Premiership Rugby has changed a lot over the last few years, mainly down to three different teams going into administration. The league has gotten a lot smaller because of that, so people are now unsure as to how many games are actually in a Premiership Rugby season.
How many games are in a Premiership Rugby season? There are 90 games in a Premiership Rugby season at the time of writing. This is the lowest it has been in quite a few years due to three Premiership Rugby teams going into administration. Each of the 10 teams will play each other twice, home and away, totalling 18 games per team.
For the 2023/24 Premiership Rugby season there will be a total of 90 games. This is split evenly between 18 rounds of the competition. This was not how the Premiership had originally planned for the 2023/24 season to go. There were originally supposed to be 120 games in the Premiership season, as there was supposed to be last year.
With three teams dropping out of the league, there are now fewer games in a Premiership season than there has been for many years. There will actually be 93 games in the Premiership season. 90 of those make up the regular season, while at the end of it there will be two semi-finals and then the final.
Wasps, Worcester Warriors and London Irish have all dropped out of the league for financial reasons since the start of the 2022-23 season. Meaning the 2023-24 season will have just 10 teams in the Premiership. The Gallagher Premiership teams for the 2023-24 season are:
- Bath
- Bristol Bears
- Exeter Chiefs
- Gloucester
- Harlequins
- Leicester Tigers
- Newcastle Falcons
- Northampton Saints
- Sale Sharks
- Saracens
Premiership rugby teams will play more than this number of games per season. As well as the 18 Premiership games that each team has, there is also the Premiership Rugby Cup where teams can rotate their academy and backups into the first team to give them an opportunity.
There is also an extra at least four games due to the European Challenge and Champions Cups. Teams who advance further into those competitions could play at least seven or even more games than that if they progress far into the tournament. It means Premiership Rugby teams end up playing more than 30 games per season.
How many games do Premiership Rugby teams play per season?
It is very difficult to say exactly how many games a Premiership Rugby team will play in a season. The real number of course depends on how teams do in the knockout tournaments. The further teams advance in those tournaments, the more games they play in a season.
Premiership Rugby teams play anywhere from 26 to 35 games per season. Each team will usually play at least 26 games per season. 18 of those come from the Premiership Rugby regular season. Four of those games would come from the Premiership Rugby Cup and the other four would be from the European Champions or Challenge Cup group stage.
Some teams will also play two more games due to being in the Premiership semi-final and the Premiership final. This is just the competitive games that each team plays. Usually, Premiership teams will play a few pre-season games before the season starts. Some teams even play friendly’s during the season.
So it means there is a chance that Premiership Rugby teams could play almost 40 games per season. But it really varies massively depending on how far teams make it in different competitions.
Premiership Rugby 2023/24 start date
The 2023/24 Premiership Rugby season will have a much later start date than normal due to the Rugby World Cup taking place. This means that a lot of people are uncertain about when the new season will actually start.
The 2023/24 Premiership Rugby season is set to start on the 13th of October, with Bristol Bears hosting Leicester Tigers in the first game of the season. As you might have noticed, Premiership Rugby has not been able to avoid clashing with the Rugby World Cup.
The Premiership Rugby season will start at the same weekend when the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals are due to take place. It likely means that pretty much every player who goes to the Rugby World Cup will miss the first few weeks of the Premiership Rugby season.
All Premiership Rugby teams have their first game on that weekend and it is the start date for all ten teams in the league. This season has a much later start date than normal, with Premiership teams playing in the Premiership Rugby Cup prior to the start of the league season.
Premiership Rugby 2023/24 end date
The 2023/24 Premiership Rugby season is supposed to end on the eighth of June 2024. The Premiership Rugby fixtures were released in July 2023 and included the dates for the final.
With the 2024 final taking place at Twickenham on the 8th of June, this will be when the 2023/24 season ends.
What is the salary cap for the Premiership rugby teams 2023-24?
The salary cap in Premiership Rugby is one of the big talking points of the league. With the financial issues that Premiership Rugby has gone through, the salary cap has become a big talking point.
For the 2023/24 Premiership Rugby season, the salary cap is going to be set at £5 million for each team. This is going to be the third season where Premiership Rugby has the salary cap at this level. In June 2020, Premiership Rugby teams agreed to reduce the salary cap down to £5 million to help with the financial issues from the Covid-19 pandemic.
These financial issues have certainly continued over the last three years, despite the salary cap remaining at the level of £5 million. This does not mean that teams can spend a maximum of £5 million on player salaries, because there are quite a few exceptions that don’t have to be included in the salary cap numbers.
Premiership Rugby teams tend to pay around £7 million per season on player salaries because a marquee player, injury covers and some homegrown players can be excluded from the salary cap numbers.
There are plans for the salary cap level to increase next season. The cap is due to rise by £1.4 million for the 2024-25 season. With three teams folding, we are yet to see whether this will change and the cap may stay at £5 million.