WRU: Council restarts legal fight after union ‘broke assurances’ over Ospreys

Swansea Council is taking the Welsh Rugby Union back to court, accusing the union of breaking assurances it gave while legal proceedings over the future of the Ospreys were live.

The council halted its High Court challenge at the end of May after the WRU told it no decision had been made on the Ospreys or on the allocation of professional licences, that the process would be fair and transparent, and that a detailed process would be published by the end of June.

Last week, days before that pause was due to expire, the union announced Cardiff and the Dragons would be offered two of the three licences for 2028, leaving the Ospreys and the Scarlets to compete for the one remaining place in west Wales.

Council leader Cllr Rob Stewart said the authority now intends to pursue the challenge.

He said the pause had been agreed on the strength of what the union told the court. “The WRU gave clear assurances to the Council during formal court proceedings and, in return, we agreed to pause our legal action,” he said. “Those assurances were central to the decision to put legal proceedings on hold.”

Stewart said the timing of the announcement was extraordinary, coming just days before the pause in proceedings expired.

The council says it was told that no decisions had been made on any of the licences, and that any allocation would be made under transparent and objective criteria.

“This misled us to believe that all four regions would have an opportunity to compete fairly for the future licences,” Stewart said. “The WRU’s latest announcement appears fundamentally at odds with those assurances.”

He questioned how the process could be called fair when two licences had been handed out without any published criteria, leaving two clubs chasing a single remaining place.

The council leader said the sequence raised serious questions about the integrity of the process, and “whether key decisions had, in reality, already been made”.

Swansea has also accused the union of withholding material it had indicated would be shared as part of the legal process, including the evidence and data behind its original consultation on the professional game.

“Despite repeated requests, the WRU has still not produced the evidence underpinning its original consultation and decision-making process,” Stewart said.

He said the union had guaranteed the future of Cardiff and the Dragons while placing the futures of both west Wales clubs in doubt, “without showing the evidence that justifies these decisions”.

Stewart added that the promise of a fair and transparent review was becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the union’s actions, and that the future of Welsh rugby was too important for decisions of that scale to be taken without transparency, accountability and clear evidence.

The stay in proceedings expired on 31 July. The WRU is expected to file its formal defence in the coming weeks.

The case began in February, when the council launched legal action over the proposed sale of Cardiff Rugby to Y11 Sport & Media, arguing the deal breached competition law and undermined the union’s own restructuring process. That sale later collapsed.

In its announcement last week, the union said only incumbent teams would be eligible for a licence, and set a timeline running from December 2026 to the end of the 2026/27 season at the latest.

Marianne Økland, chair of the Professional Rugby Board, said the WRU was committed to progressing “in a collaborative way, whilst not underestimating the considerable challenges ahead”, and wanted to avoid prolonged uncertainty for clubs, players and supporters.

The union has pushed back on the council before, saying its account of a meeting between the two sides was “not accurate” during the row over secret notes in March.

Stewart called on chief executive Abi Tierney to resign hours after last week’s announcement, pointing to a leaked recording in which she said she would have welcomed an Ospreys and Scarlets merger.

Carmarthenshire Council said it was “shocked” by the recording and demanded answers of its own, with the Scarlets’ future equally exposed by the single west Wales licence.

The stakes at the Swansea end are already on the books: the council has committed £5.1m to secure St Helen’s as the Ospreys’ home, a deal struck with the threat of the axe still hanging over the region.