Exeter Chiefs History: From Non-League to Champions

Planning permission came before promotion. That is the sequence that explains Exeter Chiefs, and it is the wrong way round from how almost every other English club got where it is. Sandy Park opened on the eastern edge of Exeter in 2006, out beyond the ring road near junction 30 of the M5, and at the time the club playing in it was in the second tier of English rugby with no realistic prospect of leaving it. Four years later they were in the Premiership. Eleven years after that they had won it twice and won Europe as well.

Devon rugby had never had a club at that level. Exeter Football Club was founded in 1871, the same year as the Rugby Football Union itself, and spent the following century and more as a good West Country side that was not one of the country's leading clubs. When the RFU introduced national leagues in 1987 they went in well below the top division, and stayed there.

1871: a Devon club and a long time in the second tier

The founding date is a coincidence worth noting. The RFU was formed in January 1871 and Exeter's club was formed in the same year, which puts it among the older surviving clubs in England without ever having translated that seniority into national standing.

The reason is geography as much as anything. Devon is a long way from everywhere. In the amateur era a club's fixture list was built on what could be reached and returned from on a Saturday, and Exeter's natural opponents were other West Country sides rather than the strong London and Midlands clubs whose regular fixtures against each other set the pecking order. Cornwall and Devon county rugby was strong, competitive and passionately followed, and it operated at a level below the one where reputations were made.

The club played at the County Ground in the St Thomas district of the city for the whole of that period. It was a proper rugby ground with a good pitch and a limited capacity, and it was hemmed in by the streets around it in the way that so many English club grounds are.

Leagues, arriving in 1987, made the position explicit rather than changing it. Exeter were in the third tier and then the second, and the professional game that began in 1995 concentrated money and players at the top of a structure Exeter were not in. Through the late 1990s and early 2000s the club was a solid second-tier operation, occasionally competitive at the top of the division, with no route past it that did not require a stadium.

• 1871Club founded
• 2006Sandy Park opened
• 2010Promoted to the Premiership
• 2Premiership titles won

Founding, ground and honours dates. Fixed points, not a record of any current season.

Sandy Park: the ground that made promotion possible

Promotion to the Premiership has never been purely a rugby matter. The league operates minimum standards for a ground entering it, covering capacity, floodlighting, media facilities, medical provision and safety certification, and a club that wins the second tier without meeting them does not go up. That has caught out several sides over the years, and it is the single most important thing to understand about Exeter's rise.

The club sold the County Ground and built at Sandy Park, on a site out by the motorway with room around it. The new ground opened in 2006. It was designed as a rugby stadium with conference and banqueting space built in, rather than as a stand with a bar attached, and the capacity has been raised in stages since.

Two consequences followed from that decision, and only one of them is obvious.

The obvious one is that Exeter became promotable. When they eventually won the play-off they had a ground the Premiership would accept, and no administrative obstacle stood between them and the top flight.

The less obvious consequence is that the ground gave the club a business that runs seven days a week. Conference space near a motorway junction on the edge of a regional city is a genuinely commercial asset, and the revenue it generates does not depend on results. A club with a trading business underneath it can absorb a bad season in a way that a club dependent on gate receipts and central distributions cannot.

May 2010: two legs against Bristol

The Championship at that time settled promotion by play-off, and the final was played over two legs, home and away. Exeter finished the regular season in the play-off places, came through the semi-final, and met Bristol in the final.

Bristol were the heavier favourites by history and by budget: a founder-level English club with a long top-flight record, trying to get back to a place they regarded as theirs. Exeter had never been there at all.

Exeter won the tie on aggregate and went up. The second leg was at Sandy Park, and the scenes at the end of it are the ones every Exeter supporter over a certain age can describe. A club that had spent a hundred and thirty-nine years outside the top division of English rugby was in it.

1. 1Championship regular seasonExeter finish inside the play-off places over the league campaign, which qualifies them for the knockout stage.
2. 2Play-off semi-finalA knockout tie against another of the top four, with the winner going through to the final.
3. 3Two-legged finalHome and away legs against Bristol, decided on aggregate score rather than in a single match.
4. 4Minimum standardsPromotion also required a ground meeting Premiership entry criteria, which Sandy Park had met since 2006.

The structure of the promotion route as it stood at the time. The second tier's promotion arrangements have been changed since.

The two-legged format has since been changed more than once, and the mechanism that governs who comes up is set out in our RFU Championship guide. Bristol's side of that season is covered in the Bristol Bears history, and the defeat left a mark there that took years to fade.

