United Rugby Championship (URC) chief executive Martin Anayi has spoken about taking steps towards establishing the competition in Qatar.
While ruling out playing URC or European games in the Middle East in the near future, he’s keen to explore other opportunities in the Arab nation.
The news comes after the URC‘s three-year sponsorship contract with Qatar Airways, which is a state-owned airline that will help with URC logistics.
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Baby steps
“It’s a process actually and I know that sounds super-corny,” chief executive Anayi stated at the 2022/23 tournament’s launch in Slough on Tuesday.
“Our championship games, whether that’s URC or Champions Cup games, are so important to our clubs and the fans of those clubs that to take any of those games away from a home crowd is really difficult.
“We’ve had this conversation around ‘can you take games to the US’, which is slightly less challenging logistically or from a conceptual point of view because there have already been games in the US.
“It’s going to be really, really hard to take a championship game there, but can you take baby steps?
“Can we have winter training camps like football have in Qatar? Can you take pre-season matches to the air-conditioned stadiums and take full advantage of the legacy that they want to achieve there? Can you set up new competitions? Can you help Qatari rugby?”
URC, who share a London office with Premiership Rugby and Six Nations Rugby, want to entice international supporters to follow the club game.
And with the ongoing concerning news at Worcester Warriors, Anayi believes it’s time the sport looked at a possible a game-wide ownership model.
Key period
“The importance of Worcester to the community of Worcester means that it isn’t something that can be owned by one or two individuals,” he explained.
“It should be something that’s more widely owned and therefore something that is more robust if something does go wrong with those individuals.
“But no one has got the answer. We need to sit down as a game and ask ‘how are all these clubs going to be owned in the future?’ Can we learn from football? How are they owned elsewhere in the world?
“We don’t even have one ownership model in the URC, never mind the game. So it’s 100 per cent time to have that conservation about how should a professional club be run and owned and what’s its role within the game?
“It can’t be on its own in a little silo over here because the economics don’t work like that. There has to be a better way.
“We need to have a conversation and unfortunately Worcester is the reason that conversation has been accelerated.
“But it’s not just Worcester and the Premiership, it’s elsewhere. Clubs are not making the money they should be making and that’s because we’re not working together yet.”