The English club rugby model is wrong with teams needing to have smaller squads and play less matches, according to former Saracens director of rugby Mark Evans.
Speaking on the latest episode of The Offload Podcast, the former Harlequins chief executive called for lower wages to help reduce rising costs in the domestic game.
Evans was speaking after Saracens chairman Nigel Wray announced his intention to purchase the club outright from South African investors Remgro.
Investors Remgro have decided to sell their 50 per cent stake with the club making an operating loss of £2.74m last year.
Evans believes significant changes are needed by clubs, starting with lower wages, to help reduce costs, although he does not think Saracens will have a problem under the full ownership of Wray.
"The model for club rugby is wrong," Evans said. "What I hope is that having driven the revenue, because if you look at the revenues the clubs have got compared to where they were 10 or 15 years ago, they've made huge strides.
"TV rights have gone up, attendances have gone up, sponsorships have gone up. More in some clubs than others but you just go and look at the accounts and the trend is up but the costs have gone up quicker. At the moment, unlike a lot of other sports around the world, rugby union in England has got its costs out of sync with its revenue.
"We have to align player remuneration with revenue. Deloitte's football report comes out every year about which club has the lowest percentage of wages to revenue? Manchester United because they've got the biggest revenue.
"You can't have your cost base, player and coach salaries, taking up too big a percentage of your revenue otherwise you will never ever be viable."
Evans thinks competitions such as the Anglo-Welsh Cup should be scrapped to reduce the amount of matches which will enable clubs to compete with smaller squads.
He said: "I think we need to have a limit on squad size. We play too many games with too many players. Our problem is because our costs are out of proportion, the short term solution is to play more games because we'll get more revenue. Then we have more injuries so have to have more players and the cost goes up again.
"You get rid of the A League straight away and the Anglo Welsh Cup in my view. A Premiership team should just be running a Premiership team in my view.
"Like virtually every other sport in the world, it's what we should be concentrating on. We need a certain number of players to do that. There are squads in the Premiership of over 55 players. That is nuts."
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