Red Roses deserve more than being RFU’s saviours

The reported bonus of £15,000 per player to England’s Red Roses for winning this year’s World Cup would be well deserved by this astonishingly committed, prolific side. Greater gain will accrue to the Rugby Football Union chief executive Bill Sweeney, who has fought off – for now – indignation at his £742,000 salary and £358,000 bonus.

Every panjandrum at a governing body knows they stand or fall by the England team’s results. Beleaguered but remarkably unbowed, Sweeney knows a win in the final on 27 September at Twickenham will save his reign. Sports administration’s lavish bonus culture would throw a party.

Rescuing the company boss won’t be a Red Roses priority after this Six Nations Championship. The players deserve a proper chance to celebrate their nerve-jangling 43-42 victory over France that earned the grand slam they have worked so hard to achieve, and for which they were overwhelming favourites. Yet a world title for the sport’s No 1 ranked team would offer refuge to a governing body where there’s a committee for everything and a power struggle for every occasion.

The technical term for Sweeney’s bonus is a “long-term incentive plan”, or LTIP. He is not the only Twickenham big wheel on the scheme. Five other RFU execs shared £1million from the pot, despite the organisation posting an operating loss of £37.9million and making 40 staff redundant.

Sweeney wanted his own bonus to be deferred, but a review by the law firm Freshfields – commissioned, you guessed it, by the RFU – called the reward scheme “appropriate and well-reasoned”. At a special general meeting called to debate the chief executive’s possible sacking, he said little but left with a resounding victory, by 466 votes to 206, with 36 abstentions. Only Twickenham, you might think, could stage an internal poll of 708 votes.

The biggest measures of success in English men’s sport are still the country’s football, rugby union and cricket teams. In the women’s equivalents, that gauge veers from the 16-0 shellacking the England cricket team took in this winter’s multi-format Ashes series, to the brutal 25-game all-competition winning run amassed by the Red Roses, who hound and overwhelm opponents.

In football, Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses were European champions in 2022 and World Cup runners-up a year later. They are second favourites behind world champions Spain to win Euro 2025 in Switzerland this summer.

The accountant Deloitte forecasts that revenues in women’s sport will reach £1.82billion this year. But the balance between grassroots growth and a likely gold rush at the top remains unclear. Some worry that women’s sport will replicate the men’s corporate model of extreme wealth inequality.

The Red Roses span this divide. They are a winning machine, comparatively well paid (though not as well as RFU execs), with a high profile, though too dominant for some tastes. The England men’s set-up has under-achieved since the World Cup win in 2003. But the Red Roses conform more readily to a global prejudice about English rugby: that it has too much money and too many players.

The women shouldn’t have to carry that can. There is a joy and pride and dynamism about this squad. Some of the stats, however, are wince-inducing: 16 of 24 Six Nations titles and 14 Grand Slams. After yesterday’s final seven-try victory over France in this year’s tournament they have scored 256 points and conceded only 71 – a remarkable points difference of 185. France’s points difference in second place was 77. England and France went professional in 2019. Wales, Ireland, Italy and Scotland are only recent converts to paying their players.

According to World Rugby, a quarter of those who play the game worldwide are women. Across the board, women’s teams are burdened with the extra task of “growing the game”, raising visibility, driving the brand – and any other business mantra you care to throw around.

Mainstream men’s sports mostly don’t have to do this. The players can get on with playing. The pressure on the Red Roses on the other hand is to justify the RFU’s investment, convert English women and girls to the game – and, crucially, grab their “Lionesses’ moment”, while the RFU politburo orders trebles all round.

For that, these Red Roses need to break out of their Six Nations hegemony and test themselves again against the world. They were world champions in 1994 and 2014, before the current women’s sports boom. In the 2014 final in France they defeated the nation they will have to beat again this summer – Canada – in front of a 22,000 crowd in Paris’s Stade Jean-Bouin, a second-tier ground. Many of England’s players took unpaid leave from regular jobs.

Marlie Packer had two days off before returning to her post as a plumbing and heating engineer. Katy Daley-McLean went home to teach at a primary school in Sunderland, where, on 22 August this year, the 2025 tournament will start with England v USA at the 49,000-seat Stadium of Light. There’s your neat symbol of transformation, right there.

Money can’t be the only prism of success. Which is easy to say when you have it, as men’s sport has. Yet the Red Roses reign in Europe can be traced fairly to the financial rewards for winning so relentlessly.

In a three-season deal running to 2026, contracts were handed to 32 England women, with salaries, match fees, World Cup bonuses, “community engagement” and “business targets”. A maternity and parenting policy was also incorporated. The £15,000 World Cup win bonus comes with a £5,000 fee for making the squad and on top of wages. They deserve it – and more.

Sweeney isn’t the only RFU employee with an incentive to stay in place – though, for him, the job is less bruising and the salary much grander.

Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images