The Champions Cup is the premier european continental competition in rugby union. It's contested annunally by teams originating from the 6 Nations Championship (England; France; Ireland; Scotland; Wales and Italy). South African teams were introduced into the competition two years ago.
In this past week's action, five of the six teams that came from England were hammered by their other regional teams. The reception to the results hasn't been kind.
There is a "gulf in quality" between Premiership clubs and Europe's elite that may only be solved by boosted salary caps or a changed season format, former England internationals have suggested.
A disappointing weekend in the Champions Cup saw four more English teams - Saracens, Harlequins, Leicester and Sale - eliminated from the marquee continental competition after heavy losses.
It leaves Northampton Saints as the sole remaining Premiership representative in this weekend's quarter-finals; alongside four French clubs, two Irish sides and Scotland's Glasgow Warriors.
In the wake of the Round of 16 results, former England and Harlequins back, Ugo Monye, said English clubs' comparatively lower salary caps - increased from £5m to £6.4m at the start of this season but still below the £9m cap for Top 14 clubs in France - make it, "hard to compete."
"The first-half scores are an illustration of the gulf in quality, and the second halfs really showed the depth of the opposition - especially the French sides," the 41-year-old told BBC Radio 5 live's Rugby Union Weekly podcast.
He added that the English league was, "too competitive" across the division, meaning Premiership clubs, "don't have the strength in depth within their squads to be able to match these (European) teams for 80 minutes" and lack sufficient quality to "fight across two fronts."
Former England scrum-half, Danny Care, said he had not played against many better teams than Leinster, who thrashed his Quins side 62-0 at Croke Park on Saturday. "I think they're better than Ireland; the skill level, the power, the pace," he said. "Their ball skills and movement, and they play smart. I've never known rucks like it. We were poor but they were next level. If they don't win it all now, it's a travesty."
The 38-year-old added: "You look at their squad and it's incredible, there's no way English teams can compete with that. About 10 of those Leinster lads would probably start for the [British and Irish] Lions or be in the Test squad. We can't compete."
Monye suggested a, "greater sense of equity" that might enable English clubs to perform better could be achieved by condensing the Champions Cup format to limit the frequency of in-season jumps between domestic, European and international competitions.
"In three or four weeks between October and November you can have Gallagher Premiership into Champions Cup into Autumn Nations series," he said of the calendar format. "Then you have a couple weekends of Premiership, back to Europe, Six Nations, back to the Premiership, then Europe (again). It makes it really hard to follow."
He continued: "If you could condense all of those weekends into one block in the season, it's easier to follow and actually makes the tournament more valuable for broadcasters. And to close the gap financially, I would allow the Premiership teams to recruit a marquee player - or just say you have a marquee spend for Europe, say £1m. That's one way to match with the very best, to close that gap in quality."
Former Ireland flank, Alan Quinlan, questions the standard of the English Premiership after Harlequins’ 62-0 Investec Champions Cup humiliation in Dublin.
'Quins, who are currently seventh on the 10-team Premiership log, conceded 10 tries in their Round Of 16 defeat at Croke Park.
It was a poor weekend for English clubs in the elite European competition as a second-string Saracens (they rested their international players) were beaten 72-42 at Toulon; Leicester Tigers lost 43-19 at Glasgow Warriors and Sale Sharks went down 38-15 at Toulouse. Only Northampton Saints qualified for the quarter-finals, with a 46-24 home win against Clermont Auvergne.
"It probably shows sometimes that the Premiership is overhyped in England," Quinlan told Off The Ball. "Harlequins were shocking. Danny Wilson, their head coach, I’ve met him many times over the years and he’s a good guy, but I was a bit disappointed he started talking about budgets.
"Leinster have a very big budget and a strong team, and full of internationals, but to start going down that road when your team concedes 62 points …"
Quinlan said 'Quins' attitude was as poor as their performance. "They were shocking, they were embarrassingly bad; their body language, their work rate, their passion, their desire, their character, it’s not the road to go down."
"If I was the head coach, I would be questioning characters here and the fight and desire because they threw the towel in. After the [Garry] Ringrose try, you’re thinking it’s slipping away but somebody do something."
