What the RFU must do about Bill Sweeney's pay optics – Andy Goode

The RFU are clearly hoping the storm over Bill Sweeney’s remuneration blows over but they should be getting ahead of it and explaining how it can be justified. I don’t think anyone is holding their breath waiting for that to happen and Sweeney isn’t the first chief executive to take home a bumper pay packet – and he won’t be the last – but the scale of it and the optics of him doing so at this time make it particularly galling.

Just imagine if you were one of the 42 members of staff made redundant recently in the midst of the RFU making a record £37.9million loss for the 2023/24 financial year, or their families. You would be fuming that the CEO is taking home £1.1m this year.

Worcester, Wasps, London Irish and Jersey have all fallen by the wayside over the past couple of years as rugby in England has clearly struggled to make ends meet, yet the man at the top of it all is taking home a seven-figure annual pay packet.

World Rugby Awards 2024 – the winners

World Rugby Awards 2024 – the winners

£358,000 of that is part of a long-term incentive plan linked to post-covid recovery and was agreed a few years ago, so his salary of £742,000 represents an 8.5 per cent increase year-on-year. It is all laid out by the RFU but isn’t likely to make anyone feel any better.

Neither is the fact that they are at pains to point out that “during the pandemic, the executive team took deeper and longer salary cuts than the rest of the organisation along with a reduced bonus”.

That might be true in one sense but it might also be misleading as the figures don’t suggest any of them took a massive pay cut and we can see what has happened to their salaries since then. Sweeney isn’t on his own either as £554,000 was paid to Sue Day for her role as chief operating and financial officer during the 2023/24 financial year.

The bonus paid to Sweeney of £358,000 alone is over double the £150,000 that each Championship club gets each year in funding and the £1.1m package is around the same amount that they all get put together.

Information from the union also states that Sweeney fully met his targets for financial performance and participation in community rugby for men, which might raise a few eyebrows. We don’t know what those targets were, though.

He was also probably quite clever in combining the England men’s team win ratio with the women’s team, who have won 50 of their last 51 Tests, when it comes to his performance metrics!

A part of me thinks he deserves a pat on the back for negotiating all this and I don’t think many people would turn down £1.1m if their employer offered it to them but what has he done to earn it? What were the financial performance targets that he has hit?

I don’t know when we are next going to get the opportunity to hear from Sweeney or anyone in the upper echelons of the RFU, and I doubt they will be forthcoming with that information when we do, but just some details could help make it at least a tiny bit more palatable.

After all, this is a man who was accused of being “asleep on the job” by Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee chair Julian Knight MP and whose handling of the tackle height saga in the grassroots game led to calls for a vote of no confidence.

It would be good to know what Sweeney has done to deserve anywhere near £1.1m but I actually think the ire in this instance should be directed towards Yasmin Diamond, Phil de Glanville and Tom Ilube.

They all sit on the remuneration committee and have overseen the increase in Sweeney’s salary, which has actually risen from £430,000 in 2020, to make him the highest paid executive in UK sport.

Football generates a hell of a lot more cash than rugby and FA CEO Mark Bullingham gets paid £850,000, although Tom Harrison did receive £1,134,425 from the England and Wales Cricket Board for the 2022/23 financial year.

Top executives in sport do get paid eye-watering sums of money and the £358,000 that has been paid as part of a long-term incentive plan is the realisation of decisions made several years ago, but the fact that the RFU’s chief executive is the highest paid of the lot is absurd.

All anyone can do is highlight the optics, ask for greater transparency and justification and hope it doesn’t fall on deaf ears but it doesn’t seem as though there is any accountability at the very top.

The clubs will no doubt be disgruntled by this, to put it very mildly indeed, but they don’t seem to have the power to do anything about it. Fans are rightly up in arms and current players have messaged me expressing their disbelief.

The RFU are probably not minded to do anything at all in response to that and think it will just be tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, but keeping quiet will only cause the resentment to fester and grow. It would be far savvier to get out in front of it.