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The England pathway statistic described as 'phenomenal'

England celebrate their recent Junior World Championship title win (Photo by Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images/Getty Images)

Premiership Rugby director Phil Winstanley has suggested the pathway system in England is envied around the world due to the results it is enjoying from its £10million per year academy investment in conjunction with the RFU.

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The focus at Wednesday’s professional game partnership media briefing was largely on England and what the new eight-year deal might do for the fortunes of Steve Borthwick’s Test side.

However, the pipeline funnelling talented youngsters into the age-grade system didn’t go unmentioned at the Allianz Stadium presentation fronted by RFU CEO Bill Sweeney and supported by RFU performance boss Conor O’Shea, Premiership Rugby duo Simon Massie-Taylor and Winstanley, along with Christian Day, the general secretary of the RPA players union.

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Eighteen months of negotiation went into formulating the new partnership governing the professional game in England, but one aspect of the existing system doesn’t require a massive overhaul – the player development pathway.

It was last July when England were crowned champions at the World Rugby U20 Championship in South Africa and it was suggested by O’Shea that the class of 2025 were shaping up to be even better.

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Winstanley, though, delved deeper into the situation, arriving armed at the presentation with a number of eye-catching statistics. “The bit that has presented a slightly different challenge for us has been the playing pathway,” he began, seated in between O’Shea and Sweeney at the Twickenham top table.

“Mainly because it was very early on that Conor and I accepted that we were actually quite aligned – we are not looking to reinvent the wheel here. That’s because the system over the last 10-years plus has been hugely successful.

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“We are currently investing £1million per annum between clubs and RFU in each academy, so more than £10m a year, and what we are getting from that is 38 per cent of players go to play in the Premiership who have been identified as an England academy player at 18. Thirty-four per cent go on to play 50 games or more, so we are identifying the right players.

“When you start to compare that to conversion rates in other development systems across the world, it’s phenomenal. Some of the major development systems and pathways are in single figures, some in the early teens and we are getting 34 per cent right.

“So we are getting a lot right and, as we said, we don’t want to reinvent the wheel and we have seen that though seven Junior World Cup finals in the last 10 years. The challenge we had with the pathway was more about how do we get greater value out of it, so how do we get better players not necessarily more players?

“The first challenge in it – and it was probably our biggest challenge in this area – was redefining the boundary system. We lost London Irish, Wasps, Worcester last year and that was super challenging for everybody in the sport.

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“But we then had to reallocate the boundaries and the south-west in particular was a challenge because of the congested nature of location of the clubs. That has taken us some time to get that right and we used a lot of metrics to do that.

“Now that we are there, the primary focus for Conor and I and for the teams is we need to develop more individualised, strategic plans for each club. We have been quite generic in the way we have approached the academy system and the way we have managed and audited that centrally.

“What we need to do is be more specific and cater for the individual needs. As an example, Newcastle up in the north-east have got a territory across the country to the west coast and that’s a very different dynamic to manage than what Quins or Saracens might have in London.

“So we need to get that right and, as Conor has touched upon, it’s important to maximise the opportunities for the players but we don’t want them travelling from Cumbria to Newcastle. We have to invest in satellite centres and that will give us an opportunity to engage and connect with the community game as well.

“We are also requiring all clubs to have two state school partners. I know this has been a topic of conversation for a number of years with the make-up of the England team and the role of the independent school section.

“But we invested just over two years ago in a three-year study with Dublin City University, led by Jamie Taylor who used to coach at Leicester. He is looking at how successful we have been, where kids are coming from and at what point do they mature etc.

“One of the things that has been interesting out of that is that at U16 level, 63 per cent of players in the academy have come through the state school system. When that goes to U17 that changes to 46 per cent and the change is there because clubs are identifying players, bringing them together into environments that have got the best system and the best ability to support.

“It’s isn’t to say the state school hasn’t brought those players through. We need to be really clear on the data. And then also we are also very much a later maturation sport. We are very conscious of that and we have tried to delay the entry point into the academy.

“Previously that was at U14. What we now do is we will leave players to play in schools and clubs at 14 and start to bring them into academy at 15 and we will have a two-year foundation phase. We will then follow that with a two-year development phase from U17s, U18s and then U19s, U20s we will have a confirmation phase where we can really assure ourselves we have got the best talent.

“One of the things we did identify needed to change was we needed those players at that confirmation group playing more games and that has been more relevant since we lost the A League four or five years ago. We believe that gives us a logical approach.

“One thing that that we did consider was what do we do around the boundary system  and when we reviewed it we felt it was absolutely essential to retain boundaries and that clubs are protected.

