The Issue

In 2015, England Rugby created a Blueprint recommending that the Rugby Football Union (RFU) works with the Rugby Football Referees Union (RFRU) to develop an improved IT and CRM system to support match officiating. It identified that lack of a central database was hampering progress.

England Rugby’s own appointing system was deemed to be failing to meet the needs of referee societies and the game in general, so England Rugby looked at commercially available systems that could deliver the Blueprint's recommendations.

Reasons for choosing WhosTheRef.com

After a thorough selection process, the RFU chose to use WhosTheRef.com via a nationwide licence which support officiating of all rugby in England, from grass roots up to the Aviva Premiership (up to 114,000 appointments annually). WhosTheRef.com was selected to provide the official management system due to our:

• Flexibility of our approach to implementation;
• Understanding the challenges of recruiting, appointing, developing and retaining sports officials at both a local and national scale;
• Existing portfolio of sports customers worldwide, including in New Zealand, USA, Canada, Asia and Europe;
• Proven willingness to understand customers’ specific needs and adapting software;
• Collaboration with third party agencies to collate “big data” about the state of the game, to make decisions that can help the future growth of rugby in England.

Outcomes

England Rugby is already reaping rewards from having selected WhosTheRef.com as their nationwide match officials system. The immediate benefits have included:

• A single, accurate view of all match officials in England;
• Authoritative data on number of games taking place in English rugby, to monitor growth;
• Prioritising games to be covered by a referee and monitoring the number of games without an allocated official;

The Future

WhosTheRef.com is committed to maintaining a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with England Rugby and its member referee societies by:

• Holding quarterly meetings with key stakeholders at Twickenham to review progress;
• Rebranding WhosTheRef.com user interface to match England Rugby’s corporate image;
• Integrating WhosTheRef.com with the game’s national database;
• Reviewing our IT infrastructure to build in additional resilience and redundant capacity;
• Ensuring full compliance with the GDPR (data protection) legislation.