French club rugby’s governing body, the LNR (Ligue Nationale de Rugby) has announced radical new plans (entitled the ‘New Deal’, showcasing France’s bizarre love of anglicised naming devices) designed to improve the Top 14, and by proxy the French international team, from the start of next season.
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The main changes are listed below.
On the pitch:
– a bonus point will be awarded if the losing side finishes within five points of the winning team’s score, rather than seven
– an automatic one match suspension for players that receive three yellow cards over the season
Off the pitch:
– between June and August, the French national team coaches will establish a list of 30 players that will form the French squad for the coming season
– the salary cap will remain at €10 million, but clubs providing players to the national group of 30 will have their salary cap increased by €100,000 per player (e.g. a club providing three players to the France squad will have a salary cap of €10.3 million)
– compensation to clubs providing players to the national set-up will increase from €550 to €1,300 per player per day
– rules surrounding transfer loans will be relaxed, with the aim of getting more young French players playing regular first team rugby
– stricter penalties will be handed down to those deemed to be behaving in a way that ‘undermines the image and spirit of rugby’
The on-pitch amendments are clearly designed to promote more attacking rugby while making the game cleaner. Teams will have to chase the game harder to win a losing bonus point, while the suspension for three yellow cards will hopefully encourage players to be a little less reckless.
The creation of an EPS-style agreement will be music to the ears of the likes of Toulouse coach Guy Noves, who typically provides a large chunk of the national team, and will now have a pretty good handle on which players he will be without for international windows, as well as receiving a healthy bump in terms of compensation.
And if the final two bullet points are fairly vague, they are also promising (unless your surname is Boudjellal). With the salary cap limit set to stay as it is (and even grow for clubs providing players to the French set-up), the number of foreign superstars in the league is not likely to diminish. Making it easier for clubs to loan out young French players, who might otherwise find their path to the first team blocked, is therefore a huge step in the right direction.
What do you make of the new rules in the Top 14? Will they be beneficial to French rugby, or are these needless changes?
Would the bonus point rule change have made a difference this season?
Next season in the Top 14 a losing bonus point will be awarded for being within five points, not seven, of the winning side’s total.
It got us thinking – how much of a difference would the changes have made to the top three Northern Hemisphere leagues this season? We trawled through the season’s results and deducted bonus points on those occasions teams had lost by six or seven points – as will be the case in next season’s Top 14. The results are summarised in the three tables below:
Top 14
Aviva Premiership
RaboDirect PRO12
So what does this tell us? First of all, the Top 14 is clearly the most affected league. With one round left to play, Racing would be in pole position for a spot in the top two and a direct route into the semi-finals, rather than Montpellier or Clermont, who would both lose several points and as a result face a game in the Barrages. Toulouse would be another big loser, dropping out of the top six in place of Stade Français and in the process losing not only a play-off spot but also a guaranteed place at next season’s top European table.
At the other end of the league it would be even more poignant – Oyonnax, in reality tied on 50 points with two other teams, would be almost guaranteed safety if they could grab a single point from their final game, and Perpignan would be comfortable favourites for the drop. Sadly no number of bonus points in the world could have saved Biarritz this season.
In the Premiership, there wouldn’t be any positional changes, but with two rounds still to go it would make the play-off race a whole lot tighter given Quins would edge closer to the Tigers. At the other end of the table the gap between Newcastle and Worcester would be cut by two points – who knows what importance that would have had in the mindset of the players in recent weeks?
The battle for the European play-off spot would also have been intensified, given that Exeter would have closed the gap on Wasps to just three points.
There are no positional changes in the RaboDirect PRO12 either, but at the top the Ospreys’ hopes of a play-off berth would have all but disappeared, given that they would drop two points further behind Ulster. The race to qualify for the Rugby Champions Cup next season wouldn’t be affected much either, but Treviso would sit a little more comfortably over Zebre in that guaranteed Italian spot.
So the Top 14 is the only league that would have been drastically affected, but of course, we are looking at all this with the benefit of hindsight – if teams had known that they needed to be within five to get a bonus point at the time, chances are they would have made different choices on the pitch and the results would have been different. Still, it’s an interesting exercise and one that shows next season’s Top 14 could be quite different.