The 2010 Russian Professional Rugby League season was the sixth edition of Russia's newly formatted top-flight rugby union competition, the Professional Rugby League ("RPRL"). The 2010 Professional Rugby League season has seen a transition to a traditional one league round-robin format with 8 teams taking place between May and September 2010. VVA Podmoskovye Monino are the reigning champions.
The two undisputed powerhouses of recent years, VVA-Podmoskovye and Yenisy-STM, were again expected to dominate, but Krasny-Yar had recruited well and were looking to break VVA's grip on the title. These three teams all had budgets seven figure euro budgets, and played at a standard roughly comparable to Championship (England) or Pro D2 (France) level, according to the RFU and FFR referees who officiate in the final stages of the competition.
Unfortunately for the two Krasnoyarsk sides, despite a few upsets throughout the season, VVA Monino again was triumphant in the finals series, to claim a record 8th title.
Competition format
To facilitate Russia's participation in the summer's Churchill Cup during June, changes to the league's structure were again made. The 2010 edition of the RPRL saw the dropping of the first phase of the season, which split the league into East and West sections and saw the involvement of several amateur teams. Instead, the RPRL was expanded into an eight-team tournament to be played on a home-and-away basis from May through September, before the top four teams play-off for the title in two best-of-three semi-finals and a best-of-three championship decider.
Plans continued to be discussed during the year about future expansion of the league to 12, and then 16, teams in time, but the unique problems posed by Russia's vast geography mean this will be a slow process. The two new teams for this year, Spartak and Fili, are both from Moscow, meaning plans to bring in a team from Kazan, remained on hold. A former rugby league hotbed, Kazan is a major target for future expansion, with several age-group tournaments being held in the Tatar capital. Absent too were former league giant RC Lokomotiv Moscow, whose defection from the 13-man code resulted in a focus on Sevens only for the 2010 season. There was also no place in this year's RPRL for a team from the country's south, where rugby is increasingly popular, in particular in Krasnodar territory and the Rostov region.[1]
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