The Women’s Six Nations continues this week but while the men’s tournament commands enormous sponsorship deals and a prize pot of £18m, the financial benefits of winning this year’s competition stand at zero pounds and zero pence. That’s right, absolutely nothing.
The Six Nation’s stance is that providing prize money for the women’s tournament would merely serve to increase inequality in female rugby. But with a World Cup approaching, and World Rugby estimating that the total number of women playing the game has soared to over two million, surely the time has come for the organisers to take a more imaginative approach to renumerating Six Nations competitors.
So what’s the answer?
“The fact there is no prize money on offer is justified by the organisers - and one former CEO spoke about it previously - is that there are nations or one nation running away with the competition,” says Rob. “In this case, England are the most dominant force in the Six Nations, with most, if not all of their players, semi-pro or professional at club level..
“What we’re seeing is that the gap is widening between England and those teams competing in the level underneath. The argument goes that if you put prize money on the table then those bigger nations will get further and further away.
“What tournament organisers should really be doing is to put things in and interventions in place that will help the competitive balance and help the emergent nations.”
At the end of the 2024 tournament, Tom Harrison, the CEO of the Six Nations outlined the basis of that very argument.
“We are not making prize money available, but that is not to say that unions are not through their own contracting system,” he explained. “It is basically at the discretions of unions.
“We are generating for the first time some revenue into the women’s game, generated by the women’s game and not using the men’s platform as a proxy for investment into the women’s game. We are starting to build that.
“So much investment is needed through the pyramids, through the structures of the six unions. Let’s make sure that we invest through those pyramids and ensure that we do some of the things in terms of narrowing the gap in performance, making sure that more girls are able to play, building more changing rooms for women and girls in men’s rugby clubs.
“We can talk about [prize money] again when we have got a big pot of money, and actually the women’s game is so well invested. At the moment, that would be going to England and France – I’m not sure that is the right answer at this point. That’s not to say that I don’t believe in prize money – I absolutely do, I just think it is one for later.”
Harrison, best known for his previous role with the ECB, makes solid points. But Rob argues that a US-based allocation of prize funds, would go a long way to hastening the sport’s progress.
“I think you need to follow the US model and start unequally distributing prize money from your headline sponsors,” he says. “What I mean by that is that the team that finishes bottom of the Women’s Six Nations deserves a higher share of the money than the team that finishes top.
“But (that money) is perhaps restricted or ring-fenced for the development of the game - essentially funnelled into the sport from the grassroots to the academy system, so that over time you can strengthen the outcome of a competition that becomes more competitive and more lucrative financially for everyone.”
If the winners of the men’s tournament can take home £6.5m, it’s surely not beyond the competition to implement a common sense that closes the gap between the best and the rest and also encourages more and more females to take up the sport with the ambition of performing on rugby’s biggest stage.
World Rugby has adopted an approach along those lines. The 2022 Women’s World Cup in New Zealand, for example, saw each player involved in the final awarded £10,000. The winning nation, though, didn’t receive any additional prize money. Instead cash was awarded with the aim of funding initiatives that contributed to the expansion of the sport and its long-term sustainability.
Share this post