Darren Childs on guiding Premiership Rugby through coronavirus

The CEO spoke to Zlata Rodionova about having to ‘rewrite how rugby gets played to restart safely’

Baptism of fire: Childs had only been in the post a few months before the virus hit (Phil Mingo/PPAUK )

It has been a testing time for rugby union. The Premiership resumed in August – with matches played behind closed doors – after a five-month hiatus marred by widely documented disputes over pay cuts.

Stadiums were due to reopen for supporters from 1 October, but the government has now paused these plans due to a rapid increase in Covid-19 cases across the UK.

As the business adapts to a constantly changing situation, Darren Childs, chief executive of Premiership Rugby, believes the league can only move forward through a collaborative and professional approach.

He told The Independent: “It requires resilience in your executive team, close collaborations and great team spirit values, where people are working together and supporting each other, as we deal with, what is probably the most uncertain time in business ever.


“From a sport perspective and from a rugby perspective, we need to start a new chapter of collaborations. There have been a huge number of rows over the last 20 years that there’s no place for anymore.

“We have to find ways of finding compromises – there's much more opportunities to grow the sport that way. This year, we've had a huge amount of collaboration across sport, from all the different bodies and from the government. I think we're all heads down until we're through this.”

Childs, who became chief executive of the league in 2019, just a few months before coronavirus started spreading in the UK, admits that – like for everyone else - the lockdown announcement came as a “shock”.


“If I go back to March, when all of this happened, I certainly would have underestimated all the things we’ve had to learn and get our heads around.

“We had to rewrite pretty much every single aspect of how rugby gets played in order to restart safely for the fans and players.”

To safeguard the business, Premiership Rugby clubs have agreed to reduce the salary cap – the limit on how much any team can spend on wages – by £1.4m to £5m for the 2021-2022 season to ease the financial impact of coronavirus.

The controversial decision sparked a revolt with the Rugby Players’ Association (RPA) with players threatening to strike over the pay cuts but Childs insists the relationship between the Premiership and the RPA is now on the mend.

“For years and years, we've had a fantastic relationship with the RPA and we will continue to do so.

“We had to be decisive and move really quickly. We took some criticism for that decision but it was done in the spirit of protecting the game for everybody and making sure all the clubs survived, when we really didn’t know when we could return to play.

I got a real crash course in understanding the power of community in rugby. That’s what kept me sane. We wouldn’t have got to restart without it

“We’re now back around the table [with the RPA] to discuss issues and come through it all. Hopefully, people realise now that it was the right thing to do to protect the business, the jobs involved and the integrity of the league.”

It’s not the first time Childs had to lead an organisation through a crisis.


The whole business of UKTV was under threat when he became chief executive of the multichannel broadcaster in 2010, after a stint as BBC Worldwide Channels managing director.

Yet, under his leadership, UKTV saw its profits surge from £29m to more than £90m in eight years.

“The business was being hugely disrupted by changes in the way that people were starting to consume content. The lesson there is that you can’t take successful companies for granted anymore.

“We needed to become more customer focused in terms of where the customer was going. It was an archive business, so we had to invest heavily in original content in order to have something compelling to convince people to spend time with us.”

Despite the glowing financial results and the multiple awards won by UKTV at the time, Childs says his biggest reward was to watch the team he pulled together become more successful as the business grew.

He actually attributes part of his professional success to his mentors and working with the right people, arguing that it can be as important, if not more than education (he graduated with a degree in Computer Science and later Business at Stanford).

He said: “I can literally put down my success to three or four people that have been huge mentors. I think it's important to get that message across to people that are starting out – who you work for is important as well finding someone that will mentor you, train you and invest in you. It's probably been more important to my success than anything else.”

That same opportunity for growing the business he saw at UKTV, also drew him to his role at Premiership Rugby.

“One, I was always a fan of the sport and I loved its values and secondly, and that's what always attracted me to businesses, is it’s a challenger brand.

“It’s not the number one sports franchise in the UK and it means there's a ton of growth, opportunities and exciting things that we can do.“

The Independent spoke with Childs in September when the rule of six has just been introduced, but prior to the government’s announcement that fans will not return to stadiums in October.

The latest decision will add to growing fears that clubs could go out of business without paying spectators for potentially months to come.

At the time, Childs said he was hoping to get fans into stadiums soon but the current crisis also taught him to re-examine the situation as it develops and react accordingly.

“We’re definitely planning for the worst and hoping for the best but I think the current situation teaches you to constantly be able to reassess things very quickly – that’s the big learning from all of this.”


Given the contact nature of the game, Childs said it took a “Herculean effort” to bring back and announce the first rugby games.

Changes including creating secure environments for athletes to train and play, writing testing protocols and creating a “huge” education programme for both players and coaches.

“I got a real crash course in understanding the power of community in rugby. That’s what kept me sane. We wouldn’t have got to restart without it. So, I'm pretty confident we're going to get this season finished as well.”