The tone struck by Alex Sanderson and Mark McCall after heavy Investec Champions Cup defeats might have caught some by surprise. "I couldn’t be prouder of the group," Sale boss, Sanderson, emphasised after his side were beaten by 23 points at Toulouse. "There is a lot to like, a lot to learn and a lot to be proud of," Saracens' counterpart, McCall, stressed after a rampant Toulon surged to a 72-42 thrashing.
Yet, there was a certain validity to each man's remarks. No one had given either side a hope of competing with the French giants – for both to be leading at the half-time hooter represented a real achievement. While they couldn't survive the second-half surge that always felt likely to come, these were creditable showings in which Saracens particularly threatened something spectacular.
However, that betrays a troubling truth for the Premiership: the English top flight may provide eight of the Champions Cup’s 24 representatives; but few are live contenders to lift it any longer. Northampton, back to somewhere near their best against Clermont, ensured a degree of respectability as the lone representative into the last eight; but elsewhere it could hardly have been a more damaging weekend.
While Sale and Saracens emerged in credit despite their defeats, there were precious few positives to take from a wretched Harlequins showing at Leinster, while Leicester weren’t too much more competitive against Glasgow despite the Warriors’ early profligacy.
The Premiership clubs’ struggles have been a developing trend of recent years. Not since Exeter Chiefs triumphed at an empty Ashton Gate in 2020 to secure a fourth title in five years for the league; has an English side made it to the continental showpiece. While both the Saints and Harlequins made last year’s final four, not since Saracens were in their pomp has a Premiership team begun the season among the top contenders to lift club rugby’s biggest prize.
To think that it was only a decade ago that the Premiership and Top 14 possessed sufficient power to strong-arm the competition organisers into a revamp of the competition for their benefit. While the French league has grown again out of a relative trough, the English division would appear a pale imitation of that within which Saracens, Exeter and others thrived.
Which is not to say that the Premiership is a poor competition. For entertainment value, it now surpasses both the Top 14 and the United Rugby Championship (URC) in terms of consistency – the highs may be higher when Toulouse meet Bordeaux-Begles or Leinster face a fully-loaded Sharks; but for those addled on the e-numbers of attacking rugby, the game-to-game sugar rush of the Premiership is highly addictive. Welshman, Dan Biggar, who will conclude his playing career with Toulon this summer, having spent time at Northampton beforehand, wrote in the Daily Mail last week that he felt the English competition is superior in many ways to that which he now calls home.
That doesn't necessarily mean it provides the best preparation for the colossal continental contests. The relative lack of jeopardy brought about by the removal of relegation has only encouraged a more free-wheeling style to emerge league-wide, where once Bristol Bears and Harlequins were offensive trailblazers, now it's hard to find an English side that wouldn't consider attacking as their stronger suit. Sale are perhaps the division's best suffocators, as shown in the first half at Toulouse – but even they couldn't sustain the effort for 80 minutes.
Naturally, it's apt to mention at this point the difference in budgets enjoyed by the competing sides, with the French giants and Leinster – with their Irish core complemented by a few star overseas recruits – particularly notable for their depth. Toulouse, for example, have four starting international full-backs on their roster. It's not just splashing the cash in recruiting, though, that makes a difference; with investment into the pathways in Dublin and elsewhere paying dividends with the talent pipeline always seeming to flow.
There's confidence in the English game that the next generation will soon come through to fill the talent gap left by a number of high-profile departees in the last few years; this has already been seen a little at Franklin’s Gardens (Northampton), where a group of backs are growing together. McCall last week used the example of Toulouse, who built around Antoine Dupont, Romain Ntamack, Francois Cros and co. having experienced their own lean times not that long ago. Perhaps the Saracens coach sees similar potential in Theo Dan, Olly Hartley, Angus Hall and Tobias Elliot – all impressive in the Stade Mayol cauldron on Saturday.
