Is Mike Tindall’s hyped-up rugby flying circus really the future?

Thirty years have passed since rugby union, under threat from Kerry Packer’s ambitious raid on the amateur game, realised the time had come to start paying players and begrudgingly ushered in the start of professionalism. There have been substantial growing pains ever since.

New ideas regularly pop up, bids to revolutionise the sport by architects who feel rugby has stagnated, while purists would prefer for everything to be left alone, thank you very much. That struggle between fresh minds and traditionalists can often make rugby union feel unrivalled when it comes to a sport tying itself in knots.

Envious glances at the lucrative success of cricket’s Indian Premier League have led to several plans over the years, but few actually make it to market and those that do often fail to survive. Rugby X, a five-on-five competition held at The O2, lasted one year before being killed off by Covid. The World 12s competition, backed by top coaches and featuring 12-a-side teams was supposed to launch in 2022 and never made it.

I say all this because the latest bid to rip up the game and try to produce something bolder and brighter appears to be gathering steam.

“R360” – hopefully a placeholder and not the final name stolen from a Star Wars droid – has been billed as the answer to rugby’s presently flawed system, where the club game is propped up by big gates and TV audiences from international matches.

The proposal is for a Grand Prix-model touring the world, with eight men’s franchises and four women’s sides featuring 300 of the world’s top players, starting in September 2026.

Finn Russell, the star Scotland fly-half and one of the highest-paid players in the Gallagher Premiership at Bath, was among dozens of players targeted to sign confidential heads of agreement, suggesting more thought and preparation than with some of the previous half-baked concepts.

Mike Tindall, the Rugby World Cup winner known to the wider public as the husband of Zara Tindall, niece of King Charles, is R360’s co-founder and sporting director. There are so many hoops left to jump through for this to work. The competition needs to be ratified by World Rugby, while England’s Test players would have to give up their international careers to take part, given the agreements in place between the Rugby Football Union and Premiership clubs.

Parking cynicism around this idea does not come easily. You want to believe this time will be different, that this isn’t another rugby salesman on the doorstep telling you to invest now for great gains in the future.

Yet the Premiership in its current form is a confounding competition. It features bucketloads of tries and potential stars, with loyal supporters treated to great spectacles every week.

But, does anyone outside of rugby’s echo chamber really care about it? Do the wider public know who might win the league at Twickenham next weekend, or who played in the European Cup final in Cardiff two weeks ago? Honestly, probably not. People tend to tap in to watch the Six Nations and tap out until later in the year to watch the internationals in November.

Do not get me wrong, the suggestion that what rugby needs is R360’s “global travelling circus”, with stops in Sao Paulo and Los Angeles, right now all sounds rather fanciful. But the sport needs a jolt. What if R360 actually is the answer?

Photograph by Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images