{"id":17798,"date":"2025-07-31T23:30:50","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T23:30:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/rfu-president-deborah-griffin-becomes-first-woman-to-head-english-rugby-unions-governing-body\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T23:30:50","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T23:30:50","slug":"rfu-president-deborah-griffin-becomes-first-woman-to-head-english-rugby-unions-governing-body","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/rfu-president-deborah-griffin-becomes-first-woman-to-head-english-rugby-unions-governing-body\/","title":{"rendered":"RFU president Deborah Griffin becomes first woman to head English rugby union’s governing body"},"content":{"rendered":"


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While the World Cup will dominate Griffin’s early days, come the autumn the RFU’s governance reform will return to the headlines.<\/p>\n

After a tumultuous period last season, when RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney survived a vote of no confidence,<\/a> her role will focus on helping English rugby evolve.<\/p>\n

“I do believe that all parts of the game want us to evolve and improve our governance,” she said. <\/p>\n

“That’s really, really important – and a lot of that is in response to societal changes. The world doesn’t stand still, and neither can we.<\/p>\n

“It won’t move as fast as people maybe think it should, but then I don’t think that’s a problem.<\/p>\n

“We won’t have another major governance review, probably for another 10 years or more. So it’s really, really important – I’d rather get this right.”<\/p>\n

The results of the governance review will go to the RFU Council in the autumn but work on giving more devolved power to different regions could come sooner.<\/p>\n

Having visited clubs across England in her previous roles with the RFU, she wants the union to become more agile and responsive to each region’s needs.<\/p>\n

“I think people want to have more influence over conversations and decisions that are being made regionally,” she said. <\/p>\n

“One solution for Cumbria is not the same as the solution for Hampshire. We’ve been working on this for several years in terms of how we can make those decisions, particularly around the growth of rugby at more local levels.<\/p>\n

“We have to move on with that regionalisation, and the governance has to be aligned with that. You can’t do everything all at once. So we very much want to get the regionalisation under way in the next season.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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While the World Cup will dominate Griffin’s early days, come the autumn the RFU’s governance reform will return to the headlines. After a tumultuous period last season, when RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney survived a vote of no confidence, her role will focus on helping English rugby evolve. “I do believe that all parts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-top-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17800,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17798\/revisions\/17800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/sport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}