Things are opening up nicely for Northampton, with Castres a relatively kind quarter-final opponent, especially at home but even they have felt the effects of the talent drain severely in a Premiership title defence that has floundered. The best equipped in terms of strength-in-depth and foreign stardust of the English clubs might be Bath – but Johann van Graan’s men couldn't even escape a curious group-stage campaign that showed their focus perhaps lay domestically.
Such matters can be cyclical, the fortunes of each league ebbing and flowing with the fluctuating forces of club sport. With 80% of the 10-team league making the top tier of European competition, the Premiership’s relative non-competitiveness is perhaps concerning.
For the Premiership to have eight out of its 10 teams in the Champions Cup, an elite tournament, always seemed absurd. And this season was likely to see something of a pinch. The collapse of three top-tier English sides during the 2022-23 campaign initially brought about a redistribution of talent within the Premiership. After that, though, clubs cut their cloth and recalibrated.
Having reached the Champions Cup semi-finals last season, for instance, Harlequins lost André Esterhuizen and Will Collier, two of their most influential individuals, over the ensuing summer. Among the departures from Northampton Saints, who also made the final four last term, were Alex Moon, Courtney Lawes and Lewis Ludlam. Jasper Wiese left Leicester Tigers. Saracens and Sale Sharks bid farewell to highly experienced figures. Bristol Bears sought to trim their squad and cut spending.
Harlequins and Leicester qualified for this term’s Champions Cup with 50-50 records in the league last season. They each won nine and lost nine of their 18 Premiership fixtures. Exeter Chiefs were marginally better, winning 10 and losing eight; yet have stuttered this campaign. They have kept company with Newcastle Falcons at the bottom of the domestic table while taking on the might of Toulouse and Bordeaux-Bègles, shipping 133 points across those two matches and 52 more on a trip to Ulster (Irish team).
The format of the Champions Cup sends 16 of 24 teams into the knockouts. Such generosity, allied to a seeding system, can cruelly expose those that limp through. Leicester, Saracens, Sale and Harlequins all 'earned' last-16 ties with two wins and two losses in the pool stages.
Perspective is required as well. Saints will expect to oust Castres at home and reach the semis again. When two Premiership teams reached the semi-finals of last season’s Champions Cup, it was the first time since 2016 that there had been more than one English representative. In 2020-21 and 2021-22, there were no Premiership semi-finalists at all. This is not a new phenomenon.
A lot of Eddie Jones’s analogies pertain to cricket. He has used another, though, that likens a team’s maturation to a clock. Everyone is working towards a small window at the top of the hour, the former England coach says, where everything is just right: there is a blend of quality, experience and energy that is in tune with a team’s tactical plan. The job of recruiters, selectors and coaches is to ensure that the hands of the clock don't stray too far either side of midnight.
There are several aspects to this task, with a salary cap the most obvious one for Premiership clubs competing in an intercontinental competition. The URC doesn't have a salary cap and the Top 14’s upper limit, which must be a certain proportion of that team’s overall budget, is €10.8 million (£9.18 million) plus credits. Toulouse, who also boast a prolific academy – as Saracens director of rugby, Mark McCall pointed out last week – are thought to shell out around €13 million (£11.05 million). The club are allowed to exceed the cap because they contribute so many players to France’s national team. The Premiership salary cap is £6.4 million, with bonuses taking it to £7.8 million before the addition of a, "marquee" player’s wages.
With a 10-point lead at the top of the Premiership after 13 matches, Bath are the English side closest to 12 o’clock. They have a loaded squad, thanks to robust backing and a canny spending strategy, with a pair of half-backs in Ben Spencer and Finn Russell at the peak of their powers. Bath would be the only Premiership team to rival Leinster and the Top 14 giants for depth.
However, Bath slipped up in the Champions Cup pool stage this season. They lost to La Rochelle at home and then, betraying that their priorities probably lay on the domestic front, stuck to what seemed to be a preordained selection policy for Benetton (Italian team). Bath rotated heavily, keeping Thomas du Toit and Ted Hill on the bench and went down 22-21. That effectively meant that they needed to oust Leinster in Dublin to go through and couldn't.
