Gregor Townsend's Red Bull call raises eyebrows - Scotland job should be more than enough

He has been intrinsically linked with the fortunes of the national team for almost his entire adult life.

It seems odd, then, that he should choose to take a secondary job with Red Bull.

Being in charge of a team with aspirations to be the world’s best would be enough to consume the professional hunger of most elite coaches. Not so Townsend, it seems.

Townsend absent from media conference

The news that he has joined Red Bull as “strategic advisor and consultant on their global rugby strategy” comes less than a month after Scottish Rugby announced he had signed a new contract with them until the end of 2027.

Scottish Rugby CEO Alex Williamson and consultant performance director David Nucifora held a media conference to trumpet the news but, curiously, Townsend was absent.

His thoughts were instead conveyed via a press release in which he said that “being the Scotland head coach is a massive honour for me personally, a true privilege. The opportunity to coach my country at another Rugby World Cup is exciting and I am hugely motivated to help the team perform to its potential”.

Fizzy energy drinks were not mentioned.

Can Red Bull give Newcastle wings?

Red Bull have invested in rugby in a big way by buying the English top-flight club Newcastle Falcons and renaming them Newcastle Red Bulls and Townsend will be expected to help shape their future. They have interests in sports teams across the world and we have already seen how they turbo-charged a football club in Leipzig, turning them from a fifth-tier side into Champions League regulars.

The presumption is they will be similarly ambitious about rugby. Townsend will work 30 days a year for Red Bull and Murrayfield mandarins are at pains to point out that they are very comfortable with that. In fact, they even dressed it up on Wednesday as being “beneficial for Scottish Rugby”.

It would be too simplistic to say that Scottish Rugby would benefit more from Townsend spending those 30 days working on improving the national team who have slipped from sixth to eighth in the world rankings since the start of the year and are on course to miss out on a top seeding when the draw for the 2027 Rugby World Cup is made later this year.

But he is leaving himself vulnerable to future flak. There were plenty who thought it was time for a fresh face as Scotland coach, who felt eight years was long enough for Townsend. My view is that he deserved another crack at a World Cup after being dealt a bad hand with the draw at the 2023 tournament. But it is harder to make a case when Townsend is dividing his time between Scotland and a sporting conglomerate which is presumably paying him handsomely on top of what he is already receiving by way of remuneration from Murrayfield.

The danger here is that “two jobs Townsend” will become a stick with which to beat him if results go south. Townsend is an intelligent man with an admirable desire for self-improvement but this feels like the wrong move for Scottish Rugby.