-spotted Ilube has barely been seen or heard since his appointment in 2021.
Shameless Bill Sweeney’s £1m payday a damning indictment of RFU lapdogs
Things are now about to get very awkward indeed for the RFU chief executive wherever he goes
Here’s a fun fact: Bill Sweeney’s £1.1 million pay packet is greater than the direct funding the Rugby Football Union provides every year to the 12 clubs in the Championship.
Needless to say, this might make things a bit awkward the next time the governing body pleads poverty in the interminable negotiations over the second tier of English rugby. In fact, things are about to get very awkward indeed for the RFU chief executive wherever he goes.
The RFU may justify Sweeney’s pay bump of 8.5 per cent, as well as a ‘performance-based’ payment of £385,000, on the basis of “stretch goals” in its long-term incentive plan (LTIP) – and if there is one area where the RFU is truly world class it is in its production of acronyms – but not one England supporter who funds the RFU’s largesse towards its executive will pay attention to this corporate gobbledygook.
What they will pay attention to is the record of the England men’s team that lost seven out of 12 matches this year. Or the record £37 million losses that the RFU has just announced alongside Sweeney’s pay packet. Or the most recent round of redundancies among RFU staff. Or the suggestion that he turned a blind eye to accusations Eddie Jones bullied staff (the RFU says it received no complaints about Jones). Or the patronising attitude the RFU has taken to Championship clubs. Or the even sorrier state of the grass-roots game.
Those with slightly longer memories will recall the loss of four professional clubs under his watch. Or the tackle height fiasco. Or the grilling that Sweeney received at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee when he was accused of being “asleep on the job” and a pitch perfect description from committee chair Julian Knight that “frankly, that you seem to be living in isolation in your ivory tower”.
Shameless cash grab
With all this in mind, supporters will see the words ‘performance’ and ‘based’ along with Sweeney’s £1.1 million pay cheque and rightly think this is a shameless cash grab. Even if the RFU’s remuneration committee felt that Sweeney had achieved whatever spurious targets it had set in its “multi-year challenging stretch goals”, it is tone deaf in the extreme to make him the highest-paid chief executive in British sport at a time when much of English rugby resembles a smouldering wasteland. Much like with Tom Curry’s selection two weeks after being knocked out, the RFU is simply incapable of reading the room.
Maybe Sweeney has a list of qualities and achievements that are hidden from public view; maybe his ability to consume canapes is truly world class. There are multiple instances of coaches continuing to pick players based on the performances in practice only to go missing on the pitch. The old ‘train like Tarzan, play like Jane’. Maybe Sweeney is Tarzan behind closed doors.
In my limited dealings with Sweeney, I have found him to be genuinely passionate about grass roots, and especially the women’s game. Most weekends, he will be pressing the flesh in clubhouses up and down the country. He seems mystified by a lot of media negativity. But what is the record of achievement that he can legitimately point to? Another women’s Six Nations title? A men’s under-20s world title? How does that justify a FTSE-level salary for effectively running a monopoly or offering a LTIP which is usually designed to stop a hot-shot chief executive from being poached (Sweeney is 67)?
Even the Professional Game Partnership that the RFU signed with Premiership Rugby, which Sweeney hoped might prove his defining legacy, is increasingly appearing like an inconsequential fiddling of the existing arrangements rather than the “transformational” deal that he promised.
The sums do not add up
None of this is to say that the role of RFU chief executive should not be well remunerated. English rugby supporters should surely want the very best person at the head of their organisation. Nor should they be put in stocks every time the national team loses a match.
But the men’s team drives 80 per cent of revenues and over the past four years they have only once managed to win more than two matches in the Six Nations (three in this year’s competition). That’s a staggering level of underachievement yet, when Steve Brown stepped aside in 2018, he was paid £400,000. The sums do not add up.
I am sure Sweeney will be able to justify this all to himself, as anyone who receives a pay rise in any walk of life would do, by saying it is an overdue recognition of his under-appreciated brilliance. The real blame lies with those who have waved it all through. Like with Tom Ilube, the completely inconsequential chair of the RFU. Apart from a rare sighting in that rugby hotbed of Desert Island Discs, the lesser-spotted Ilube has barely been seen or heard since his appointment in 2021.