Turning a modest budget into a title-winning squad

Exeter went up with a squad drawn largely from the second tier and did not spend their way out of trouble. That is the central fact of the decade that followed, and it is worth being precise about how it worked, because "small club overachieves" is a description rather than an explanation.

Rob Baxter is most of the answer. He had played for Exeter, captained them, and took over as head coach in 2009, the season before promotion. He was not a fashionable appointment and he was not brought in from outside with a mandate to change everything. Continuity of coaching over a period when most Premiership clubs changed director of rugby every two or three years compounded in Exeter's favour year on year.

The recruitment model was to sign players other clubs had finished with, players from the Championship who had not been given a top-flight chance, and players from the southern hemisphere who were good rather than famous. Thomas Waldrom arrived from Leicester and became one of the most productive number eights in the league. Don Armand and Dave Ewers came from southern Africa. Almost nobody was bought at a price that would have troubled the Premiership salary cap.

Underneath that sat a squad culture that Baxter enforced hard: players were expected to earn selection every week, marquee signings were rare, and the group that came up from the Championship was given time to prove it could not cope rather than being replaced on the assumption that it could not.

The first two seasons were about survival. Then came the LV= Cup in 2014, won at Sandy Park against Northampton, which was the club's first significant piece of silverware and the point at which the squad learned it could win a final.

2017: the first title, and the finals that came before it

Exeter reached the Premiership final in 2016 and lost it to Saracens. They came back the following year, met Wasps at Twickenham, and won it in extra time, 23-20.

That 2017 final is one of the better ones the competition has produced, and the manner of it fitted the club exactly. Exeter did not win it with a flourish. They won it by holding on to the ball in the opposition twenty-two through phase after phase until the defence broke, which is a description of most of what they did between 2015 and 2020.

The finals run that followed is remarkable and slightly buried by the two titles. Exeter reached six consecutive Premiership finals.

Season	Opponent in final	Outcome
2015-16	Saracens	Lost
2016-17	Wasps	Won, after extra time
2017-18	Saracens	Lost
2018-19	Saracens	Lost
2019-20	Wasps	Won
2020-21	Harlequins	Lost

Three of those defeats were to Saracens, and there is a complication in that record which cannot honestly be left out. In November 2019 Saracens were fined and deducted league points for breaching the Premiership salary cap across a period covering those seasons, and were relegated at the end of the following campaign for further breaches. What that means for the 2016, 2018 and 2019 finals is a matter of judgement rather than of record, since the results stand. It is reasonable to observe that Exeter were losing finals to a club that was later found to have been spending outside the rules the rest of the league was playing under.

October 2020: the double, finished six months late

The 2019-20 season was suspended in March by the pandemic and restarted in August behind closed doors, which is how a season that began in the autumn came to be decided in the middle of the following October.

Exeter won the Champions Cup first, beating Racing 92 31-27 in a final played at Ashton Gate in Bristol, the competition having been forced to abandon its planned venue. A week later they beat Wasps 19-13 in the Premiership final at Twickenham. European and English champions inside eight days, both trophies won in empty stadiums.

No English club had done the double since Saracens, and the fact that it was Exeter, a club that had been in the second tier a decade earlier, is the part that dates the achievement. The playing group that did it was largely home-grown or bought cheaply, and it had been together for years.

There is an honest asterisk to place next to any 2020 achievement, and it is the same one that applies across every sport that season. A competition finished behind closed doors, on compressed scheduling, with squads managed through an unprecedented set of restrictions, is not identical to a normal season. That takes nothing away from beating Racing and Wasps in consecutive weeks, and it is a fair thing to note.

Why the European win took longer than the domestic one

Exeter's first Premiership final came in 2016 and the European trophy did not arrive until 2020, and the gap tells you something about the difference between the two competitions.

The Champions Cup pool stage puts English clubs against French and Irish opposition in December and January, with the away legs played in stadiums where the crowd, the referee's interpretation and the weather all point the other way. A club with a squad of playing depth suited to a domestic season of twenty-odd rounds finds those fixtures land in the middle of the international window, when its England players are unavailable and its opponents in France may not be missing anybody at all.

The other difference is stylistic. A driving maul close to the line is a percentage play against English defences that are coached to compete for it legally. Against a Toulouse or a Leinster pack it is a percentage play that sometimes stops dead. Exeter's European breakthrough came after the side had developed enough in the wider channels to make an opposition that folded in to defend the close-range game pay for doing it.

