The business end of the rugby season has arrived and the English Premiership and United Rugby Championship tables, as ever, are being carefully scrutinised. Two from Bristol, Sale and Saracens are now vying to make the Premiership playoffs with two games left while the race for the URC top eight will boil down to the final weekend.
At which point some know-all will intone the well-worn mantra: bonus points will be crucial. And we’ll all nod solemnly and start contemplating how Team X or Team Y can best set about scoring either four tries or losing by seven points or fewer. Without necessarily stopping to think whether the cold, hard mathematics support that supposition – or indeed ever have done.
If you go and consult Dr Ellie Nesbitt, a senior lecturer in sports management at Nottingham Trent University, a very different picture emerges. Having crunched the Premiership numbers for the past 25 years, she found bonus points made a major difference to – wait for it – just 2.28 per cent of team positions in the 24 seasons in which they have previously featured. “Bonus points are not quite irrelevant but they’re definitely not making the impact they were probably designed to do,” she says.
Hang on. That hard-earned losing away point in the rain at Sale? That valiant fourth try in the dying seconds against Bath? It turns out they barely count in the wider scheme of things. Nesbitt discovered that a whopping 92 per cent of Premiership league placings were totally unaffected by their inclusion.
No fewer than 10 of those aforementioned 24 Premiership seasons would have ended up with precisely the same league table had bonus points not been included. And in the 8 per cent of occasions where teams would have finished in another position, it still made little material difference in terms of playoff or Champions Cup qualification.
Which, for the curious-minded Nesbitt, prompts wider questions. Hailing from a football background, she only became interested in rugby union because her partner was playing at Burton RFC. Watching his team constantly looking for bonus points set her analytical brain whirring.
“Even in their league they chase them. But then I looked at the data and told them: ‘It didn’t make any difference.’ I take the caveat that it potentially creates more of a spectacle but at the end of a season the difference is so marginal. So then you start to question it. ‘What is the point of all of this? Is it time for a refresh?’ For me it warrants a look at the effectiveness of bonus points. But no one in rugby union seems to be bothered that they’re not making an impact.”
It is a fair cop. Take Sale who have claimed only nine bonus points – the second-lowest in the league – and still sit in the top four. What will almost certainly determine their final placing in relation to the Bears, as ever, will be their respective number of wins. It is more than possible the Sharks will finish ahead of Bristol with seven fewer bonus points. So much for attacking rugby paying extra dividends.
But let’s open our minds up beyond decimal points. Nesbitt’s research around competitive balance, incorporated last year into the Leonard Curtis financial report on English club rugby, invites us to contemplate a landscape totally free of such added complications. What if even the slightly tweaked French system – a bonus point for scoring at least three more tries than the opposition – is a hareng rouge?
Because what if the extra layer of complexity, rather than enticing more people to enjoy the sport, is actively diluting rugby union’s popularity? “It’s weird to me that bonus points only really exist in rugby,” says Nesbitt, suggesting football’s relative simplicity is not an insignificant part of its appeal. “Rugby has so many layers that it’s difficult to get into. And when something is difficult to get into – whether that’s sport, music or history – people switch off. I don’t think rugby has helped itself over the years.”
She also wonders aloud if playoff semi-finals represent another well-intentioned idea that might have had its day. The team finishing either first or second in the regular season has gone on to win the Premiership 20 times out of the past 22 editions. Nesbitt’s logical academic brain tells her it would be much simpler to save everyone a ton of hassle and just stage a final between the top two sides.
Looking further ahead, she argues, the league also needs to work out who, exactly, it is trying to please. At present, amid plans to launch a franchise Premiership model in autumn 2026, she suggests it is being hampered by blurred vision. “The reason why a franchise system works in America is because they also have the draft and a salary cap. Rugby union seems to have this half European, half American approach but it doesn’t seem to work for them either way.”
Rather than using bonus points as a comfort blanket, accordingly, her analysis points to a more equitable spread of talent and spending power across the league as being more important. “The issue with rugby union is that the same patterns occur each year because no changes are made. What are your motivations? What do you want from the league?
“If they want to make it a spectacle and make people excited about rugby, I have no doubt the franchise approach could do that. But it is not necessarily going to fix all their problems.” Plenty for us all to ponder, whether you love bonus points or not, before this season’s final push. – Guardian
