English rugby’s financial crisis may leave Premiership clubs prey to vultures

We should be casting our eyes over the runners and riders, perusing the comings and goings, drawing up our projected finishing orders, semi-finalists, winners. We should be arguing with alacrity over all of the above, dismissing each other’s opinions as worthless. Have you ever actually played the game? You don’t know what you’re talking about. All the usual brickbats any self-respecting sport rings out with at this time of year.

Instead, we approach the new season of English rugby, 25 years after the Premiership was minted, with a sick feeling in the stomach. We cannot even predict with any confidence how many teams will be lining up when it all kicks off next weekend.

The fate of Worcester is turning those stomachs at the moment, but really the club’s plight is little more than a bubo breaking the surface. A chronic condition has been bubbling under for years. The constitution of English rugby is hopelessly dysfunctional. But for a couple of periods of something approaching apparent solvency (circa 2005 and 2015, to be precise), only to be followed by the inevitable period of reckless overconfidence, it always has been.

If any bean counters had enough time on their hands to trawl through the individual accounts of the respective companies, they would discover that the cumulative losses of Premiership clubs in those first 25 years stand at more than half a billion pounds. For the most part, those losses have been covered by wealthy benefactors with great reserves of patience (if only they were infinite) and greater or lesser reserves of cash.

Worcester are in trouble because the owners appear to have more in the way of talk than they do money. There is an air of mutiny among the club’s employees now, so tired are they