Seismic changes in English rugby & the 6 Nations run-in
The Ruck
Reynolds Alfie
3.4 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last week the English league system saw its biggest shake-up since the dawn of professionalism: it was confirmed that from 2029/30 the PREM will change to a franchise system and there will be no promotion or relegation starting next season.
Alex Lowe, Will Kelleher and Stuart Barnes join Alfie Reynolds to chat about those developments. Is this an inevitable step to try and fix a system which doesn't work? Or is it betraying the very essence of sport?
They also look ahead to round 4 of the 6 Nations. How important is this week for England and Steve Borthwick? And, Scotland gear up for a crunch game against France!
***
Allianz Future Fund | Allianz Insurance
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, this is the Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from The Times and the Sunday Times. |
| 0:21.2 | The Fallow Week is done. We are rested. We are ready for the final two rounds of the Six Nations. |
| 0:26.4 | I'm Alfie Reynolds, busy studio this week to my right-hand side, Will Keller. |
| 0:30.6 | Hello. |
| 0:31.5 | Also with us once again on the train from Wiltshire, the Wiltshire Express is Stuart Barnes. |
| 0:36.1 | All right, Barnsey? |
| 0:36.7 | You're good, thanks. |
| 0:41.5 | Good, good. Trains on time again? Train perfect. Excellent. Two weeks in a row. Happy week. Happy you can believe it. And also back in studio, it feels like a long time, Alex Lowe. It has, yeah. It's good to be back in on the back of a busy fallow week. which is what we're going to start on. So we'll get on to looking ahead to round four in the Six Nations, |
| 0:55.7 | some massive, massive fixtures, but actually big... Which is what we're going to start on. So we'll get on to looking ahead to round four in the Six Nations, |
| 0:55.8 | some massive, massive fixtures, but actually big domestic news, Alex, last week. I mean, |
| 1:00.8 | you've all been writing about this at some point over the last few years and yourself and Charlie |
| 1:04.6 | were writing a lot about it last week. So as I say, we'll get on to the Six Nations. But the |
| 1:10.2 | end of promotion and relegation between the champ and the Prem, the plans are to relaunch the Prem as a 12-team franchise kind of expansion competition from 2029, 2030, and no relegation from the end of next season, although I suspect we're not going to be seeing any relegational promotion this year either. So as I just said, Alex, you guys have all been |
| 1:32.1 | writing about this for quite a long time. This was the inevitable, right? Really? This is what |
| 1:36.3 | we've been expecting for a long time. Yeah, it's actually, when you look back to the point many |
| 1:41.3 | years ago, six, seven years ago that the RFU and the Prem decided between |
| 1:47.1 | them that the gap from the champ up to the Prem was too big and the RFU decided that all the |
| 1:53.1 | funding that was going into the championship was never going to help close that gap. Where I've been |
| 1:58.0 | critical through this whole process and even last year we said to the |
| 2:02.0 | prem when we had them on the pod why the pretense why is everyone still pretending that they want |
| 2:08.6 | and they believe in promotion and relegation when they evidently never did and they manipulated |
| 2:13.2 | the regs to make sure the right teams were going up or not going up in right teams in their view. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Reynolds Alfie, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Reynolds Alfie and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.