The Rugby Football Union’s overseas player ban is, in my assessment, an anti-competitive commercial arrangement masquerading as a selection policy, and it is almost certainly unlawful as currently structured.
Whilst England stumble through their worst Six Nations opening in living memory, Jack Willis, one of the finest opensides in the world right now, a man Toulouse head coach Ugo Mola has described as “mind-blowing,” is watching from France, ineligible, untouchable, a ghost at the feast of English rugby’s ongoing humiliation, together with a host of other Test hardened players like David Ribbans, Kyle Sinckler and Lewis Ludlam.
Tom Willis was overlooked the moment he signed for Bordeaux-Begles, not because Steve Borthwick doesn’t rate him, but because he won’t be eligible for the Rugby World Cup. This is not sporting governance. It is a cartel-like arrangement.
What the rule actually is
A commercial contract, the Men’s Professional Game Partnership (MPGP), signed between the RFU and Premiership Rugby Ltd in 2024 and effective through 2032, is what the overseas player ban actually is. Under its terms, England-qualified players are effectively reserved for the 10 PREM clubs.
The global market for their services is, by agreement between the primary buyers, confined to a domestic competition whose salary cap sits at £6.4 million against the Top 14’s equivalent of nearly £10 million. Players are not prevented from going to France. They are simply told that if they do, their international career ends. The incentive of an England shirt, substantial, quantifiable, commercially transformative for any player’s earnings and post-career opportunities, is weaponised as a retention tool for clubs that cannot compete on salary, basically wage suppression by another name.
The legal case
Chapter I of the Competition Act 1998 prohibits agreements between undertakings that have as their object or effect the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition within the UK. Chapter II prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position. The RFU, as the regulatory body with effective monopoly control over the market for England caps, and PRL, representing the clubs that dominate the domestic market for England-qualified players, have together constructed precisely such an arrangement. Sports law specialist Ben Cisneros of Morgan Sports Law, writing in Rugby and the Law in April 2024, concludes the rule is “prima facie a restraint of trade, an anti-competitive agreement by object and/or effect, and a prima facie abuse of dominant position.”
In October 2024, the European Court of Justice delivered its judgment in FIFA v BZ, the Diarra case, described by the legal team that won it as “Bosman 2.0,” finding that FIFA’s transfer regulations constituted a restriction of competition “by object,” meaning anti-competitive in their very nature without any need to prove actual market effects.
The ECJ was emphatic: players as workers are entitled to genuine labour market freedom, and governing bodies cannot unilaterally set the terms of that market without collective negotiation. The Competition Act 1998 operates on identical principles.
The FA Regulatory Commission’s landmark ruling in CAA Base Ltd and others v The Football Association and FIFA in November 2023, featuring former Supreme Court judges Lord Collins and Lord Dyson, reinforced this further, establishing that governing bodies must produce actual evidence of necessity rather than merely assert it. The MPGP arrangement has never been tested in court. In my view, it should be.
The proportionality test
Even if a court accepted that the RFU pursues a legitimate aim, the rule fails the four-stage proportionality analysis that governs both competition law and restraint of trade doctrine.
The aim must be legitimate: player access for training outside international windows has genuine sporting merit, though commercial club protection does not. The measure must be suitable: excluding players entirely goes far beyond ensuring coaching access, which could be achieved through negotiated release clauses with overseas clubs. It must be necessary: South Africa has won three consecutive Rugby World Cups selecting players under standard World Rugby Regulation 9 release windows alone, which makes necessity impossible to demonstrate. And it must be proportionate in the strict sense: a blanket ban affecting 15 or more elite players, suppressing wages and restricting career development, is self-evidently disproportionate when less restrictive alternatives exist.
The rule fails at every stage.
The counterarguments, fairly stated
Intellectual honesty requires engaging with the RFU’s strongest ground, because it has genuine merit. Under the MPGP, England coaches can call on Prem players outside standard World Rugby Regulation 9 international windows for training camps, profiling and preparation weekends that overseas clubs are not contractually obliged to provide. That access is real and genuinely valuable. The RFU would also note that the Rugby Players Association co-signed the MPGP in 2024, suggesting institutional alignment rather than opposition, though unions have challenged agreements they have signed before when individual member interests were inadequately represented in negotiations. Willis himself extended his Toulouse contract twice with full knowledge of the consequences, a fact any court would weigh carefully. And a weakened Prem does carry genuine costs for the English player development pathway, however overstated that argument has become in the mouths of those with a direct commercial interest in making it.
