Twickenham has become rugby’s Old Trafford – a decaying cash cow trapped in the past
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Twickenham is the single biggest cash cow in rugby. Most England men’s home games generate about £10 million in revenue and, across the year, account for around 85 per cent of the Rugby Football Union’s total income.
Not only is Twickenham the self-styled home of rugby, the biggest rugby stadium in the world, but it is also the object of near pathological envy from the southern hemisphere. Famously in 2016 when the New Zealand Rugby Union among others requested a profit-share from England home games, then RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie told them to “go and build a bigger stadium” themselves rather than seek to piggyback upon English rugby’s hard work. The £5,500, 12 shillings and sixpence that William Williams and William Cail invested in purchasing four hectares of gardens in 1907 has been repaid thousands of times over.
So it seems unconscionable in certain quarters that the RFU would even consider sending its prized cattle to the abattoir and up to Wembley. While this option appears off the table for the moment, it may not be long before the RFU ponders better-placed allotments than its current cabbage patch.
There are many parallels with the situation that Manchester United find themselves in with Old Trafford. Like Twickenham, it has a storied history, a large capacity but with various ailments such as leaky roofs that feel increasingly dilapidated next to 21st century venues such as the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Messrs Williams and Cail could never have had the foresight to consider the challenges of getting 82,000 people into a small pocket of south-west London poorly served by public transport. Or that four-bed terraced houses in the area would sell for £1.4 million giving residents a powerful and frequently used voice of objection.
Like many things in rugby, if you were starting over you would never choose Twickenham as your location, although it does speak to a certain failure of the imagination of the report’s authors that the extent of their relocation plan would end up 10 miles north in a stadium served equally appallingly by transport links. Maybe their map does not include the Midlands, South West and the North.
Although it is not explicitly stated in the report, it is clear that the current matchday experience for many spectators is pretty miserable. Anyone who has experienced the crush getting on a train at Clapham Junction, or found themselves trapped in the dreaded karaoke zone at Twickenham, will have repeatedly questioned their life choices that led them to paying £100 or more for an individual ticket.
A lot of those horrors can be forgotten when you are following a successful team playing a thrilling brand of rugby, but England have not had one of those in some time. The entire economic model of the RFU, and by wider extension the whole of English rugby, is predicated upon there being 82,000 bums on seats for England men’s home games. The 55,000 attendance for the warm-up game against Fiji, which already seemed remarkably inflated, should be taken as a warning sign that the patience of England rugby supporters will eventually run out.
And today’s supporters may not be around tomorrow. Hence Twickenham hiring DJ Tony Perry to sonically bombard everyone in attendance at half-time with a ‘set’ that 85 per cent of people would have found auditorily offensive but might have appealed to the remaining Generation Z demographic who were not glued to their phones.
Commendably, Jamie George, the England captain, has recognised the need to improve the atmosphere at Twickenham as well as the disconnect that has emerged between the team and its supporters. Beating top-quality opposition would be a fine start.
For the RFU’s part, money will need to be spent. The words “diversity” and “inclusivity” feature frequently throughout the report, but anyone who has witnessed the astonishing lines for the ladies toilets post-match will recognise that Twickenham’s facilities are in need of the upgrade. This is to say nothing of the complete absence of baby-changing facilities. Families be damned.
If the future of English rugby depends on Twickenham being a 21st century stadium, then it is clear that Twickenham needs upgrading. The word doing the heavy lifting is the ‘if’. Going back to Ritchie’s quote, bigger stadiums come with much bigger bills. Twickenham’s East Stand sucked up £80 million in redevelopment as recently as 2018 and still needs improvements. It is even more astonishing to consider the amount of money – potentially £60 million – pumped into redeveloping Twickenham station in time for the 2015 World Cup that was not ready for the start of the tournament and has provided a negligible benefit to train users since (although someone involved must have won because a load of ‘luxury’ flats have appeared above the station).
At a time when multiple professional teams have gone bankrupt and there are near-constant reports of grass-roots clubs being on their knees, it will be a hard sell for the RFU to plead poverty while pumping yet more money into the money pit that is Twickenham. What was once a cash cow now appears closer to a sunk-cost fallacy. Yet at the same time, the sold out sign has been up for some time for England’s next home game against Ireland.
