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The latest RFU update on 'agreed' England player hybrid contracts

Jamie George and England celebrate their win over Wales (Photo by Michael Steele/Getty Images)

Performance director Conor O’Shea has insisted that plans are still very much on track for the RFU’s introduction of hybrid contracts to upwards of 25 players in Steve Borthwick’s England squad.

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Negotiations about the provision of a fixed fee top-up of about £160,000 per player in addition to their Gallagher Premiership club contracts have been ongoing since the Rugby World Cup, but an official completion of the deal has yet to be confirmed.

The proposed top-up for the 2024/25 season hasn’t been enough to keep the likes of Owen Farrell, Kyle Sinckler and others playing their club rugby in England, as they have organised moves to France which will make them ineligible for Test squad selection by Borthwick.

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New England skipper Jamie George and his Saracens clubmate Maro Itoje did sign extended club deals in mid-December to remain in the Premiership for the foreseeable future, but their RFU top-up has yet to be officially signed off.

Hybrid contracts are the most significant aspect of the new professional game partnership [PGP] between the RFU and Premiership Rugby.

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They will reportedly enable the RFU to have more of a say over the 25 players expected to be included in an elite England squad, reviewing their development plans every month.

Asked if there was a delay in signing off the proposed deal, O’Shea, the RFU’s high-performance director, explained: “The agreement is there, the new PGP starts on July 1, so nothing can start before then anyway.

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“There is a lot of work in other areas ongoing, but we can’t do anything until the new PGP is in place from the start of next season.

“It’s linked to the PGB, to be honest. I sat down after training at Twickenham on Wednesday with four to six senior players and Steve just to talk through timings and everything like that. The concepts and the principles of all these things have been agreed.

“We obviously have to do the deal and sign off the PGB. Hopefully, it will be really collaborative and something that will be a step forward for English rugby.”

Borthwick’s England have opened their latest Guinness Six Nations campaign with back-to-back wins in the opening two rounds for the first time since 2019. Their next match is away to Scotland on February 24.

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5 Comments
C
Clive 307 days ago

Wow, these morons at the RFU could fook un a free bar with hog roast.

25 contracts when at any point half could be injured or out of form so straight off you have a two tier squad which does nothing for team unity.

The suggestion that Sinkhole would get one is laughable, if he were the 10th best EQ TH I should be stunned.

T
Turkish 307 days ago

The intent to turn England's into a conveyor belt is worrying for the rest of us. The As and central contracts will help the clubs also. When they crack it they will be unstoppable. Maybe a very long term plan though.

S
Sumkunn Tsadmiova 307 days ago

“I sat down after training at Twickenham on Wednesday with four to six senior players and…”

Yet more gobbledygook from Conor O'Shea. Why not just say 5? Unless he's admitting he can't count. Do these RFU apparatchiks get special training to help them spout this stream of nonsense?

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JW 1 hour ago
Does South Africa have a future in European competition?

I rated Lowe well enough to be an AB. Remember we were picking the likes of George Bridge above such players so theres no disputing a lot of bad decisions have been made by those last two coaches. Does a team like the ABs need a finicky winger who you have to adapt and change a lot of your style with to get benefit from? No, not really. But he still would have been a basic improvement on players like even Savea at the tail of his career, Bridge, and could even have converted into the answer of replacing Beauden at the back. Instead we persisted with NMS, Naholo, Havili, Reece, all players we would have cared even less about losing and all because Rieko had Lowe's number 11 jersey nailed down.


He was of course only 23 when he decided to leave, it was back in the beggining of the period they had started retaining players (from 2018 onwards I think, they came out saying theyre going to be more aggressive at some point). So he might, all of them, only just missed out.


The main point that Ed made is that situations like Lowe's, Aki's, JGP's, aren't going to happen in future. That's a bit of a "NZ" only problem, because those players need to reach such a high standard to be chosen by the All Blacks, were as a country like Ireland wants them a lot earlier like that. This is basically the 'ready in 3 years' concept Ireland relied on, versus the '5 years and they've left' concept' were that player is now ready to be chosen by the All Blacks (given a contract to play Super, ala SBW, and hopefully Manu).


The 'mercenary' thing that will take longer to expire, and which I was referring to, is the grandparents rule. The new kids coming through now aren't going to have as many gp born overseas, so the amount of players that can leave with a prospect of International rugby offer are going to drop dramatically at some point. All these kiwi fellas playing for a PI, is going to stop sadly.


The new era problem that will replace those old concerns is now French and Japanese clubs (doing the same as NRL teams have done for decades by) picking kids out of school. The problem here is not so much a national identity one, than it is a farm system where 9 in 10 players are left with nothing. A stunted education and no support in a foreign country (well they'll get kicked out of those countries were they don't in Australia).


It's the same sort of situation were NZ would be the big guy, but there weren't many downsides with it. The only one I can think was brought up but a poster on this site, I can't recall who it was, but he seemed to know a lot of kids coming from the Islands weren't really given the capability to fly back home during school xms holidays etc. That is probably something that should be fixed by the union. Otherwise getting someone like Fakatava over here for his last year of school definitely results in NZ being able to pick the cherries off the top but it also allows that player to develop and be able to represent Tonga and under age and possibly even later in his career. Where as a kid being taken from NZ is arguably going to be worse off in every respect other than perhaps money. Not going to develop as a person, not going to develop as a player as much, so I have a lotof sympathy for NZs case that I don't include them in that group but I certainly see where you're coming from and it encourages other countries to think they can do the same while not realising they're making a much worse experience/situation.

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