Few rugby clubs have a chairman who cites the virtues of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
But just as the Enron and WorldCom scandals led to reform of US corporate governance, so “Bloodgate” at Harlequins this summer prompted soul-searching within a sport where infringements are traditionally punished by a penalty kick or, in the privacy of ruck and maul, just a kick.
Malcolm Wall, the new chairman of “Quins”, believes the soul of rugby can now be saved only by a fundamental reform of its corporate, as well as on-field, governance.
This summer, the club wanted an internal inquiry into Bloodgate and engaged Mr Wall, who was a player in the club’s amateur days and was recently chief executive of cable company Virgin Media’s content division.
Bloodgate began on April 12 when Dean Richards, Quins’ then director of rugby, told his physiotherapist to order a player to crack a blood capsule in his mouth in the closing minutes of a game. By feigning a blood injury, rugby’s substitution laws allowed a specialist kicker substituted earlier in the match to return to the field in the hope of scoring a drop goal.
As a cover-up, the Quins doctor cut the player’s lip, but the opposition made a formal complaint. In spite of Mr Richards and other Quins staff lying over the incident, the truth eventually came out.
Charles Jillings, chairman, resigned, while Mr Richards was banned for three years by the sport’s authorities. The physiotherapist was banned for two years and the player for four months. The doctor faces legal action.
Quins suffered huge reputational damage, a fine and costs totalling more than £500,000 – wiping out what would have been the first profit of its 13-year professional history – and a noticeably poorer performance on the pitch this season.
“The players would not have been human if it didn’t get through to them,” Mr Wall said in his first interview since accepting Mr Jillings’ invitation to become chairman, a post he also held in 1997-2000.
Mr Wall has acted on his own recommendations to the board, installing new lines of reporting and a whistleblowing mechanism. “We had a situation where the playing management were doing things that weren’t being signed off [by the board].
“It’s good business practice for a board to know what’s happening in its operations, particularly if [it is] essentially against the laws of the game.”
He drew an explicit comparison with the US laws passed in 2002 in response to Enron and other scandals.
“Working within a Sarbanes-Oxley environment, most people groan because of the huge amount of administration involved. But the principles were right: the concept that you must put in systems that assume that some human beings will want to abuse the system,” he said.
“If rugby is to be successful – commercially, but also in terms of elite rugby being an example – we have to make sure that those levels of governance are in place.”
Staff now understand there is “zero tolerance” of “what we euphemistically call gamesmanship but what is actually just cheating”, he added.
Harlequins’ veterans’ team, until recently captained by Mr Wall, are called “the Gentlemen”. But is there any room for the spirit of sportsmanship in the modern professional game?
“If you lose that, you potentially lose supporters,” Mr Wall responded. “Many are attracted by [those] attributes of rugby. We have to keep it as a highly competitive sport played by wonderful athletes, that is genuinely entertaining . . . and that maintains standards of behaviour we can all relate to and admire.
“I don’t think that is a foolish dream,” he said. “But these things, just by putting them in the ether, they don’t stay. What you have to do is manage them with good governance.”
