Today’s announcement will do little to calm the often seething cauldron of Welsh rugby, particularly in west Wales.<\/p>\n
The WRU said only one of the three future teams in Wales will be based in the west where both Ospreys (Swansea) and Scarlets (Llanelli) are based.<\/p>\n
Scarlets and Ospreys are on a previous funding agreement until 2027 – worth just \u00a34.5m a year – after refusing to sign the new participation agreement earlier this year.<\/p>\n
There is still a hope within the governing body that the teams could merge but would open a tender process if they do not.<\/p>\n
That process even opens the unlikely prospect that one of those teams could apply for the licence based in Cardiff or east Wales.<\/p>\n
The WRU, meanwhile, is a stakeholder in the URC – along with the four other national governing bodies – and would need support from the league to alter the number of regions competing.<\/p>\n
Surveys have shown a majority of Welsh rugby fans would like the WRU to approach the English clubs to see if there could be an Anglo-Welsh league.<\/p>\n
WRU director of rugby and head of performance Dave Reddin has stated that option was not on the table and the WRU remains committed to the URC. <\/p>\n
So while the present now has greater clarity, the longer-term future of Welsh rugby still remains uncertain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today’s announcement will do little to calm the often seething cauldron of Welsh rugby, particularly in west Wales.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-101781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}