Other Premiership sides are at differing stages. Gloucester are among the form clubs, yet are competing in the Challenge Cup and turned over Montpellier on the road from 14-0 behind. Northampton are still replenishing their pack as potent backs develop together. Steered by George Ford and spurred by the Curry twins, Sale are reasonably close to 12 o’clock. Following an impressively dogged defeat in Toulouse on Sunday, Alex Sanderson said his side would grow even stronger as prodigiously talented youngsters such as Asher Opoku-Fordjour and Rekeiti Ma’asi-White develop and grow accustomed to the biggest occasions.
Leicester are close to 12 as well but there are other variables behind English sides’ problems; and playing without a full deck just seems more damaging for squads that are assembled to compete in a 10-team domestic league.
Saracens, in something of a transition period, opted to deploy their cohort of England regulars – Jamie George, Maro Itoje, Ben Earl, Tom Willis and Elliot Daly – in crucial Premiership games after the 6 Nations. The first of those matches, a loss to Harlequins, represented an important marketing opportunity for the club. Victory over Leicester saved their league season, yet compromised the Champions Cup because protocols required that quintet to take a rest, leaving Saracens with an extremely green bench in Toulon. Tigers travelled to Glasgow Warriors without Joe Heyes, Ollie Chessum and George Martin. Julián Montoya and Tommy Reffell were also missing. Sale were handicapped by injuries to Bevan Rodd and Joe Carpenter.
To a degree, such absences are occupational hazards of rugby union and demand that clubs are adaptable. Warriors didn't need the excellent quartet of Scott Cummings, Jack Dempsey, Sione Tuipulotu and Huw Jones to dismiss an ill-disciplined Tigers convincingly. Prioritising can work both ways, though.
Northampton’s campaign has hinged upon December’s excellent performance in Pretoria to beat the Bulls, which hastened a good seeding. They are free to pile their eggs in the Champions Cup basket now because their Premiership title defence – in a league free from relegation – is as good as over.
It bears repeating that the basketball scorelines of Super Rugby didn't appear to hinder New Zealand in the international arena and Dan Biggar used his Mail Online column last week to urge English supporters to celebrate the, "fantastic" Premiership. Now at Toulon after his stint with Saints, Biggar compared the Premiership’s spectacle favourably to the Top 14, albeit while identifying Toulouse and Bordeaux as free-running outliers in France.
Try-fests and another compelling play-off race in the Premiership, with second and eighth separated by just nine points, as well as all seven of those sides having won between eight and six domestic matches out of 13, are hallmarks of an exciting league full of fallible teams. Referees in the Premiership are mindful of maintaining flow and intrepid attack coaches are thriving.
It is impossible to know for sure whether all that contributes to flimsier defence but the signs suggest as much and there have been alarming lapses this year. Toulouse hit Leicester for 80 in January and Saracens shipped 40 unanswered points at Stade Mayol on Saturday as their brilliant start was wiped out in a 72-42 defeat. Harlequins were humiliated 62-0 by Leinster, who also battered Bristol and Bath on the way to an average of 48 points across three victories over Premiership sides.
Leinster, La Rochelle and Toulouse have contested every final since 2021. Bordeaux seem poised to succeed La Rochelle at the very top table. Alternatively, the big two may separate themselves.
Among the best performances from Premiership teams in the Champions Cup this season was Tigers’ effort at Stade Chaban-Delmas in a 42-28 loss to Bordeaux. Leicester grafted and scored four tries, yet were undone by some devastating transition attack from Louis Bielle-Biarrey and friends. Do not forget that Bordeaux subsequently plundered 66 points against a Sharks side containing Siya Kolisi and other World Cup champions. Premiership sides have not been alone in their suffering.
Looking at all the evidence above, it looks like each Premiership side has their own unique issues. There's no central solution to the problems at hand. I do disagree about the lack of attraction of the Premiership. Teams are still able to lure international stars to their ranks. A prominent example to me would be Leicester Tigers having the services of Handre Pollard.
I always enjoy watching the competition when I can. I sort of agree with the perspective of Dan Biggar. I don't see the need to change the Champions Cup format. It's perfect the way it is.