Money is still new in rugby. People haven't really grown used to the notion that you can spend and spend and end up with nothing to show for it.
In fact it's worse than that - the chances of seeing a return on money thrown at a rugby club are still zero. From Cecil Duckworth at Worcester to Keith Barwell at Northampton and Nigel Wray at Saracens, rugby possibly does not feature on page one of their high-return portfolios.
The pro game is only 10 years old. To be fair to football - and rugby people tend not to be - they have long lived with the notion of the chairman trapped in a free-spending passion from which there is no escape with health and wealth unaffected. Obsession has its price in football and everyone knows it.
In rugby, money that goes down the wage drain is money whose disappearance still hurts. Rugby clings to the notion that it can be run like any other business. Such a nouveau attitude to investment has tilted the balance between commercial viability and sporting values in favour of the businesslike. Relegation is a dirty word because it disrupts income-stream projections. Nobody has protested more loudly than Harlequins about the perils of the drop. How can you reach for the sky with the tiers of a new £9million stand when you may be falling into the pit of lower-league competition?
Several things strike me about relegation. For as long as the professional game has been inventing ways to extend the season beyond the regular into the irregular - the Premiership play-offs spring to mind - the only real interest for the non-partisan follower for seven months of the season has been at the other end of the table.
The drama of Bristol going down two years ago was gripping, the game against Bath at a sell-out Ashton Gate a dignified tribute to a great club's fall from grace. Bristol went down, took it on the chin and are now coming back up again. The true worth of Harlequins will now reveal itself.
For every tale from the bottom club of job losses and pointless construction work there is a tale of revival and regeneration elsewhere. If you finish bottom you drop. It is as fundamental to sport as finishing top and raising a trophy. And in the case of the Premiership, a good deal more entertaining.
Ring-fencing is the preferred self-defence system of the Premiership clubs. The argument goes beyond protecting the pounds put in. It has been suggested that the England team will never be properly prepared as long as her best players are engaged in a relegation struggle. Spare me. Test players prepare in an environment so far removed from - so far above - club rugby that it doesn't matter if you're playing for Leicester or Worcester. The notion that you become a better player by playing with Martin Johnson is fair enough, but it's just as valid that you can learn a thing or two by playing against the old boy.
Shifting players outside what international coaches refer to as the comfort zone is pretty trendy. Nothing is as uncomfortable or as character-building as a basement battle. You learn to scrabble on the floor at one level and you then learn how to soar in a World Cup-winning environment on another. England and the bottom of the Premiership are not mutually exclusive.
Harlequins may yet not go down. Some dastardly strokes have been pulled in the past to keep clubs up or down, depending on which way you are travelling. Rotherham decided one year not to take promotion.
It's still not too late for the Premiership to expand to 13 or even 14. Bristol have already been promoted and all the money that has been blown on salaries in the past 10 years would not keep them from taking their place back in the elite division. Exeter, I imagine, would also leap at the chance.
Harlequins may yet be spared. Northampton, had the Saints finished last, might also have been given an exemption. The Premiership is a relatively new club and the members are still making up the rules as they go along.
That's OK, but would re-floatation have been put on the agenda if Worcester or Leeds finished last? It's funny how talk of the ring-fence died to a whisper the closer the two rather gauche newcomers got to the bottom.
They say that this time the rules are binding, and that Harlequins will go down. But, hell, this is rugby politics. No, it's rugby business. And here, fair play comes a long way behind keeping the financial losses down. Prudence is a virtue when you're running a national economy. It sucks when you're trying to play sport.
