England duo Courtney Lawes and Ellis Genge have suggested making the wages of all English clubs public, in an effort to grow the game and enable a fairer pay structure across the league.
Appearing on The Good, The Bad & The Rugby podcast, the players claimed that the insistence on making the subject of salaries ‘taboo’ is hurting the game commercially.
“If you compare us to some of the other major sports – football, even cricket, tennis, stateside you’ve got a lot of different sports – we’re paid peanuts in terms of what we do as professionals,” Lawes said, but added: “I don’t think that you can ask for more money than you’re making.
“If we haven’t got the audience, if we can’t generate the income, then how can we expect to get paid as much as these other massive organisations? So it starts there. We need to continue growing the product, and eventually, hopefully, the players will reap the rewards.”
But how does rugby attract more viewers and build better income? Well, Genge believes the game needs to start being more open.
Opening the salary market
“I’m aware of how much cricketers and footballers earn,” he said. “I don’t watch football at all, but I could tell you most of the players how much they earn a week.
“It’s a conversation piece, and I always hear conversations in the changing room of ‘he got sold for X, or he got bought for Y’, and I feel rugby’s always trying to grow its market and encourage its audience to be spoken about or get into other places in the world, and I feel it’s just an easy, easy avenue.”
But rugby’s always had an issue with paying players. In fact, it was only in 1995 that the game finally turned professional, after years of insisting it was an amateur sport. Remarkably, that was exactly 100 years after rugby league made the switch, so understandably, the game is still very much behind on that front.
“I find it so weird,” admitted Genge. “It’s always been so taboo in rugby to refer to money and contract negotiations. I think I signed at Leicester; I can’t remember if it was my last contract or the one before, but they didn’t even publish how long I’d signed for. And I was like, how weird is that?
“It’s just so strange that it’s a taboo subject in rugby. You’re almost taught not to speak about your money and how much money you earn, and then it becomes a guessing game.”
Besides being an avenue to grow the game, Genge believes an open knowledge of salaries will help individual players strive for fairer pay.
“When I was younger, I’d always say, ‘I wonder how much he earns in my position, so that I can leverage it to then go to market and be like, ‘Well, I want to earn this because he earns this’. And I feel that players would have an option.
“I’m not referring to players at the top of the game. I’m speaking about the people who are probably newer into their journey, or a squad player who plays 20 games in the season, plays unreal, and then there’s another player who thinks is getting paid more than him.
“We’ve all been dictated to with our contracts, as opposed to the market being open and driving conversation around money.”
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Growing the game through the commercial conversation
But while those in the game don’t always want to talk about money, those outside the game do.
“The first question you get asked when you go to a community event: What car do you drive? How much do you earn?” explained Genge.
“People are interested in it, so an easy thing to do is publish everyone’s earnings, and then there are players probably 28 years old getting paid between 40 and 50 grand playing in the Premiership every single week. I think that’s probably a bit off, in my opinion.
“It’s a tough gig to put your body on the line and do a lot of potential damage for a reasonably small sum of money in today’s day and age for a professional athlete.”
“You find out that someone signed at your club for a period of time. Like, why shouldn’t you then know how much of the cap they’re taking up? So we [should] release every single bit of information.”
The Bristol man did warn against following other sports, however, but admitted that, in terms of salary visibility, rugby can learn a lesson.
“If you go on FIFA and you do a manager mode, you can see what people are being paid,” said Genge.
“All I ever speak to people about in football is, ‘oh, this guy’s signed in Saudi for 20 mil. This guy’s coming to Arsenal for 100 grand a week. X, Y, and Z’. So that was more the conversation piece.
“I wasn’t like ‘everyone tell me how much you earn’, but then it becomes like a stronger negotiating tool for those people who are probably, in terms of monetary wise, at the smaller end of the scale, to then go elsewhere and say, well, I want to be paid this because so and so is being paid, X.”
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