URC boss Anayi: “The season doesn’t make any sense”

As the European club season reaches its climax, the Players Podcast sat down with United Rugby Championship (URC) chief executive Martin Anayi to talk growth, the calendar, the women’s game and rugby’s enduring financial question.

Now into his second decade at the helm Anayi has overseen a transformation built on looking outwards. The arrival of South Africa’s big four franchises, he explained, was the turning point.

“And so URC was born five years ago,” he said. “It’s been really special since then.”

The numbers back him up. Attendance, social media reach and TV viewership have all hit record levels, even as the league competes in what Anayi calls the “attention economy.” As he put it, the challenge is no longer just about who watches a match at the weekend.

“It’s everything else. It’s social media, et cetera, and we have to play in that space.”

Asked about the financial pressures facing clubs, Anayi was candid. He pushed back on the idea that the URC was the source of clubs’ troubles, pointing out the Stormers entered administration before joining, and exited it because of the competition, but he was blunt about the bigger picture.

“This is not a league problem. This is a game problem,” he said. The model, in his view, is fundamentally broken because player costs have outstripped what a fragmented system can sustain. France, he noted, has money pouring in and is still losing cash. The fix, he argued, is structural: “We need to change the way that the money flows through the game to the players,” so the burden sits across both the club and international games rather than landing on one.

For Conrad Smith, who knows the demands of Super Rugby travel first-hand, the conversation turned to balance. Anayi made an impassioned case for rugby’s dual identity as its competitive advantage. The Six Nations, the Rugby Championship, the World Cup and the Lions — “one of the best things about our sport” — coexist with a thriving club game in a way few other sports manage. “That is the superpower of rugby union,” he said.

On the women’s game, Anayi sees the opportunity as immediate. He suggested a British and Irish model may make more commercial sense than simply mirroring the men’s competition, given travel costs and a revenue base that hasn’t yet caught up. With South Africa’s franchises building women’s programmes, finding them competition is a live question.

The season structure drew his sharpest words. The URC has already cut from 24 rounds to 21 and moved off international weekends to protect player welfare and product quality — a weekend final between two fully capped sides, he noted, produced 1,305 caps between them. But the wider calendar? “The season for me, it doesn’t make any sense at all.” He threw his weight behind the ongoing World Rugby review of the global season.

Anayi shares the romance of seeing teams like Toulouse, the Bulls and Leinster collide in a Club World Cup, but warned that “time kills deals.” With the Nations Championship now landing in the calendar, the window is tighter though, he insisted, “I wouldn’t say it’s completely off the cards.”

Listen to the full episode with Martin Anayi now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.