While not in favour of a return to pre-Covid salary caps, Leicester Tigers CEO Andrea Pinchen is on board with ongoing talk of structural changes to the English top flight.
In October, RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney threw the organisation’s support behind a proposed 10-team English Premiership to help solve the financial crisis in the country’s top tier.
Worcester Warriors and Wasps were both forced into administration, leaving 11 teams in the Premiership, while several other clubs are still struggling financially.
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“There is no big secret about it [10-team English Premiership],” Pinchen told BBC Sport. “All the CEOs of the Premiership clubs are on a WhatsApp group. Everyone just says what they think.
“Everyone is like ‘yeah, we agree that 10 is the way to go, as long as it’s not me’.
“How that will work when we are sitting at 11 teams, I don’t know? There is no hidden agenda. They want what is right for the sport.”
The Prem’s salary cap for clubs was reduced following the financial impact of the pandemic, with it currently standing at £5-million (R102.778m).
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It is set to return to £6.4m in 2024, in an effort to retain star players and be more competitive in the Champions and Challenge cups, but Pinchen believes that there has to be financial stability across the board before such a call should be made.
“Personally I don’t think that is right for the game as we sit here today,” she added.
“In any industry, if you looked across the board and everyone was losing a lot of money and had lots of debt to pay back, and you were then increasing the ability to spend – and that everyone will feel a certain pressure to spend if you want to remain competitive and recruit people who want to win and make you successful – then people would look at you as if there was something slightly wrong.”
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