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These are legitimate points. They do not survive the proportionality analysis above.
The golden arguments
Two considerations dwarf everything else, and neither receives the attention it deserves.
The first is Test success. South Africa has won the last three Rugby World Cups. Their players are scattered across the Top 14, the Prem, Japan and beyond. The Springboks select on merit, operate within standard World Rugby Regulation 9 release windows, and have constructed a culture and a system that renders the “access” argument not merely unconvincing but empirically false.
England, by contrast, have endured their worst Six Nations in memory whilst the world’s best English openside wins three straight Top 14 titles in red and black. The policy designed to make England better is making England worse. That is not a debating point. That is the scoreboard.
The second is the commercial opportunity that the RFU and PRL are leaving on the table, and this is the argument that should concentrate minds in every Premiership boardroom in England. The Top 14’s English audience is growing. Every English fan who watches Willis play for Toulouse is a fan of rugby, not merely of French club rugby. They watch the Six Nations. They buy England shirts. They attend Prem matches.
The assumption that English rugby audiences are a fixed market in competition with French rugby is as analytically wrong as assuming that Premier League viewers do not watch Champions League football. They are the same people. The market for elite rugby in England is not fixed. It can grow substantially. But it will only grow if England are worth watching, and the audience that has discovered world-class rugby through the Top 14 is precisely the audience that a winning England team would convert into paying Prem customers.
A dominant England team is the Prem’s most powerful commercial asset, not a threat to it. Every Grand Slam, every World Cup campaign that captures the national imagination, drives participation, broadcast value, shirt sales and match attendance at every level beneath it.
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The clubs lobbying hardest for this restriction are sophisticated commercial operations who should be able to follow that logic to its conclusion: the long-term valuation of the Prem is far more dependent on England winning than on whether Jack Willis plays in Toulouse or at a Prem club.
The path forward
The Rugby Players Association has in its hands a potentially historic case. A collective challenge mounted by the 15 or more England-qualified players currently in the Top 14, men excluded from international consideration not because they lack quality but because of where their employers are located, would demolish at a stroke the voluntary choice defence the RFU would otherwise deploy. 15 players do not make a series of lifestyle decisions. 15 players constitute structural exclusion from a labour market. The RPA has never truly flexed its institutional muscle. This is the moment.
But litigation is the nuclear option, and the most powerful argument here does not require a courtroom. It requires the Prem clubs to follow their own commercial logic honestly. Australia reached this conclusion and abolished its overseas player restrictions entirely in August 2025, declaring them redundant, not under legal compulsion but under the weight of sporting and commercial reality. England can do the same.
The verdict
Nick Easter said this week that England should “bend the rules”. With respect to a distinguished former captain, that understates the position. The rules should not be bent. They should be abolished. They are, in my view, legally indefensible, commercially self-defeating, and sporting nonsense. The Willis brothers are watching. The Prem’s future audience is watching. So, with increasing bewilderment, is the rest of the rugby world.
The RFU has a choice. Reform now, on its own terms, and claim credit for a decision that grows English rugby at every level. Or wait until a court makes the decision for them, at considerable cost and with no credit whatsoever. That is not a difficult calculation. It is, however, one that requires courage. That conclusion is, of course, a matter of legal analysis rather than adjudicated fact.
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Legal Authorities and Sources
Competition Act 1998, Chapter I and Chapter II prohibitions
Nordenfelt v Maxim Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Co [1894] AC 535
Eastham v Newcastle United Football Club [1964] Ch 413
Meca-Medina and Majcen v Commission, Case C-519/04 P, ECJ, 2006
Chambers v British Olympic Association [2008] EWHC 2028 (QB)
CAA Base Ltd and others v The Football Association and FIFA, FA Rule K Arbitration Tribunal, November 2023
FIFA v BZ (the Diarra case), Case C-650/22, European Court of Justice, 4 October 2024
World Rugby Regulation 8 (international eligibility) and Regulation 9 (player release for international duty)
Ben Cisneros, “England Rugby’s Overseas Player Rule: A Restraint of Trade?” Rugby and the Law, Morgan Sports Law, April 2024
Men’s Professional Game Partnership (MPGP), RFU and Premiership Rugby Ltd, 2024
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