Irish rugby does not need more talent. It needs teeth.

A guest piece by Dom Einhorn, responding to Frank Schnittger’s series on the state of Irish rugby heading into the 2027 World Cup.

The first lesson I learned as president of a 118-year-old French rugby club is that nobody in rugby ever does the right thing because you asked nicely. Sarlat, in the Dordogne, had survived two world wars, professionalisation, and a century of committee meetings, and every good structural idea I inherited had died the same death: everyone agreed it was sensible, nobody was obliged to do it, and so it quietly did not happen. That lesson is, I think, the missing piece in the conversation Frank has started here, and it is the reason I believe Irish rugby’s problem is not the one most of the commentary assumes.

A word first on where I stand, because a Frenchman turning up on an Irish site to talk about Irish rugby should show his papers. I grew up in Alsace, spent years in club administration in Sarlat, and I am now helping build a startup club, the New Braunfels Outlaws, in the Texas Hill Country alongside Dave Ellis, who spent a decade as France’s defence coach under Bernard Laporte and Marc Lièvremont, winning a Grand Slam in 2004 and engineering the defensive plan that knocked New Zealand out of the 2007 World Cup, after a playing career in rugby league across England, Australia, and France and coaching spells at London Irish, Gloucester, and Lyon. I have also spent most of my working life in business, media, and monetisation, which means I tend to see a rugby union the way I see any organisation: as a set of incentives wearing a blazer. And I should say plainly that I have loved Irish rugby for many years. The rolling pick-and-go game (the “rouleau compresseur irlandais,” as French commentators call it) is one of the sport’s great sights, and Irish supporters are among the most generous in the world toward French rugby, far more generous, frankly, than we chauvins tend to be in return. Respect where respect is due. What follows is offered in that spirit.

Frank’s series lands on a number that should alarm everyone: fifteen academy graduates against forty-two departures across the four provinces. His diagnosis is right. But the prescriptions that usually follow, fix the academies, spend more, recruit better administrators, all share a hidden assumption: that Irish rugby’s institutions will do the right thing once they are shown what it is. My experience of rugby governance, French, English, and now American, is that this assumption is almost always false, and that the countries which fixed their pathways did so by removing goodwill from the equation entirely.

What France actually did

The French revival is usually told as a story of money and talent. It was neither. France always had money and always had talent, and for fifteen years it converted both into quarter-final exits and imported thirty-somethings. What changed was that the federation and the league, two institutions that fought each other over the calendar, player release, and money exactly the way the RFU and Premiership Rugby still do, stopped relying on cooperation and built compulsion instead.

The mechanism is the JIFF rule (“joueurs issus des filières de formation,” players produced by the training pathway). A player qualifies by spending five seasons in French age-grade rugby or three seasons in an accredited academy by age twenty-three. Since the 2017-18 season the quotas have been binding, and since 2019-20 every Top 14 and Pro D2 club has been required to field an average of at least sixteen JIFF players in every twenty-three-man matchday squad across the season, playoffs included. Fall short and you start the following season with points deducted from your league total. Exceed a higher threshold and you unlock money from a dedicated JIFF fund. Carrot and stick, both written into the regulations, neither dependent on anyone’s good intentions.

The genius of the design is that it made developing homegrown players the cheap option. A Top 14 owner who could not care less about the national team still funds the pathway, because the alternative is a points deduction that can cost him a playoff place. Cooperation was not achieved. It was made irrelevant.

The half of the answer nobody talks about

The second half of the French rebuild is visibility, and it is the half that unions almost never treat as pathway infrastructure. Canal+ has broadcast the French championship for three decades, and in 2024 it committed roughly €700 million to keep the Top 14 and Pro D2 through 2032, with the league explicitly directing that money down into amateur rugby and the training system. I grew up near Strasbourg, in a corner of France that is emphatically football and handball country, and a kid there who has never stood next to a rugby pitch still knows who the France captain is, because the sport is simply present: Saturday nights, magazine shows, highlights on his phone. You cannot recruit a twelve-year-old from a region where the sport is invisible. Broadcast product is not downstream of the pathway. It is the top of it.

And twelve is the real battleground. Pathways do not fail at academy level. They fail two levels below it, in the schools and junior clubs where the player pool is actually made, in the fight over which sport’s junior structures reach a talented child first. In Ireland that fight is against the GAA and football, both superbly organised at exactly that age. An academy reform in 2027 does nothing for the athlete who was lost to another code in 2019.

Ireland’s paradox

Here is what makes the Irish case so maddening from the outside. Structurally, Ireland should find this easier than any rugby nation on earth. The IRFU owns the provinces outright. There is no English-style club-versus-country war, no French-style federation-versus-league trench warfare, nothing to negotiate and nobody to outvote. The union could, tomorrow, tie a defined share of each province’s central funding to binding pathway metrics: minimum academy intakes, minimum match minutes for Irish-qualified players under twenty-three, measurable recruitment activity in schools outside the traditional fee-paying circuit. It could ring-fence a percentage of its broadcast income for visibility below the elite level, the way the French deal now feeds the amateur game, so that rugby exists on screens and in schoolyards in the counties where it currently does not.

France needed a decade of institutional warfare and a home World Cup deadline to force these mechanisms into existence. Ireland needs a board decision. And that is precisely why the thinning pathway is so damning. When a system with total formal control produces fifteen graduates against forty-two departures, the constraint is not structure, talent, or money. The athletes exist in Ireland; anyone who has watched Irish schools and GAA sport knows it. The constraint is that nobody inside the system is compelled to act, and voluntary virtue is not a strategy. It is a hope.

Frank closed his piece by asking whether the IRFU has the courage to make tough decisions. I would sharpen the question. Courage is what you need when the path is dangerous. This path is merely uncomfortable, mostly for senior administrators whose performance would suddenly be measured against numbers they cannot manage away. The real question is whether Irish rugby will keep trusting goodwill, which every rugby country has tried and none has made work, or whether it will do what France did and give its own best intentions the force of law. The fix is not a mystery. It is a mandate. Someone just has to sign it.

Dom Einhorn is a Franco-American entrepreneur and the founder of Masters of Trivia. He grew up in Alsace, served as president of Sarlat Rugby in the Dordogne, and is currently helping build the New Braunfels Outlaws rugby club in Texas with former France defence coach Dave Ellis.