The alternative plan from Rob Regan

Fair point there were 22 players based outside Wales in this season’s 6 nations squads for the senior and U20s.That is likely to increase next season with player movements.

Two of our more promising tight heads are bit part players in England.Giffin at Bath is struggling for game time partly due to the change in rules on match day squad composition in the Prem and Sam Scott has had 17 minutes of rugby in the Prem Cup with Bristol so far this season - although he is getting some game time at National League 1 level.

In the Prem the number of NEQ players is around 118 - close on 12 a team or double the close to 6 a team in Wales.

The vast majority of this appears to be written by an AI/LLM and isn’t saying anything new that hasn’t been said by the WRU.

It might be an alternative but it isn’t a good one in my opinion. A lot of words but not a lot of detail on how things would be changed, just “what if this?” and “what if that?”.

70 pages and it feels like it was generated for the sake of being an alternative, rather than actually being one.

But what he has done has identified that there are trade offs with how you use the WRU funds. The strategy here is to keep 4 teams as well funded as possible, move funds away from SRC, women's game and pathways which combined with a bit of cost cutting and a bit more benefactor investment (but still less than they contribute now) gets you to 4 teams which are £0.9m down on funding compared to the 3 team model. 

The financial calcs are a bit finger in the air, but that's not his fault as he doesn't have access to the WRUs figures. 

What he's done is exposed two things:

1) The trade offs in how you use funds

2) The lack of evidence/rationale provided by the WRU to back their chosen option. For example this often cited £28m in pathway funding, nobody has any idea what that's being spent on, whether there's any evidence to say £28m is the right figure and what the alternative use of that funding is. 

What there is undoubted evidence for however is that the Welsh team has unprecedented success over 15 years, with 3 teams contributing the majority of players to that success. So it can and has worked It's therefore risky to remove one of those pillars of that success, and that's what people are intrinsically objecting to. 

The  WRU plans also include a £5m efficiency saving so probably a direct lift from that and I think the £6m is a starting figure which is £400k less than than the WRU starting point on the 3 team model - so neither approach is likely to create the Welsh  Leinster if you apply equal funding.

Agree looks like an AI masterpiece.

Haven’t gone through it in detail but your first post dismisses it strange.