Ex-Springboks captain: PREM Rugby ‘will regret’ controversial decision as it ‘fails’ English Rugby and leaves Steve Borthwick with blunt ‘tools’
Bob Skinstad (left) has claimed English rugby could come to 'regret' the decision to scrap traditional promotion and relegation
Bob Skinstad believes English club rugby’s lack of jeopardy is damaging the national team and England ‘may live to regret it’.
Talking exclusively to Planet Rugby, the former South Africa captain argues the absence of relegation from the Gallagher PREM has hurt England at international level.
“As players, we are competitive animals,” Skinstad says. “We’re built to understand debilitating loss and mountain-high expectations of ourselves.
“If you’re happy to play in the bland marshmallow land that is neither a promotion nor a relegation environment, why would you suddenly be a sharpened tool in a Test match environment?”
‘There’s absolutely no jeopardy in the players’ lives beneath Test level’
No club has been relegated from the top division since 2020, the year of England’s most recent Six Nations title.
Since then, the world’s richest and best-resourced rugby country has lost 16 of its 30 championship matches and recorded just one top-two finish.
They have lost to Italy and Fiji for the first time, suffered record home defeats to Ireland and France and been beaten by Scotland five times out of six.
In that same period, no English club has won the Champions Cup, having provided four tournament winners in the previous five years when jeopardy did exist in the domestic league.
A Rugby Football Union review is currently underway to identify the reasons for the country’s worst-ever Six Nations, which saw England lose four games for the first time since 1976 and concede more tries and more points than ever before.
Skinstad, Springbok skipper turned French second division club owner, believes one of the root causes is staring them in the face.
“There’s absolutely no jeopardy in the players’ lives beneath Test level,” he says. “They go back to their clubs and, even if they lose all their games, they stay in the PREM.
“You don’t have to actually put your livelihood on the line and stay at the top of your game, as you do in France. I find that extraordinary.”
In February of this year the RFU confirmed a major overhaul of English rugby’s elite tier, formally binning promotion and relegation and turning the Gallagher PREM into a franchise model.
The plan is for the new-look division to one day incorporate a criteria-based expansion and demotion model, though even that will only be partly influenced by results on the playing field.
‘I think they’ve failed domestic rugby’
The decision to forfeit sporting uncertainty for financial stability was made on the grounds of economic necessity. In the 2023/24 season, PREM clubs made a combined loss of £34 million.
According to the Leonard Curtis Rugby Finance Report 2025, total debt reached £342.5m across the league, while six of the 10 clubs were balance sheet insolvent.
Supporters of the radical change, chief among them club owners who for years have haemorrhaged money propping up an unsustainable sector, argue there was no alternative if the professional game was to stay afloat.
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It is hard to argue with the figures, but Skinstad, whose Beziers club is battling relegation across the Channel in Pro D2, counters that the loss of competitive jeopardy is a high price to pay.
“I think they’ve failed domestic rugby in terms of that decision,” he says. “I don’t agree with this vote around the PREM. I think they (English rugby) may live to regret it.”
Simon Halliday, the former England centre, is strategic advisor for Ealing Trailfinders, who lead the Champ (second division) by 25 points and have won all their games, yet have no chance of gaining a seat at the top table.
Even before the switch to a closed shop, Ealing had had their path to the promised land blocked on multiple occasions due to failing the ‘minimum standards’ criteria – requirements around ground capacity and assurances over safety compliance.
“I look at the PREM and there are streams of matches that don’t matter any more,” says the ex-chairman of European club rugby. “As Bob rightly says, it doesn’t matter. None of it matters.
“A third of the division has nothing to play for. I look at, say, England centre Seb Atkinson. He is not going to become a better player turning out for Gloucester every week for the next two months. He just isn’t.
“There’s no tension, or whatever, in what they’re doing. That can’t be right for players like him who hope to face South Africa in July.
“The proof of the pudding will be in what happens at Ellis Park and then against Fiji and Argentina. England could be down to eighth in the world by the end of the summer.”
Gloucester languish eighth of 10 in the table, 29 points off the play-off spots, having won only twice in 12 league outings. Worse still are Harlequins, who have misfired all season yet know results do not matter to their future status.
“You need to have an edge,” says Chris Robshaw, former captain of both the Londoners and England. “There’s definitely a lot of teams now – Quins, Gloucester, Sale – who are out of Europe and out of [contention for] the Prem and whose seasons are petering off.
“If there was relegation it would force them to focus their minds a bit more and raise their game. It would put that jeopardy upon them.
“But there is no easy answer because English rugby literally can’t afford the uncertainty relegation brings. After what happened to Worcester, Wasps and London Irish we don’t want to lose more clubs and see more jobs go.”
Jeopardy or solvency? It seems you cannot have both.
As Robshaw puts it, “it’s less a case of what does the league want more, than what does it need.”