Five big changes for Scottish Rugby, including Murrayfield hotel plan and breakaway threat

Among the issues addressed by McGuigan were his plans to upgrade Murrayfield, including the potential for building a hotel on-site, the role of new performance advisor David Nucifora and the threat posed by a potential breakaway league.

£10m to be spent upgrading Murrayfield

McGuigan outlined Scottish Rugby’s commitment to remaining at Murrayfield and said significant capital expenditure would be used to improve the facility. The chairman has acknowledged previously that the stadium is in need of an upgrade and some work has already been done: new LED screens have been installed and the PA system is being upgraded.

Oliver Colling, Scottish Rugby’s interim chief financial officer, said the capital expenditure would amount to “around £10 million over the next two years”.

“It’s split between two things,” he added. “The essential things we have to do to keep everyone safe, to make sure the stadium is in good repair, things like the PA system, fire-alarm system, to make sure it’s absolutely 100 per cent. And then tactical enhancements - how we use the space particularly inside the stadium better and generate revenues from hospitality and probably different kinds to the ones that we currently have.”

McGuigan said: “The future is definitely at Murrayfield. And not just focusing on the bowl, but also the footprint or the stadium in terms of how we develop that.

“Clearly, the more things that we get the opportunity to do, like events outside of the rugby, that will potentially give us more money in order to speed up that plan of things we want to do. That’s why we’re really keen to continually promote Murrayfield as a place to come and do other things.”

He added: “In an ideal world we’ll incrementally build stuff that enables us to have fans coming earlier, staying longer, maybe watching another game - doing it in a space where they’re not dependent on weather alone to determine whether they can stay here or not.”

McGuigan also pledged to build more women's toilets.

Hotel Murrayfield is under consideration

Among the projects under consideration is the building of a hotel on the Murrayfield campus. There is in-house expertise in the form of Chris Stewart, an experienced hotelier who joined the Scottish Rugby Limited Board in March.

A hotel on site could appeal to concert goers as well as travelling rugby supporters and Murrayfield’s proximity to Edinburgh’s main transport links also make it an appealing location.

Near neighbours Hearts opened a 25-room boutique hotel in the main stand at Tynecastle earlier this year and the club actively courts guests who are in Edinburgh to attend events at Murrayfield. It feels like Scottish Rugby is missing a trick but McGuigan says it is something the board is considering and they may even go into partnership with a major chain.

“We’re at the very early stages of thinking about this, so I’m not suggesting we’re going to do it next year,” he said.

“A hotel would be an obvious thing to bring on site for a variety of reasons - you could run conferences there, you could have people staying there before a game. It makes it a better deal in terms of a concert promoter coming here and you could offer them that kind of facility on the doorstep.

“We don’t necessarily have to pay for that. There are hotel chains that would come to us and say ‘Look, to have something 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from town, right next to a tram station, is a bit of a no-brainer for us as well’.”

Edinburgh can eclipse Glasgow as gig capital

Concerts are big business at Murrayfeld. Taylor Swift’s three shows at the stadium in June generated £1.7m of revenue for Scottish Rugby.

Five concerts are planned for next summer, with Oasis playing three nights and Robbie Williams and Billy Joel one apiece and McGuigan, mindful of keeping local residents onside, admitted four-to-five per year was about the limit. Interestingly, the Scottish Rugby chief thinks Edinburgh in general and Murrayfield in particular is in the process of stealing Glasgow’s crown as Scotland’s place to go for mega-gigs.

“When I came to the Taylor Swift event I met the promoter and he said to me ‘I’ve done this for years, and Glasgow was always my place, because Glasgow is the home of music. And I’d never think about Edinburgh as being a place to come to. But coming to Taylor Swift has completely changed my mind’,” said McGuigan.

“He said air routes out of Edinburgh are better. More people from Europe came to Edinburgh and bought their tickets because of the location - they want a few days in Edinburgh and combine it with Taylor Swift. We had lots of customers from America, who found that coming here and having a week’s holiday and buying a ticket here was cheaper than buying it in California.”

Welcome, David Nucifora

Recruiting the respected performance director David Nucifora has been widely welcomed as a smart bit of business by Scottish Rugby and McGuigan revealed that the Australian has had a productive first month.

Hired in “an advisory capacity to provide a roadmap for its next decade of player development”, the hope is that Nucifora can replicate in Scotland what he did for Irish rugby, primarily by revamping the current set-up to nurture talent better.

“David has started,” said McGuigan. “He was in camp with the national team in the last few weeks. He’s also spent a fair bit of time with the guys - Gav [Scott, director of rugby development] - he was with them when they were talking about pathways. He’s been around for the past four weeks and he’s coming to the board next week to provide his first update in terms of what he’s seen.

“I had dinner with him on Saturday night, and he was at the Australia game on Sunday.”

The other big appointment is Alex Williamson who is succeeding Mark Dodson as Scottish Rugby’s chief executive. The former House of Fraser CEO's official start date is early February but McGuigan is hopeful of getting him in in January.

Scottish Rugby has been operating without a chief executive since Dodson’s departure in March.

Breakaway league is ‘potentially a threat’

A so-called rebel league that is threatening to lure rugby’s biggest stars away from their clubs to play in a franchise-based global circuit is being treated as “potentially a threat” by Scottish Rugby. It has been compared to LIV Golf, the Saudi-funded professional men's circuit that broke away from the main PGA Tour, but it’s also fair to say there is a fair bit of scepticism towards the rugby plan such is the lack of detail.

“Yeah it’s interesting,” said McGuigan. “I was trying to find out about it because there's all the rumour but I couldn't actually get to anybody who could explain to me what the actual opportunity is.”

McGuigan said that a “back of a fag packet” calculation estimated the cost of the new league would be around a billion pounds and he struggled to see how that could work, but also warned: “I'm sure somebody did that [same calculation] at the PGA when the golf thing came along, so I think we're not absent of seeing it as potentially as an area we need to work closely at because it could impact leagues.

“I think the way it's expressed at the moment is that your international players would still be released for the internationals but it could have a very dramatic effect on the URC and Premiership, so it would be wrong of us to pretend it's not potentially a threat. It could be, but we don't know enough yet.”