KEY POINTS:
A bad situation looks like becoming a whole lot worse if proposed changes to the structure of English rugby come to fruition.
Once a league tormented by bickering and self-interest, the Guinness Premiership is on the verge of yet another major breakthrough that will increase the number of raiders looking to poach New Zealand's players.
Discussions to rip up the current format and replace it with two leagues of 10 teams are believed to be at an advanced stage.
Which is good news for England, bad news for New Zealand. The Premiership currently operates as a 12-team championship with one club relegated to the semi-professional National League each year.
Relegation has been a bug-bear of many club owners for some time. Doing away with it has been on the agenda several times, only to be ruled out after heated debate.
The argument against it is two-fold; there is the belief that it promotes negativity among the half dozen or so teams that normally spend the five months after Christmas locked in battle to avoid the drop.
Where the top half of the league focuses on playing to win, the bottom half gets stuck in the mind-set of trying not to lose.
It can make for some ordinary games, foster some poor habits and drain the enthusiasm of even the best players as former All Black Justin Marshall discovered when he was involved in Leeds Tykes' unsuccessful campaign to stay up in 2005-2006.
Carlos Spencer had the same problem at Northampton last year. When the Saints found themselves on an unbreakable losing streak that left them in the mire, Spencer said:
"The guys put pressure on themselves by mentioning relegation all week. You go into your shell and don't want to do anything wrong because you don't want to be blamed.
"Guys are playing within themselves. They don't go out of the square to fix things, they'd rather be happy just doing their job, because at least they won't be blamed."
The second, more significant, gripe with relegation is that it acts as an impediment to external investment.
Rugby is a boom sport in Europe. Almost overnight it has gone from being a bit of a weird game for public school types to the epitome of cool.
Broadcast and sponsorship deals are growing, crowds are getting bigger and plenty of rich blokes want a slice of the action.
What puts them off is relegation. The financial model stacks up but for that one flaw.
In the early days of professionalism, money gushed out of English clubs and only trickled back in. That's all changed now with accounts showing that in 2001 Leicester Tigers turned over £7.7m, Northampton £4.7m and Bath £4.5m. By 2006 those numbers had respectively risen to £15.1m, £10.1m and £7.9m.
Leicester made a £1.1m profit in 2006 and many clubs in the Premiership are now making small profits where once they were posting moderate losses.
Relegation is a massive financial threat, however. The club that goes down receives a parachute payment of about £1.5m to help them off-set the predicted £3m drop in revenue that will result because they are not playing in the Premiership.
It's a lot of money to lose and the reality for the doomed club is that the owner either has to wear a big hit to the pocket or the squad has to be decimated to bring down the wage bill.
Under the new proposal there would be two self-contained leagues of 10 teams. There would be relegation from the top league but the bottom team in the second division would not be dumped.
That scenario would give club owners a degree of certainty about what they were getting into. It would prevent massive fluctuations in income and could attract major investors.
There are several clubs in the National League with the potential to become Heineken Cup contenders in time.
London Welsh have a rich history and a dormant support base that could be lured back to Old Deer Park if the club are suddenly flooded with cash. Nottingham are another former heavyweight while Rotherham Titans and Bedford have recent Premiership experience.
What everyone in England hopes is that a restructuring will pull down the barriers to investment.
Clubs like London Welsh, Rotherham and Bedford will no longer be purely vanity products, but viable opportunities for wealthy entrepreneurs and consortiums.
If that proves to be the case, it will mean yet more serious operators in the player transfer market. And New Zealand will be first port of call.
Not so long ago there were only a few top English clubs like Leicester, Wasps and Northampton and a couple of the major French outfits who were in the market for established All Blacks.
Now most of the Premiership clubs are in the market, with virtually every Top 14 club as well as the likes of Toulon, Agen and Racing Metro in the second division.
The Celts, too, are now serious options with Leinster, Munster, Ulster, Cardiff, Gwent Dragons and the Ospreys all armed with big budgets and big ambitions.
Bruce Sharrock of player agency World in Motion, says: "There is definitely a much bigger pool of teams looking to recruit talent. The European competitions are growing in popularity and attracting more sponsorship and broadcast revenue and that is creating a lot more opportunities for New Zealand's players."
There is already intolerable strain on the New Zealand Rugby Union. The battle to keep their players is hard enough. They don't need yet more cashed-up raiders offering the world and more.
But that's what is going to happen and the momentum is going to be mighty hard to reverse.
Maybe even impossible and despite New Zealand and South Africa's constant presence at the top of the world rankings, Europe is the power base of world rugby.
