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Playing budgets for Wales’ four professional clubs are set to increase from £4.5m to between £6m and £6.5m for the 2025/26 season.
Wales’ four professional teams – Cardiff, Dragons, Ospreys and Scarlets – are currently operating under a £4.5m salary cap, meaning they will struggle to compete. The WRU is set to publish its full strategy for football in Wales this autumn, with the future of the four professional clubs at the forefront.
According to the official minutes of a meeting between the Joint Supporters’ Group (JSG), WRU CEO Abi Tierney, executive director of rugby Nigel Walker, communications director Simon Rimmer and Professional Rugby Board (PRB) chairman Malcolm Wall in June, the plan calls for playing budgets to increase to at least £6m per club. This has been agreed by the PRB and they are now working to close the £29m funding gap over five years for the professional game.
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Tierney said a document outlining the future of the professional game would be presented to the WRU board by October to give clubs a “degree of certainty for the 25/26 contract period”. PRB chairman Wall admitted the status quo was untenable but that reducing it to three professional teams was not necessarily the solution.
Currently, there is a funding gap of £1.45m per club per year, while there is also a £20m debt that clubs hope to refinance this autumn with improved payment terms. According to the official account, Tierney claims that professional football spends more money than it earns each year, which is a difference of around £15m.
She says this has been covered by CVC money but that investment will stop in 2026. If this deficit is not reduced the game will become unsustainable. When asked how this funding gap was created, Tierney said Covid had taken away their main source of income at an estimated cost of £30m, while TV revenues were stagnant but costs continued to rise.
Tierney acknowledged that the WRU had not responded quickly enough to the change. If they were to close the funding gap and increase playing budgets to at least £6m per club, Wall said it would not be at the level of the Irish provinces but would give them a “fighting chance” to be competitive.
Wall said they would not spend as much as Irish teams, but the Irish Rugby Football Union wants to keep all its best players in Ireland while the WRU recognises that is not possible in Wales.
The five objectives of the new strategy are to consistently rank the men’s and women’s national teams among the top five in the world, enable club teams to challenge in the play-offs, retain and increase active participation numbers, ensure financial sustainability at all levels of the game and increase the percentage of the Welsh public who are positive about rugby.
In terms of additional revenue, Tierney said the Parkgate Hotel was “performing above expectations but there is a significant mortgage that needs to be paid and the money that is being generated now needs to be retained to maintain the building”. She went on to say that “the hotel is an asset on the books and the money it generates can be used for rugby in the long term”.
