Tonga eyes Skipper Cup entry

Rugby officials from one of our Pacific Island nations have approached the Fiji Rugby Union on the possibility of having their team playing in the Skipper Cup competition.

This was revealed to SUNsports yesterday by Fiji Rugby Union board chairman John Sanday.

"We have been approached to have a team from Tonga playing in our Skipper Cup and the leader of the consortium was here in Lautoka last week to watch the grand-final and went away very inspired," he said when asked if our domestic competition is ready to go semi­professional.

Sanday indicated that in many ways the domestic competition is already semi-professional.

"Match officials are paid and their remuneration structure is very clearly set out and agreed to by all parties.

"Referees, doctors, medics and so on are compulsory for each sanc­tioned game, they are paid for each week they participate.

"The coaches and players do get some form of weekly allowance from their supporters and union. So in that sense it is already a kind of semi-professional league."

The former Flying Fijians No.8 said they want to continue building our provincial competition into an elite and fully professional league where players are remunerated properly; there are salary caps put in place and other regulations that a fully professional league must

have in place.

"Discussions are happening right now at board level on the com­mercial shift needed to anchor the league on a commercially sound footing from which we can move to fully professionalise."

Benchmark

For this season, Sanday said, they had put in place some benchmark, baseline measuring tools from which they can get solid data on which to base their business plan.

"We have started tracking attend­ance at each Skipper Cup games and revenues.

"For the eleven rounds of the Skip­per Cup games, total attendance is just over 155,000 and generat­ing gross revenue of $1.69 million. When we add on the attendance and gate takings from the quarterfinals to the grand finals, we would have easily exceeded $2m in total rev­enue for the whole season."

He highlighted given this baseline data, they are able to con­fidently start a scenario plan the re­muneration structure for the play­ers and officials and the revenue streams that can make this league commercially viable.

"This season has shown us that a very strong and competitive pro­vincial competition can be eco­nomically viable but the obstacles will remain around the number of grounds and the costs we will pay for hosting our games there.

"Therefore the acquisition of our own grounds in the right locations will be the cornerstone of our push into a properly commercial league where playing rugby is a viable em­ployment pathway for our provin­cial players.

The other obstacle is whether the crowds will be willing to pay a bit more for admission.

Overall though, there is still much work that has to be done to ensure we strike the right balance where the provincial unions can