The WRU now has the opportunity, when appearing before the Senedd committee, to finally put the record straight
WRU CEO Abi Tierney(Image: Mark Lewis/Huw Evans Agency)
For months those questioning the Welsh Rugby Union’s decision to reduce the professional game from four teams to three have been told the decision followed extensive consultation, detailed analysis and independent challenge.
When WalesOnline recently raised concerns about the lack of supporting data, the WRU said it would “publish the information soon”, including more detail on the reasoning, evidence, criteria and weightings behind its proposals. Now, at long last, we finally know that decisive evidence exists, but the WRU does not intend to publish it in a form that would allow anyone to test its conclusions.
In correspondence with me last month, chief executive Abi Tierney confirmed that the board considered a “detailed, fully costed business case comparing three teams against a reformed four-team alternative” before reaching its decision last autumn.
According to Ms Tierney, this incorporated financial analysis, strategic considerations, risks and stakeholder feedback. That confirmation matters, as we now know a business case apparently underpinned one of the most important and effectively irreversible decisions in Welsh rugby history.
Unfortunately, none of us can currently see it because Ms Tierney conveniently said the material is commercially confidential and “will not be published in the form you have requested”. Instead, member clubs will receive what she describes as “the appropriate briefings and evidence through the proper channels” before the WRU’s annual general meeting.
That language is very revealing because it suggests that clubs are not being promised the business case or underlying model, but whatever the WRU decides is “appropriate”. They may receive selected presentations explaining a decision already made without the evidence needed to test its assumptions or develop an alternative.
Sadly, for a modern organisation that is supposed to hold to the highest standards of governance, that is not meaningful transparency but managed disclosure. Explaining where three professional teams should be located is no substitute for demonstrating why Welsh rugby must be reduced to three teams in the first place.
In other words, the WRU is offering evidence about the consequences of its decision while withholding the evidence that supposedly justified making it.
Following a letter from that Hayley Parsons and I sent to the Senedd’s sport and culture committee about this failure to reveal the data to the clubs once again, Ms Tierney and the WRU are to be invited to appear before the committee for the second time this year.
So what should the WRU reveal when they appear before members of the Senedd?
Without getting too technical, they should start with details of the formal post-consultation option appraisal the board considered in October 2025 and submit, as evidence, the underlying financial model, including annual projections, funding allocations, revenue assumptions, owner contributions, and transition costs.
Without it, Senedd members and their constituents cannot establish what reducing the number of teams saves, whether the preferred structure survives less favourable assumptions, whether alternatives were assessed fairly, or whether the calculations were independently verified.
The WRU must also explain what it means by a “reformed four-team alternative” and whether that option incorporated the same shared services, central efficiencies, player controls, pathway reforms and commercial improvements assumed for three teams, or was the preferred model compared with a weaker version of four that was never given an equal opportunity to succeed?
The committee should also consider the wider consequences of removing a professional team, especially given that an independent report found the Scarlets generated over £1m in annual gross value added and supported 336 jobs, alongside extensive work with schools, community clubs and disadvantaged groups.
In Swansea, substantial public and private investment has already been committed to the Ospreys and the redevelopment of the ground at St Helen’s.
It would have been better to have had the answers made public before having to ask a Senedd committee to intervene, but we cannot know what the board considered because the business case remains withheld. Indeed, Ms Tierney told me that correspondence about governance and disclosure should be properly conducted with member clubs rather than “individual columnists or commentators”.
That is a curious position as the WRU seems happy to use the media to assure the public that evidence would be published but appears less comfortable when one of the Western Mail’s longest-serving columnists asks what will be disclosed.
Speaking truth to power has been one of this column’s central purposes for over twenty years, and I will not be discouraged from doing so simply because the organisation being scrutinised would prefer the questions not to be asked publicly.
Yes, the WRU is entitled to refuse to answer, but it should not pretend that the questions are illegitimate in doing so, and it will be interesting to see if it adopts the same approach with the Senedd and its member clubs as it did when it responded to my request for this information.
The WRU may ultimately be right that three (or even two) teams represent the only sustainable future, and anyone proposing an alternative must explain how it would be financed, but how on earth can any alternative be tested while the WRU withholds its financial data and assumptions?
And it is ironic that Ms Tierney, when speaking at the Welsh Select Committee last January, said that she would not “apologise for being data-driven”, and yet the more they hide this data, the more mistrust they generate in their ability to govern the game.
Therefore, the issue is no longer whether the evidence exists – it does – and given that Ms Tierney said member clubs should pursue these matters, I hope at least one will now formally request the complete business case and supporting evidence before the union’s AGM late this year.
The WRU now has the opportunity, when appearing before the Senedd committee, to finally put the record straight and, as part of its evidence, to provide all the information required to scrutinise its decision.
But if the WRU again refuses a reasonable request to do so from the democratically elected members of the Senedd whose constituents across Wales are supporters of local, regional and national rugby, then they can no longer claim that the problem was who asked the question, but that the WRU never wanted anyone outside its board to see the answer.
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