Mediaboss Marketing

SportRugby UnionHow the vote works, who the candidates are and why it matters so much to the sport

Friday, 24th April 2020, 6:16 pm

World Rugby will elect its chairman for the next four years in an online vote on Sunday, with the result declared on 12 May.

It is a straight fight between the incumbent Sir Bill Beaumont, standing for a second term, and Agustin Pichot, who has been Beaumonts vice-chairman since 2016.

How the vote will be carried out

i's fantasy football tipsnewsletter: get ahead

i's fantasy football tipsnewsletter: get ahead

There are 51 votes, made up of three each for England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, France, Italy, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina; two each for the regions of Africa, Asia, Europe, North/Central America, South America, Oceania; and an additional two each for Japan and one each for Romania, Georgia, Uruguay, USA, Canada, Samoa, Fiji.

One estimate is Beaumont will win with at least 26 votes from the Six Nations, Japan, Europe, Africa, Canada and Fiji but predictions are precarious and Pichot has been a media-savvy electioneer.

Bill Beaumont, 68

Played all his rugby as a lock in the amateur era, captaining England 21 times and the British & Irish Lions in apartheid-era South Africa in 1980. Has since been one of his sports most prominent administrators, as chair of the Rugby Football Union and then World Rugby, while holding down the day job, running a successful family textiles company.

There is nothing Sir Bill, aka Bo-Bo to his mates, does not know about schmoozing a rugby room, and since his days as a genial captain on BBCs A Question of Sport he has been getting things done in a collegiate manner.

He has a direct connection with the modern game through his son Josh, who plays for Sale Sharks, and his manifesto promise to review World Rugbys governance is backed up by the radical change he oversaw in 2017, when 17 female representatives were added to the Council taking it from 32 to 49, and subsequently up to the 51 who will vote tomorrow.

On the other hand (a phrase it is necessary to rehearse in rugby), the 50th and 51st Council members welcomed enthusiastically by Beaumont in 2018 included the Fiji Rugby chairman Francis Kean, who last week was stood down by his union over allegations of homophobia and violence in his role in charge of his countrys prisons. And the seven candidates for the seven vacant positions on World Rugbys powerful executive committee are all men.

So would it be fair to describe Beaumont as male, stale and pale? While the outwardly avuncular Lancastrian presided over last years hugely well-received mens World Cup in Japan, the decision to take it there was made back in 2009. And it was a previous World Rugby chairman, Bernard Lapasset, who did most to achieve the sports return to the Olympic Games. Similarly, the welcome surge in the womens game in recent years is only partly Beaumonts baby.

He can point to much-needed medical and injury initiatives, and he is promising a central voice for players but everyone says that, always. On the eternal question of who pays for what, Beaumont would advocate growing the overall pie more than taking a slice out of the Six Nations.

Beaumont also has a running mate, Bernard Laporte, the chairman of the French Rugby Union, whose country is hosting the next mens World Cup in 2023, having unexpectedly won the rights ahead of South Africa. And here is political murk: when you ask Council members if Laporte will work under Pichot if Beaumont loses, some say yes while others expect the Frenchman to step aside.

Agustin Pichot, 45

To those of us who remember meeting Pichot when he was a newly-capped scrum-half in Buenos Aires in 1997, the Argentinian has hardly changed the flowing black hair has shortened a little, but he remains a fast-talking polyglot who wears white trainers to black-tie dinners and answers a question about promotion and relegation in the Six Nations with a plea for the world to engage with his philosophy.

As World Rugbys Americas North rep Dennis Dwyer told this newspaper last week, Gus Pichot wants change now, if not sooner, and this election is a battle of personalities as much as it is of two broadly similar manifestoes.

Pichot is more aggressively progressive than Beaumont, and if it means speaking out against a policy he helped agree as World Rugbys vice-chairman, he will do it. His modus operandi can be unsettling. One Council member told i that half of World Rugbys staff would walk out if the 71-times capped Puma becomes top dog.

Both Pichot and Bill Beaumont say World Rugbys finances are not transparent enough. Where Pichot would differ is how the cash is doled out.

He is a businessman who has apparently softened on the idea of private equity taking a stake in rugby and, as long as everyone gains, he will put more pressure on the rich to help the poor. And as i understands that the regional federation of Africa, for instance, receives around 2 million a year in central surpluses compared with 7m for England, the scale of the challenge is clear.

Pichot has played all his rugby in the open era, for clubs in France and England, and in an Argentina team who turned over the French and the English in their back yards. He then helped persuade club owners in France to release Argentina players for the Rugby Championship, and he says he will reach out to the owners in England too.

Pichot does not fancy a world in which international rugby is second-best, and he was frustrated when a new Nations Championship to create an annual global Test competition stalled last year. He feels Beaumont should have pushed harder for it. Yet Pichot is more rigid on the question players representing one country and sticking to it.

Whichever of them is chair faces the thorny task of pulling a bunch of conflicting interests in the same direction: the Six Nations, the Rugby Championship, the Lions and the big club leagues in England, France and Japan.

Read this article:
Battle for the control of rugby union: How World Rugby's chairman vote could change the face of the game - iNews