Steve Borthwick has one of the hardest jobs in rugby as England’s head coach. The England head coach gets more criticism than anyone else in rugby. So how well is Steve Borthwick paid for all of this stress?
What is Steve Borthwick’s salary? Steve Borthwick’s salary as the head coach of the England team is thought to be around £700,000 per year. There has not been any official reports on the exact amount.
Considering rugby is a sport where the financial side is rarely disclosed, It is no surprise that there have been very few reports on how much Steve Borthwick is earning now that he is in charge of the England team.
There were a lot more reports about how much his predecessor Eddie Jones was earning. The new Australia head coach was reported to be earning around £750,000 per year when he was England’s head coach. You would therefore assume that England would have offered a similar salary to Steve Borthwick.
The salary that Steve Borthwick is earning with England will likely be slightly less than Eddie Jones was earning. That is for two reasons. The first is that Borthwick is a less experienced head coach than Eddie Jones. Eddie Jones was a huge scoop for the RFU when he was appointed so it probably took a large paycheck for him to take the job.
Also, the RFU will be slightly down on the money that they can offer Borthwick because they will have had to pay Leicester to get him released from his contract with the Tigers. The reports were that the RFU had to pay more than £500,000 to get Borthwick released from his contract with Leicester.
Therefore they may not have as much money to spend on Borthwicks’ salary. Steve Borthwick is still being paid handsomely for his role as England boss, with £700,000 a pretty nice deal.
Who will replace Steve Borthwick at Tigers?
With Steve Borthwick leaving his role as head coach of the Leicester Tigers to take charge of the England team, there have been a lot of talk from Tigers fans about who is replacing Steve Borthwick.
For the rest of the 2022/23 season, Richard Wigglesworth will be head coach, with Dan McKellar taking over the role to begin the 2023/24 season. Richard Wigglesworth was an interesting choice to take over as head coach for the remainder of the season. Wigglesworth was a player/coach while Steve Borthwick was in charge.
But he retired from playing to become the Tigers’ head coach for the remainder of the year. However, the scrum-half has very limited coaching experience and so Leicester began looking externally for their head coach of the future.
They settled on Dan McKellar which will be a name not a lot of English rugby fans are familiar with. McKellar had a good playing career, representing Souths Rugby Club in Brisbane over 150 times, but never really being able to break into the Reds Super Rugby team.
This led him to stop playing at just 30 years old and he moved into coaching. McKellar became the assistant coach for Souths Rugby Club in 2007. He spent two years with the Tuggeranong Vikings before continuing his coaching in Japan with the NTT DoCoMo Red Hurricanes.
He was the team’s forwards coach for two years before returning to Australia to join the Brumbies coaching staff as an assistant. When Stephen Larkham departed the team, McKellar was promoted to become the team’s head coach. He was supposed to join the Australian coaching staff when his time with the Brumbies ended in 2022.
But when Eddie Jones was appointed the team’s head coach, McKellar resigned from his role so that he could become the Tigers head coach effective from the 1st of July 2023.
What does Eddie Jones get paid?
Eddie Jones quickly rebounded after being sacked by England. He signed a contract to become Australia’s head coach for the second time, having previously led them to the Rugby World Cup final in 2003. The reports are that his contract was extremely lucrative.
Eddie Jones gets paid around $1.125 million per year with his current contract as the head coach of Australia. When Jones was announced as head coach, it was reported that he had signed a four-year, $4.5 million contract which makes him one of the highest-paid rugby coaches in the world.
This gives Jones a nice pay increase on his previous job, although his pay packet was criticised considering Rugby Australia lost a huge amount of money over the pandemic. But if he can make Australia one of the best rugby teams in the world once again then that salary will surely be worth it.
Is Borthwick a good coach?
Considering Steve Borthwick is now the head coach of the England team, there have been quite a few questions about his coaching ability.
Steve Borthwick is certainly a good coach. He has been in coaching since 2012, now having more than a decade of experience. Not only that, but Borthwick has coached some incredibly successful teams. He was the forward’s coach for England for five years, from 2015 to 2020.
This means that he was the Forwards coach for an incredibly successful period in England’s history, coaching a dominant pack that won two Six Nations titles as well as reaching the 2019 Rugby World Cup. He created a very physical pack who scrummaged well and out physicaled some huge teams.
His work with Leicester Tigers really showed that Steve Borthwick is a good coach. When he joined, Leicester were one of the worst teams in the Premiership and looked like a shell of the team that had previously won multiple Premiership titles. But Borthwick was able to turn them around.
He led Leicester to the Premiership title in 2022. But it was also that Borthwick led an inexperienced team. He helped to turn Ellis Genge into a superstar as well as being crucial in the development of England internationals Freddie Steward, Jack Van Poortvliet, Ollie Chessum and George Martin.
Borthwick is a brilliant coach and he should improve England in the long term.