The maul, the pack and an identity that annoyed people

Exeter's rugby in that period had a signature, and opponents found it genuinely difficult to stop.

The core of it was the driving maul from a lineout inside the opposition twenty-two. Kick the penalty to the corner rather than at the posts, win the lineout, form the maul, and drive. If the maul is stopped illegally the referee awards a penalty and the process repeats five metres further on. If the defence collapses it, the same. The laws governing that phase, and the reasons it is so hard to defend legally, are set out in our guide to rugby's maul laws.

Around it sat a game built on carrying, ruck speed and a pack that expected to be fitter in the last twenty minutes than whoever it was playing. Exeter scored an enormous proportion of their tries from forwards close to the line, which is not a style that produces highlight reels and which won them a great many matches.

Critics called it one-dimensional. The defence against that charge is straightforward: a plan that only works if the other side cannot stop it, and that they demonstrably could not stop, is not one-dimensional so much as effective. The critique had more force in Europe, where French and Irish packs were physically capable of holding the maul, and Exeter's Champions Cup breakthrough came when the side had added enough width to punish teams that over-committed to defending the close-range game.

England internationals developed in Devon and Cornwall

The list of England players who came through at Exeter is longer than a club of that size and history has any right to produce.

Jack Nowell is from Newlyn in west Cornwall, a fishing town about as far from the English rugby establishment as it is possible to be. Luke Cowan-Dickie is Cornish too. Henry Slade is from Plymouth and came through the Exeter academy as a teenager. Sam Simmonds, Harry Williams, Ben Moon, Alec Hepburn and Jonny Hill all established themselves at the club and were capped by England from there.

That is a striking concentration, and it happened because Exeter were the only professional club in a region with a real rugby culture and no alternative pathway. A talented sixteen-year-old in Truro or Barnstaple had, before 2010, no professional club within a sensible distance. After 2010 there was one, and it was in the Premiership, and it had a coaching staff who preferred developing players to buying them.

The pathway regulations that govern how a club can work with age-grade players are explained in the Premiership academies guide, and the constraints are tighter than most supporters assume.

It also happened because Exeter selected them. A club under pressure to survive its first Premiership seasons had every incentive to sign experienced professionals and play them, and the alternative, giving a twenty-year-old from the academy a run of starts in a relegation fight, is the kind of decision that costs coaches their jobs. Baxter made it repeatedly. Nowell and Slade were both playing regular Premiership rugby very young, in a side that had been in the second tier three years earlier.

There is a further point that the England selectors noticed before most supporters did. A player developed in a system that demands accuracy at the breakdown and in the maul arrives at international level already able to do the unglamorous parts of the job. Several of the Exeter forwards who won England caps were picked for exactly that, rather than for anything that shows up in a highlights package.

The 2022 branding review and what changed

Exeter adopted Native American imagery in the late 1990s, building an identity around a headdress logo, a mascot called Big Chief, and matchday customs including a tomahawk-style chant. For a long period the club defended it as respectful, and for a long period a growing number of people, including Native American organisations, said it was not.

In 2022 the club carried out a review and changed it. The headdress logo went, the Big Chief mascot was retired, and a new identity was introduced based on an Iron Age Celtic chief, drawing on the pre-Roman history of the South West rather than on North America.

The Chiefs name itself was kept, and the reasoning matters. The club's position is that "Chiefs" was in use for its first XV long before the Native American imagery was ever adopted, as a term for the senior side, and that the name and the imagery therefore have separate origins. On that account the review removed something added in the 1990s rather than changing what the club had always been called.

Not everybody accepted it. Some supporters regarded the whole exercise as capitulation, and some critics thought keeping the name was a half-measure. Both positions are held sincerely and the club took a decision that annoyed part of each. What is not in dispute is that the change was made, and that Exeter went further than most sports clubs facing the same criticism have.

Recruiting the South West and the community programme

Exeter's catchment covers Devon and Cornwall, most of Somerset, and a competitive fringe running up towards Bristol and Bath. It is a large area with a low population density and a strong rugby culture, and it presents a specific problem: the players are spread thin and the driving distances are long.

A promising fourteen-year-old in Penzance is more than a hundred miles from Sandy Park. That is not a commute, and it makes the regional development centre model, where a club runs coaching sessions at satellite venues rather than requiring everybody to travel to the stadium, essential rather than optional in a way it is not for a club in the Midlands.

