Champions Cup 24/25

What do we do? We immediately start negotiations on merging the URC with the premiership.

Like, no matter how much love and attention we give the URC, it has fundamental flaws that mean it will never pay the bills in the same way that Europe can.

I agree that we could certainly give the URC more prominence and certainly could stop scheduling extra national team games and tours to clash with the league, but there’s a ceiling to how far that can go

I'd say hardcore fans of 15s don't give a shite about the olympics but I noticed the stadiums were full for 7s unlike a lot of the other sports. And the biggest social media star in rugby is one of the US women's team. 7s, for whatever reason, seems to have a much broader reach than the 15s game. It certainly brings a new audience to rugby and I hope it translates into greater popularity/participation in 15s. I watched a fair amount of the 7s with a group who don't pay any attention to rugby and know nothing about the sport other than maybe having acquaintances who played in college. They loved it but 15s would probably be a slog for them initially.

On the Europe versus URC question. There are two issues, one is that it's silly to have a competition where everyone who wins a group game qualifies for knockouts, better to just go straight to knockouts. It means that for most of the competition there are no stakes, and that only appeals to anoraks. It also means that English and French teams are actively trading off between performances in their domestic leagues and pointless but risky European games. For the URC the reality is Welsh and Italian teams (most of the time) aren't any good and teams like Leinster and Munster and a couple of the SA teams really don't need to field their best teams the vast majority of the time. Those are problems internal to different unions so the they're deeper than can be fixed by the league.

This from another sports buff user on Digital Spy -

''There are red button feeds for premier sport Ireland with Sky TV Ireland/Now TV Ireland.

Premier had red button live feeds for wimbledon this summer on Now TV Ireland..

RTE TV will have 1 live game per round.

I say Ulster & Connacht's games will be covered live on premier sport ireland.''

Is there much obstacles in the way to Premier Sport launching a third, or even fourth, sports channel? I know they used to have Freesports which I believe is now gone, perhaps bringing that back might be on the cards

I'm not sure if games between clubs from SA and France would pull huge viewing numbers so maybe a third channel isn't needed. As long as brit and Irish games don't clash they should be fine

online

In addition, Premier Sports is planning to create and launch a 24/7 rugby channel at the very heart of which will sit the Investec Champions Cup and EPCR Challenge Cup.

https://www.epcrugby.com/champions-cup/content/epcr-and-premier-sports-announce-headline-broadcast-partnership

I'm not sure I see it surviving much longer, the format doesn't work and only a small few teams have the squad size necessary to compete without it greatly hampering from their league as we saw last season with the Bulls effectively forfeiting a quarter final.

Having it on Premier Sports will only further take it off the radar for UK viewers.

There's probably more money and interest in it for French teams to expand the Top 14 across those 8 weekends, how long before they pull the plug?

I think the format change has evaporated some of that prestige that used to exist. Before the pool stages were like a mini tournament and qualifying from your group was an achievement in itself for a team that had no realistic chance of winning it all. It meant something to top a group with Clermont or win the back to back with Saracens on bonus points. Even if it all would inevitably fall apart against the Toulon galacticos in the quarter final it was still an enjoyable journey for fans with some sense of satisfication.

There was always a gulf but at least there was something meaningful for most teams to strive for. Now the groups are greatly imbalanced with the luck of home/away draws and massive travel differences between hemispheres, it's not a fair contest and it's also very easy to finish top 4 in a 6 team pool so it means little to qualify from a pool, it's almost embarrassing not to.

Toulouse / Leinster / La Rochelle might look at those rounds as a means for getting a good seed and avoiding the exertion of playing each other until the later rounds but for everyone else with no expectation of winning the competition it's all a bit pointless.

I suspect also that premier sport will be more sympathetic towards Irish games and not be giving us crap kick-off times in the future as BT sport often did in the past

Not sure if they had any influence on the current schedule but it's certainly better than last years one

No major surprise. The club game doesn't sell tickets in SA. You look at some of their regular season games and the place is empty. Couple that with low chances of SA teams being in it French supporters never travelling and you run a real risk of not selling enough tickets to cover the costs

As a rugby fan I agree but as a Munster fan I like that we pretty much have a guaranteed knockout game we can lose every season