Is RFU overseas players rule beneficial or are its merits up for debate?

Say goodbye to playing for your country. “It is black and white for us as players,” was how George Ford, the England and Sale Sharks fly-half, put it to me this week. “We understand that if we want to play for England and represent our country, then you play in England.”

The spark for a resurgence in the discussion around the merits of the rule was last week’s announcement that Tom Willis, the Saracens No 8, is to leave the club at the end of the season to take up a contract with Bordeaux-Begles in the Top 14.

The Observer noted two weeks ago that French clubs were pushing hard to sign Willis, who has started the season for Saracens like a runaway freight train. Going into this weekend Willis led the league in two key categories; carries and defenders beaten. With five Test starts for England already in 2025, paired with that excellent form, he felt like a certainty to start in England's four matches over the autumn.

Willis is 26; far from a veteran looking for a final big payday abroad. He is, however, certainly a unique case. No one else has a brother who has just been crowned the best player in France, like Jack at Toulouse.

UBB were also the club who took Tom in for the rest of the season when Wasps suddenly fell apart back in 2022. As noted by a source, Willis loved his time in Bordeaux. Having covered games there during the 2023 Rugby World Cup, I can see why. Even when taking all of that context into account, the fact that an in-form player will be lost to England from next summer - which makes selecting him now pointless given his future unavailability - is jarring.

Enough so to make you step back and reevaluate the overseas selection policy as a whole. The rule has been implemented since 2012 but England players were first warned about the predicament they would face all the way back in 2010, when the RFU laid out their plans to build the perfect Rugby World Cup campaign culminating in glory on home soil in 2015. Ah.

For those who have understandably wiped that memory, England did not make it out of the pool stages. The arguments made today for not selecting England players based in France are the same as they were 15 years ago; logistical access and medical care, while also protecting the Prem by enticing the best England players to stay in the country.

Here is Rob Andrew, then the RFU's elite rugby director in 2010. “Imagine what it would be like if we had 10 of the England starting team based in France. It would make it virtually impossible,” he told The Guardian.

The policy has now been in place for so long that a professional making their England debut around the time it came into effect - let’s say Ben Youngs, who retired at the end of last season and made his England debut back in 2010 - will have spent their entire career debating whether moving abroad is worth sacrificing playing for their country.

Here is more from Ford, who would fit the ‘final payday’ mould at 32 but has recently re-signed with Sale on a three-year contract. “I’ve given it serious consideration, probably more this time than previously. My decision-making process was, I love playing for Sale and playing for England, and I want to have opportunities to do that again in the future.”

Ford’s family also played an important role. His wife runs two restaurants and two cafés, plus they have an 18-month-old daughter. Again, each case is different. “I genuinely think Tom Willis is a great lad, unbelievable player, I don’t think any bad of him for making the decision he has made,” Ford said.

Hypothetically, say that Willis and his brother Jack and any of the other players based in France still wanted to pursue international careers, does the RFU’s rule hold up legally, if examined as a potential restriction on players working wherever they want?

Ben Cisneros, an associate with Morgan Sports Law, believes “it could be open to challenge” as "either a restraint of trade or a violation of competition law", if a player or group of players were inspired to follow in the footsteps of Jean-Marc Bosman - of free transfer fame - or Lassana Diarra, the former Chelsea and Arsenal midfielder who is currently seeking compensation after FIFA regulations blocked Diarra from joining a new club following an acrimonious departure from Lokomotiv Moscow back in 2014.

As noted by Cisneros, those players who become “something of a martyr for their cause” often find that the proceedings “dominate that athlete's legacy more than their sporting achievements” in their careers. “I wouldn't necessarily want to put my neck on the line and say which way [a challenge] would go, but I certainly think there are reasons to doubt [the rule's] legality, primarily because it restricts players' ability to work wherever they like,” explains Cisnero, stressing that any challenge "would not be straightforward".

“It sort of narrows the market for their services which inevitably will have an impact on their negotiating power and thus their earning potential within [the PREM]. It might be quite challenging for the RFU to say we need this in order to allow the national team to thrive.”

Referring to the Enhanced Elite Player Squad contracts handed out in August to 25 players - including, awkwardly, Willis - Cisnero adds: “It might be that it's not really anything the players want to fight about or even could fight about if they've come to that [EPS] agreement.”

We often speak about a career in rugby being short. Do players, earning good money but nowhere near the sums witnessed in football, truly want to spend large chunks of their careers in courtrooms and paying for lawyers? Perhaps not. And so players remain faced with a difficult choice between overseas offers and playing for their country, while England have to watch the Willis brothers - like Steffon Armitage and Nick Abendanon before them - excel in France.

Photograph by David Rogers/Getty Images