“That players within those boundaries in terms of player movement are subject to compensation and rewarding the development of home-grown players through the salary cap. We have done that because we think if can put those protections in place it’s a greater incentive for the clubs to invest into those systems.

“To summarise from a pathway system, we felt we were in a good place we want to keep producing the numbers, but we want to improve the quality coming out at the far end.”

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J
JW 3 hours ago
'Passionate reunion of France and New Zealand shows Fabien Galthie is wrong to rest his stars'

Ok, managed to read the full article..

... New Zealand’s has only 14 and the professional season is all over within four months. In France, club governance is the responsibility of an independent organisation [the Ligue Nationale de Rugby or LNR] which is entirely separate from the host union [the Fédération Française de Rugby or FFR]. Down south New Zealand Rugby runs the provincial and the national game.

That is the National Provincial Championship, a competition of 14 representative union based teams run through the SH international window and only semi professional (paid only during it's running). It is run by NZR and goes for two and a half months.


Super Rugby is a competition involving 12 fully professional teams, of which 5 are of New Zealand eligibility, and another joint administered team of Pacific Island eligibility, with NZR involvement. It was a 18 week competition this year, so involved (randomly chosen I believe) extra return fixtures (2 or 3 home and away derbys), and is run by Super Rugby Pacific's own independent Board (or organisation). The teams may or may not be independently run and owned (note, this does not necessarily mean what you think of as 'privately owned').


LNR was setup by FFR and the French Government to administer the professional game in France. In New Zealand, the Players Association and Super Rugby franchises agreed last month to not setup their own governance structure for professional rugby and re-aligned themselves with New Zealand Rugby. They had been proposing to do something like the English model, I'm not sure how closely that would have been aligned to the French system but it did not sound like it would have French union executive representation on it like the LNR does.

In the shaky isles the professional pyramid tapers to a point with the almighty All Blacks. In France the feeling for country is no more important than the sense of fierce local identity spawned at myriad clubs concentrated in the southwest. Progress is achieved by a nonchalant shrug and the wide sweep of nuanced negotiation, rather than driven from the top by a single intense focus.

Yes, it is pretty much a 'representative' selection system at every level, but these union's are having to fight for their existence against the regime that is NZR, and are currently going through their own battle, just as France has recently as I understand it. A single focus, ala the French game, might not be the best outcome for rugby as a whole.


For pure theatre, it is a wonderful article so far. I prefer 'Ntamack New Zealand 2022' though.

The young Crusader still struggles to solve the puzzle posed by the shorter, more compact tight-heads at this level but he had no problem at all with Colombe.

It was interesting to listen to Manny during an interview on Maul or Nothing, he citied that after a bit of banter with the All Black's he no longer wanted one of their jersey's after the game. One of those talks was an eye to eye chat with Tamaiti Williams, there appear to be nothing between the lock and prop, just a lot of give and take. I thought TW angled in and caused Taylor to pop a few times, and that NZ were lucky to be rewarded.

f you have a forward of 6ft 8ins and 145kg, and he is not at all disturbed by a dysfunctional set-piece, you are in business.

He talked about the clarity of the leadership that helped alleviate any need for anxiety at the predicaments unfolding before him. The same cannot be said for New Zealand when they had 5 minutes left to retrieve a match winning penalty, I don't believe. Did the team in black have much of a plan at any point in the game? I don't really call an autonomous 10 vehicle they had as innovative. I think Razor needs to go back to the dealer and get a new game driver on that one.

Vaa’i is no match for his power on the ground. Even in reverse, Meafou is like a tractor motoring backwards in low gear, trampling all in its path.

Vaa'i actually stops him in his tracks. He gets what could have been a dubious 'tackle' on him?

A high-level offence will often try to identify and exploit big forwards who can be slower to reload, and therefore vulnerable to two quick plays run at them consecutively.

Yes he was just standing on his haunches wasn't he? He mentioned that in the interview, saying that not only did you just get up and back into the line to find the opposition was already set and running at you they also hit harder than anything he'd experienced in the Top 14. He was referring to New Zealands ultra-physical, burst-based Super style of course, which he was more than a bit surprised about. I don't blame him for being caught out.


He still sent the obstruction back to the repair yard though!

What wouldn’t the New Zealand rugby public give to see the likes of Mauvaka and Meafou up front..

Common now Nick, don't go there! Meafou showed his Toulouse shirt and promptly got his citizenship, New Zealand can't have him, surely?!?


As I have said before with these subjects, really enjoy your enthusiasm for their contribution on the field and I'd love to see more of their shapes running out for Vern Cotter and the like styled teams.

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