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#Post#: 154927--------------------------------------------------
The untold story of ‘Project Lion’ and the big rugby payday that
never was
DIR By: deadlyfrom5yardsout
Date: June 1, 2026, 4:05 am
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Home unions still feeling effects of missed £500m opportunity to
offer players central contracts and support top clubs
Gavin Mairs has reported from every World Cup and Five/Six
Nations Championship since 1999, and every British and Irish
Lions tour since 2001. See more
Published 31 May 2026 9:03am BST
Concepts that could have revolutionised rugby in England, Wales,
Scotland and Ireland were floated in a secret 1999 meeting
On March 5, 1999, on the eve of Ireland’s Five Nations match
against England, a small group of rugby’s power brokers made
their excuses and slipped away from the traditional pre-game
functions for a secret meeting at Castlemartin House, an
18th-century mansion in Co Kildare.
At the time, the 300-hectare estate was owned by Sir Tony
O’Reilly. The former Ireland wing had scored 38 tries in 38
games for the British and Irish Lions on the tours of South
Africa and New Zealand in 1955 and 1959 respectively. But his
business career had been even more successful.
The meeting was due to take place in the special meeting room in
the estate’s garden. Up for discussion was a £500m proposal
entitled “Project Lion” that would underwrite and transform the
future of rugby in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales for the
next 10 years and allow the unions to offer central contracts to
their leading players.
At the time, rugby union was in a mess, struggling to find its
way in the fledgling world of professional sport. The game had
officially opened after the 1995 World Cup, but the Rugby
Football Union (RFU) had insisted upon a year-long moratorium,
and in the vacuum clubs had begun to sign the leading players.
The RFU was not alone in struggling to see the way forward.
Their Irish, Scottish and Welsh counterparts also lacked the
vision and finances to take a decisive grip in an increasingly
uncertain environment.
Tom Walkinshaw, the former racing driver, had taken ownership of
Gloucester and, as chairman of English First Division Rugby (the
forerunner to Premiership Rugby), had proposed a breakaway
British league, guaranteeing each club a £1m participation fee.
Meanwhile, the English clubs had pulled out of the European
competitions because of a row over prize money, scheduling and
control.
Some feared that international rugby would lose its primacy;
that the winners of this existential battle would be either club
or country. Many feared that the Lions tour of South Africa in
1997 would be the last.
But O’Reilly had a plan. As head of the Irish Dairy Board in the
1960s, he had invented the Kerrygold brand and went on to become
the highest-paid executive in the US when he was chairman of
Heinz, the first non-family member to hold the post. By the time
of the meeting, he had also become a media magnate, owning over
200 newspapers, including The Independent.
Sir Tony made 29 appearances for Ireland between 1955-1970
Both his fields of expertise were about to be put to the test.
He had no skin in the game other than his philanthropy. In the
1970s he had set up Ireland Funds, a charity to finance
self-help projects north and south of the Irish border to
promote “peaceful and fruitful co-existence” during the
Troubles. O’Reilly wanted to offer a solution to rugby’s
problems, but he was running late.
Pooling £500m
The seeds for the plan had been sown a few years earlier. Chris
Rea, the former Scotland and Lions centre who was working as
rugby correspondent for the Independent on Sunday, had written a
piece not long after the “Paris Accord”, which declared the game
open in August 1995, under the heading “British Isles PLC”.
Rea had written in depth about how the wonderful rivalries
across the four Home unions would withstand the changes that
professionalism might bring. He wondered how powerful they could
be if they managed to combine their resources.
“I really didn’t know quite what I was talking about, but it
sounded good,” recalls Rea, who at the time was also presenting
BBC’s Rugby Special. “Then one day I was at Gloucester,
preparing to cover a match when I got a call from my sports
editor Simon Kelner. He said he had received a call from Tony
O’Reilly in the Bahamas and asked if I could call him back.
“After the game I rang him home in the Bahamas. He said: ‘Chris,
that was a very interesting article, could you come over
tomorrow to talk about it?’ I was dumbfounded. I said I couldn’t
travel to the Bahamas because I was working. So, he said he
would come over to see me. So, we met in his suite at the
Berkeley Hotel in London, and it began an amazing journey.”
O’Reilly used his financial connections to provide a full
analysis of the economic potential of the new professional sport
in the UK and Ireland. “He asked me what I knew about
securitisation,” Rea says. “I must admit I had never heard of
the word.”
Chris Rea's belief in the collective strength of the Home unions
captured the imagination of O'Reilly
Securitisation, in layman’s terms, is the financial process of
pooling income-generating assets and repackaging them into
tradable financial securities. O’Reilly’s analysts had forecast
that if the four Home unions pooled future revenues from Test
matches over the next decade, it would raise £500m.
“He called it the ‘Lions bond’. The money would be distributed
to the four countries on a pro-rata basis, and it would have to
be spent on the development of rugby and provide enough money to
support the top clubs,” Rea adds.
‘The RFU didn’t have a plan’
Fran Cotton, the former England and Lions prop, who had been
tour manager of the Lions tour to South Africa in 1997, had a
strong interest in the project.
