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remiership Rugby has announced a partnership with Tenka Group owned, Turnstile to work alongside Premiership Rugby’s commercial team to value its partnership offerings as part of a broader strategic review.

Premiership Rugby chief commercial officer of PRL, Mark Britain, said Turnstile will provide a valuation report on the findings, meaning Premiership Rugby joins the likes of Formula One, World Rugby, Manchester City, Adidas, and Toyota as Turnstile clients.

“I have been watching the evolution of Turnstile closely since its launch and believe that their valuation approach is the best way of fully capturing the commercial proposition of Premiership Rugby,” Britain said.

“I was keen to work with the Turnstile team as we look forward to implementing a new commercial programme at Premiership Rugby.

“It is important that we are able to fully articulate our vision, and the impact that we are able to deliver for both existing and new partners.

“The relationship with Turnstile will focus not just on valuation, but also on how we can drive innovation to deliver maximum commercial growth,” he said.

Turnstile general manager, Dan Gaunt, said Premiership Rugby will also be using Turnstile’s Dealmaker software, which puts data points and market benchmarks into the hands of commercial teams to allow them to quickly model the value of new deals and renewals.

“We are tremendously excited about working with the Premiership Rugby team as they re-shape their commercial program,” Gaunt said.

“Our recent work with a broad range of premium rugby properties and major leagues in other sports, has provided us with highly relevant learning and benchmarks that we will factor into the Premiership Rugby valuations,” he said.

This latest news comes as The Guardian reported Premiership Rugby director, Phil Winstanley, said the competition may consider extending its two-week mid-season break due to concerns over COVID-19.

“From a public health perspective, there are serious concerns about sport at the moment,” Winstanley said, discussing concerns the UK Government is considering shutting down all elite sport during the current COVID-19 lockdown.

“It made absolutely no sense to bring games forward when [COVID-19] is at its highest prevalence and highest risk.

“It is constant engagement with Public Health England (PHE) and the DCMS (Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport).

“We have all the internal management groups with the [Rugby Players’ Association] and the RFU are continually monitoring the situation, continually getting feedback from independent experts around our testing programme and continually engaging with the authorities in the DCMS and PHE.

“Like everybody else, we are reacting to an extremely difficult landscape that has not been experienced with anyone else before,” he said.

Leading into the two-week mid-season break in Premiership Rugby, two rounds of both European competitions were postponed and have now been cancelled, coming after five of the last 18 matches in the Premiership Rugby competition were cancelled due to COVID-19.