How Dublin-based researchers helped English clubs to organise their academies

ENGLISH RUGBY’S RESURGENCE on the field last season was hard to miss for Irish rugby supporters.

Steve Borthwick’s England team ended dreams of a second consecutive Irish Grand Slam with their excellent win at Twickenham, while there were two English clubs in the Champions Cup semi-finals in Harlequins and Northampton, the latter giving Leinster a scare at Croke Park.

And beneath the surface, plans have been brewing to ensure that English clubs and the national team can be “world-leading” for years to come.

The ‘Professional Game Partnership’ announced by the RFU, Premiership Rugby [PRL], and the Rugby Players Association [RPA] earlier this month included confirmation of notable changes to the academy structure for Premiership clubs.

The academy boundaries have been redefined for the 10 Premiership clubs, with an 11th academy based in Yorkshire – which has no Premiership side – to be run by a board made up of the RFU, PRL, RPA, and independent members.

The clubs are being encouraged to focus on developing players from within their regional boundaries rather than recruiting from other areas of the country, with an increase in funding to help that work.

The redefined development system starts at U15 level and includes three phases. ‘Foundation’ takes in youngsters of 15 to 16, the ‘development’ stage is for ages 17 to 18, then ‘confirmation’ includes players aged 19 to 20. The agreement means each Premiership club is required to have genuine partnerships with at least two state schools.

The overall aim is to have a deeper, more developed pool of English players breaking into the Premiership and onwards to the England team.

Interestingly, a study carried out by a research group called Insight based at DCU in Dublin has played an important role in guiding this change at academy level in English rugby.

To give it its full title, the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics at Dublin City University is one of the largest data analytics research organisations in Europe and sport features among its many projects.

DCU itself offers a Master’s degree in Elite Sport Performance, as well as a Professional Doctorate in Elite Sport Performance, so it’s a melting pot for people working at the top levels of sport from all over the world, including in rugby.

Back in 2022, Premiership Rugby tasked a team of Insight/DCU academics with helping them to get a grasp on what they have been doing in the field of player development through the academies.

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As Dr Jamie Taylor – one of the DCU team – puts it, the aim was to “understand the DNA of a Premiership player: when they develop, how they develop, what resources it takes them to develop, and what are the differences between the academies.”

Taylor is an assistant professor in Elite Performance at DCU and has coached in the Leicester and Wasps academies. PhD student Amy Shelley has done much of the heavy lifting on the project, with Dr Áine MacNamara and Dr Stephen Behan also on the Insight/DCU team.

The Premiership clubs handed them 20 years’ worth of data, basically everything that’s ever been collected by a club about a player apart from their medical information, for obvious reasons.

Included was stuff like the timing of selections, players’ school, age, position, any positional changes, number of appearances and how much money each Premiership club has been spending on its academy.

Everything underlined that player development – rather than identifying and recruiting young players – was the key to academies turning out Premiership stars.

Taylor – who stresses that all their findings relate solely to English rugby and couldn’t be imported somewhere else – is upfront that this project won’t revolutionise English rugby on some grand scale but he is firm in pointing out what it has highlighted.

“It’s supportive and a good bit of research, but the nuts and bolts are that the real difference maker is coaching,” he says.

“I’m not going to say this is revolutionary because the good work is done by the people on the ground who are developing the players. We hope that what comes out of the research is a better deployment of resources to support players and coaches.”

So one of the big changes with the modifications to the academy structure under the Professional Game Partnership is that clubs are being strongly encouraged to invest in and develop players from within their boundaries rather than focusing on recruiting exciting prospects from other regions of the country.

It has long been the case that some clubs have scouted and recruited from well-known rugby schools well outside their regions, but the Insight/DCU research demonstrated that this hasn’t been important to producing Premiership players.

“The assumption is that the stronger the schools you’ve got, the more players you’re going to produce,” says Taylor. “That just doesn’t carry in England.

“It doesn’t look like it has any impact at all. What seems to be the only factor that we’ve found that has an impact on player development is effectively the amount of money that the club is spending on their academy. The more money a club spends, the more players they get.

“Everything indicates what the science has been saying for a very long time – it’s not about identification, it’s about how players get developed, the coaching they receive and the support they get, that really makes the difference.”

This is a particularly useful insight for the clubs who have understandably felt that a relative lack of successful rugby schools in their regions meant they had to recruit young players from elsewhere.

“We’ve looked at the number of schools per academy boundary region and the number of those schools that are in the top 50, basically the highest-performing schools, and then compared that to the number of players that have been developed and had Premiership debuts – there is no correlation there,” says Taylor.

“It’s also interesting in the way the academy boundary is set up – you’ve got pretty significant disparity in the number of players per region, some very small and some very big both in population and geographically, but again there is no particular correlation there with output of players.”

Unfortunately, there is little existing data on exactly where the money has been spent by academies, with further collection and study required to flesh that out. English rugby is a little behind other sports in this regard. Things like physical testing data, anthropometric data, maturation data, and psychological data will be useful when they become available.

“Those are the kinds of things if we really want to get a good picture of how players develop and what might help them develop, that’s the next stage,” says Taylor.

“We’re really pleased the league have said they’re keen to get hold of that and really get into the nuts and bolts of it in a way rugby probably hasn’t done in the past.”

One of the other findings was around England Academy Players [EAPs], a label that is essentially the marker of a high-potential player. What the research showed is that players don’t necessarily need to be an EAP from the very beginning to make it into pro rugby.

“What it looks like is that there are two really significant groups of players who are more likely to progress to have Premiership debuts,” says Taylor.

“The first are players who are EAP’d early, that is the players who are ID’d the earliest look like they’re the ones who come through.

“The second most likely are the players who are ID’d the latest. So if you’re labelled EAP at the point you become a professional player, then you are more likely to progress than anyone else apart from the ones who are ID’d the earliest.”

Again, further research is required to ascertain exactly why that is.

But the work done by the Insight/DCU has helped in getting English rugby to a point where changes to its academy structure have become a reality.

The results might not be seen at the top level for some time but it’s another step towards making English rugby more joined-up and productive.