RFU to make youth clubs give every player a chance with half-game rule

Youth rugby players prepare to scrum
The RFU is attempting to stem the flow of 10,000 young players being lost from the game every year Credit: Ian Walton

The Rugby Football Union is demanding that from next season all children included in a match-day squad must play at least half a game.

The RFU is attempting to stem the flow of 10,000 young players being lost from the game every year. The half-game rule, which had been in place as a discretionary measure this season, will become regulation from next season.

It means that all age-grade players, from six to 18, will be guaranteed to play at least half a game.

The initiative was piloted in New Zealand and has since been adopted by the Welsh Rugby Union as well as the RFU.

Research conducted by the University of Essex shows that players who play half a game are six times more likely to enjoy rugby than if they languish on the bench. Yet Steve Grainger, the RFU’s rugby development director, accepts that the measure will prove to be controversial with the win-at-all-costs attitude adopted by some school coaches.

He is prepared for accusations of pandering to “snowflakes”. “I know the negativity that will come,” Grainger told The Daily Telegraph. “They will say, ‘Steve is a really bad player, I just won’t pick him so I’ll have 19 players rather than 20’. Quite frankly, they shouldn’t be coaching rugby.

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“This is about changing attitudes and making parents and coaches think differently. Coaches will have to make decisions about who they start and who finishes.

“We are excited about it. It does all the things you want it to do. There’s nothing worse than players getting only three or five minutes, particularly with rolling subs. They will go away and do something else. If players commit to play junior rugby, then there has to be an expectation that they are going to get at least half a game.

“In no other area of life would you build a delivery model on the people who are running it rather than the people who are consuming it. In sport, certainly in rugby, we have to get loads better at listening to the views of the players and using that to determine the offer of the experience.”

In the transition from school to university or work, English rugby loses an estimated 10,000 players every year.

Some of those may have been happy to give up the sport. But many more have been lost because there was no natural pathway for them to follow after school.

The key, according to Grainger, is to start integrating teenagers into their local clubs so that a 15-year-old school player can become a club player for a further 20 years.

That will involve further attitude shifts from many schools whose obsession with winning tournaments often overrides development opportunities. In a discussion with a group of schools rugby coaches, Grainger’s suggestion that they measure success by how many children kept playing the game was met with stony faces.

“I said, ‘think of it another way: say you are a French teacher and you have spent seven years teaching a pupil to speak French and then they can’t speak a word of French when you meet them again at 25. How would that make you feel?’” Grainger said.

“They said it would be awful. What’s the difference? You have spent all this time and investment trying to develop a rugby player in a technically difficult sport and then they are not playing at 24. Surely that needs to be one of our success factors?”

Rugby must also keep pace with the aspirations and attitudes of the millennial generation. That means providing a higher level of coaching and refereeing as players graduate to 15-a-side at 14. Clubs will also need to allow teenagers to book matches online and even alter their traditional kick-off times. “This generation, some will want to play at 3pm on Saturday, but a huge number of them don’t,” Grainger said. “That’s a culture shift for clubs to get used to the fact that you are playing in a different space at a different time.”

Again that may sit uncomfortably with some. Why should rugby adapt because of the millennials and not the other way around? Grainger’s answer is stark. “It is like Kodak,” he said. “Kodak did not adapt at all and they died. We have this real dilemma going on.

“What we are really conscious of is that there is an increasing likelihood that this generation will want authenticity. How do we become the vinyl of streaming? Vinyl went and everyone said it was dead when people started downloading music and now a whole pile of people want vinyl back.

“What we have got to do is modernise tradition. One of our greatest strengths is our traditions, which are very deep-rooted and valuable. Once you turn them off you can never bring them back. But you have to modernise that and present it in a different way if we want to keep that generation in the game.”