RFU conscripts Wembley for campaign to host World Cup

The public bloodletting over the future of Wembley Stadium may have made an All Black ruck look like high tea at the vicarage, but the top brass of English rugby are so confident the new £715m venue will be constructed with a minimum of delay that they have incorporated it into their revised bid for the 2007 World Cup.

If England beat the French to the hosting rights they plan to hold four of the 40 élite matches at the most celebrated sporting arena of them all and predict that at least three would be sell-outs, generating £9m apiece in gate money alone.

More controversially, they are also proposing to hold games at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff and at Murrayfield in Edinburgh, neither of which appear to fit terribly snugly into an England-only bid. As Francis Baron, the chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, and the rest of the Twickenham hierarchy are decidedly sniffy about the decision by their French rivals to offer pool matches to Wales, Scotland and Ireland in a blatant attempt to buy votes when the final decision is made in April, charges of hypocrisy can be expected from the general direction of Paris.

Baron got his retaliation in first at yesterday's launch of the RFU's latest tender document. "We are not in the business of offering inducements to people and we are not attempting to influence the way they vote when the decision comes to be made. We simply think that it would be sensible to use major rugby stadia in the later stages of the competition," he said. "What we are suggesting is fair and equitable to everyone involved, not just to a few individual nations. In our view, you cannot hand-pick three countries and give them an advantage. We simply do not think that is fair."

By common consent, the most successful World Cup of the four to date was the 1995 event in South Africa, the only one held within the borders of a single nation. By contrast, the 1999 tournament – centred on Wales but played at venues throughout the British Isles and France – was unsatisfying in the extreme and was saved only by two classic semi-finals, both of which took place at Twickenham. At the outset of the 2007 process, Baron and company strongly rejected the notion of any matches being played outside of England. Now that the political battle has been well and truly joined, they have re-discovered pragmatism.

For all that, the new bid is every bit as imaginative and cleverly thought through as the first, which fell foul of the International Rugby Board in November because it did not meet the strict criteria in force at the time. The RFU is now putting forward two formats – the first for a 20-team competition along the lines of this year's event in Australia; the second for a 16-team tournament, together with a 20-team Rugby World Nations Cup for the so-called "developing" nations. The latter arrangement, heavily favoured by Twickenham, has received strong support from unions as far removed from the centre as Israel, Kenya and Hong Kong.

Baron's team have also hit on an inventive way of saving considerable amounts of money – no small matter in a commercial climate described by one RFU source as "desperately difficult" – by effectively scrapping the IRB's notoriously expensive World Cup qualifying programme. Under the RFU proposals, entry to the main event in 2011 would be through performance in 2007, position in the official IRB rankings and success in major regional tournaments.

In addition, England are pressing for the tournament to be moved from autumn to summer, and also want to see a compensation formula designed to offset the considerable loss of international and domestic competition revenues caused by the playing of a World Cup – a deficit of around £25m for the major European nations this year, according to recent research produced by the Scots.

"Our basic premise is that we should cause a minimum of disruption to existing tournaments," said Terry Burwell, the RFU's director of operations and one of the driving forces behind the bid. "We could hold a World Cup in any of the available windows, from June-July to October-November, but we believe the summer option to be the least problematic and the least expensive."

With the addition of Wembley, Murrayfield and the Millennium Stadium, the RFU has five venues of 60,000-plus capacity. "I believe we can maximise revenue for the IRB, that we can generate 50 per cent more money than the French bid," said a confident Baron. "I also think we have put forward strong ideas for the global development of the game and are offering financial protection for those unions disadvantaged by a World Cup. If anyone thinks our analysis is flawed or that we have our sums wrong, I'd be interested to hear their arguments."

Main points of the England bid

* New Wembley, along with Murrayfield and the Millennium Stadium, added to the Rugby Football Union's list of World Cup stadiums. Union expects 25 per cent increase in ticket revenue as a result

* England pushing for 2007 tournament to be played in June-July, minimising disruption to northern hemisphere season and avoiding direct competition with football

* RFU continues to press for second-tier Rugby World Nations Cup for developing countries and promises to underwrite cost of 2011 competition, wherever it is played

* Bid calls for £20m compensation scheme, funded by World Cup surplus, to alleviate hardship for unions hit by loss of revenue from International and domestic rugby

* Sharp criticism of rival French plan, which offers pool matches to Ireland, Scotland and Wales