As chairman of what was then known as “Club England”, he was
determined to ensure that any new professional structure was
designed to give the national side the best chance of success.
“The brief for Club England did include professional rugby and
we were trying to come up with a plan for professional rugby,”
recalls Cotton, who was also a member of the RFU management
board and council representative for Lancashire at the time.
“One of the biggest weaknesses of the RFU at the time was that
they didn’t have a plan, all they were interested in was a fight
over who was going to be chairman.”
Cotton had also met O’Reilly at his London headquarters. “We had
been talking about the various problems facing the game. He’d
gone away, obviously thought about it, and said, ‘Right, this is
a way of solving a lot of the issues that the unions are
facing.’
“The problem was that the unions didn’t have enough money to
fund it. Tony put forward the idea of the securitisation of
match attendances over a 10-year period which would allow the
unions to central-contract the players.
“Apart from the money raised, it would have the advantage of
also bringing the four Home unions together much more closely,
because at the time England were a bit out on their own, having
tried to do their own deal with Sky TV to broadcast their Five
Nations matches when the game turned professional.
“Before the Lions tour in 97, there were a lot of people saying
that it had no place in professional rugby and that we needed to
get rid of it. But of course, we not only won the series but the
tour generated such an overwhelming feel-good factor that it
really put that to bed forever.
“Here was a concept to show that we already had an existing
playing structure of the four Home unions working together and
led to the question: why can’t we replicate that in terms of how
the game is funded?”
Concerns Ireland would get ‘left behind’
Cotton was one of the power brokers who had been summoned to
Castlemartin, and sadly the only one who is still alive to tell
the tale. He says Scotland were represented by Allan Hosie, a
former chair of the Five Nations and International Rugby Board
(IRB) representative, who passed away last month, while Vernon
Pugh, the IRB chairman, attended on Wales’s behalf.
He had flown into Dublin on the Friday morning and checked into
the Westbury Hotel before taking the 55-minute drive to
Castlemartin. “I remember sitting and waiting for Tony to
arrive,” Cotton adds. “I think he had been out for a very good
lunch with some of his former team-mates he had played for
Ireland with.
After the meeting, the four had dinner with O’Reilly and his
wife, Lady Chryss, who was the daughter of a Greek shipping
magnate. “They were obviously very financially savvy as they
talked about the rating of the debt and whether it was AAA, AA+
or whatever,” Cotton adds.
“Tony was really concerned that Ireland were going to be left
behind. You have got to remember at this stage, they were
nowhere near where they are now in terms of how they are
organised and the standards they are setting. They ended up with
an extremely efficient system, and we have ended up with an
extremely inefficient system.”
‘RFU deemed securitisation too expensive.. it looks pretty cheap
now’
While the plan gained support at the Castlemartin meeting, it
would be the closest the RFU would get to securing the top
English players on central contracts, something that Cotton
believed would have enabled England to be far more successful
than their record of just one World Cup and just two Six Nations
Grand Slams since 1995.
“JP Morgan gave a presentation to the RFU management board to
explain securitisation and had agreed to fund it,” Cotton adds.
“The money would be given to the unions at an agreed interest
rate and paid back over the next 10 years from the ticket
receipts.
“We had begun to sketch it out, how many players we would sign
up and gone through the whole concept of what we would do. We
had even begun to look at contracting players as they came out
of England Schools. We had a meeting with Mike Burton, who was
an agent at the time and if it had gone ahead, he would have
been responsible for contracting those young players to the RFU.
“It would have allowed the Premiership clubs to thrive without a
lot of the costs that have since been weighing them down.
“We weren’t going to deny [the players] to the club, a bit like
they do in Ireland where the guys are contracted to the Irish
Rugby Union but still play for example for Leinster in all the
big games. It’s just the whole [player] management is centrally
done, which makes the world of difference. For example, take
Maro Itoje, he is a great forward, but if you look at him, he
looks shot because he has played so much rugby.
Management of Maro Itoje's workload has come into question in
recent months
“Look at New Zealand, they will say to players like Richie McCaw
or Dan Carter to take six months off because they want them to
be absolutely firing in time for a World Cup.”
But Cotton says in the end “Project Lion” never got beyond the
presentation stage. Without RFU buy-in, it collapsed, leaving
the other unions to go their own ways and people like Cotton
wondering what English rugby would look like now if it had gone
ahead.
“The RFU management board came to the opinion that the cost of
securitisation was too expensive, but if you compare that to
what the RFU have spent over the last 25 years now, it looks
pretty cheap now,” he adds.
There have been several iterations of the deal between the clubs
and RFU since then, in which the ownership of the players has
been retained by the clubs, and the RFU paying for greater
access for the national side and recognition of the investment
in player development
“The deal between the RFU and the clubs has moved on from the
original agreement, but the current one, the only benefit seems
to be that the RFU have the last call on a medical issue, which
is pretty pathetic really,” Cotton says.
“If you look at the performance of England in this year’s Six
Nations – and this is nothing to do with Steve Borthwick, that
is a separate issue about who coaches England – the RFU should
be ashamed of themselves. For that to happen for a country the
size of England, and the financing we have, does make me very
sad.”
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