The upside is the absence of competition. Once a South West player is in the Exeter pathway there is no rival Premiership academy fifteen miles away trying to take him, which is the position Bath, Bristol and Gloucester are all in with each other. Retention is easier when the alternative involves moving out of the region entirely.

Community work in Cornwall in particular has been a deliberate priority, and the relationship runs both ways: Cornish supporters travel to Sandy Park in numbers, and the club's Cornish players are a large part of why.

The second business: conference and events at Sandy Park

A Premiership rugby club plays somewhere between eleven and fifteen home fixtures in a season. That is fifteen trading days out of three hundred and sixty-five, and every stadium in the country is built around the problem of what to do with the other three hundred and fifty.

Sandy Park was designed with the answer built in. The stadium carries substantial conference, exhibition and banqueting space, positioned beside a motorway junction on the edge of a regional capital with no comparable venue nearby. Corporate clients in Exeter, Plymouth and across Devon who need a room for two hundred people with parking and easy road access have a short list, and the rugby club is on it.

The financial effect is not glamorous and it is the reason the club has been able to operate the way it does. Rugby income at any English club is volatile: it moves with results, with weather, with fixture scheduling, with whether the European draw is kind, and with the central distribution the league negotiates. Conference income moves with the regional economy and with the sales team's diary, and neither of those depends on whether the forwards had a good afternoon in February.

1. 1MatchdayTicketing, catering, retail and matchday hospitality, concentrated into a dozen or so dates across the season.
2. 2Season-long commercialSponsorship, advertising inventory, naming rights and season-ticket income agreed in advance of the campaign.
3. 3Non-matchday eventsConferences, exhibitions, weddings, dinners and meetings using the same rooms the hospitality operation uses on a Saturday.
4. 4Central distributionThe club's share of league and broadcast income, negotiated collectively and largely equal between clubs.

The general structure of a modern club stadium's revenue mix, described rather than measured. Not figures from any particular club's accounts.

Building that in from the start also changed what the stadium is inside. Hospitality boxes and function rooms designed for weekday corporate use are better rooms than the ones bolted onto a ground twenty years after it was built, and the matchday hospitality product benefits from the investment made for a completely different customer.

There is a limit to the model. A conference business is a property business with a service operation attached, and it competes with hotels, universities and purpose-built centres rather than with other rugby clubs. It also constrains the rugby side, because a stadium that has to be turned around for a corporate event on the Monday cannot be used as flexibly on the Sunday. Clubs that have tried to copy the approach have generally found the hard part is the sales operation rather than the building.

Matchday at Sandy Park: the M5, park and ride, and Digby station

Sandy Park is one of the easier Premiership grounds to reach by car and one of the harder ones to leave.

Junction 30 of the M5 is minutes away, which is why the site was chosen, and there is parking around the stadium and at the surrounding business parks. The difficulty is the exit. Several thousand cars leaving a site next to a motorway junction at the same time produces a long wait, and anybody who has sat in it once will use one of the alternatives afterwards.

The alternatives are good. Digby and Sowton station, on the branch line that runs from Exeter towards Exmouth, is a short walk from the ground, and the service connects to Exeter Central and Exeter St Davids for main-line trains. The Honiton Road park and ride, on the A3052, operates for matches and drops you close to the stadium without any of the car park queue. For anyone travelling from outside Devon, the train to Exeter and the local connection out to Digby is the sensible route.

One warning for a first visit in winter. The walk from Digby and Sowton station is short but it runs alongside a road with limited shelter, and the wind coming up the Exe estuary on a January evening is a serious proposition. Exeter regulars dress for the terraces rather than for the concourse, and visitors used to a covered London ground routinely underestimate it.

Around the ground there is very little, because it is a business park. The stadium's own bars and catering carry the pre-match trade, and supporters wanting a pub generally drink in the city centre before heading out, or in Topsham, which is a few minutes away and has a run of good pubs by the estuary.

Ticket sales open first to season-ticket holders and members, with general sale following, and prices vary by stand and by the category assigned to each fixture. Big European nights and the West Country fixtures are priced at the top of the range. Since prices in pounds are reset every summer, the club's own ticketing pages are the only figures worth quoting. How the tickets for the season's showpiece are distributed, which works on a different system, is covered in our Premiership final tickets guide.

Sandy Park has also hosted Rugby World Cup pool matches, which required temporary seating and a level of transport management well beyond a normal league fixture. The rest of the English club game is covered across the England guides hub and the site's rugby section, including the Premiership play-off system that Exeter reached the final of six years in a row.