Petrie: Future very exciting for Ulster

A year into his tenure as Ulster Rugby CEO, Jonny Petrie is pleased with the “hugely positive” strides the province has made on and off the field.

In an interview with the Ulster Rugby website, Petrie praised the performance of coach Dan McFarland, with Ulster having won all four of their Champions Cup matches this season.

“The Ulster team performance has been hugely positive. Dan and I work closely together and it’s important that he has that support alongside him,” said Petrie.

“When I joined halfway through the season last year, we were delivering beyond expectations. Off the back of a few difficult years and Dan being new to the province, no-one really expected us to deliver much, but we performed above and beyond that. It set the benchmark higher for the following year and it has been hugely promising to see the squad really kick on again this year.

“To go four from four in the Heineken Champions Cup has been fantastic and having a strong start to the Guinness PRO14 as well has been really encouraging.

“The senior performers are now starting to deliver the goods week in, week out, and the performance levels of the likes of Marcell Coetzee, John Cooney, Stuart McCloskey, Luke Marshall, among numerous others, show we have the right environment and are moving in the right direction.

“All we can do is keep getting better every day and who knows where the ceiling is for this province? It’s very exciting.”

Off the pitch, Petrie stresses the need to constantly improve the “matchday experience” at Kingspan Park.

“The context for us over the past few years — and this is common within professional sport — is that costs had risen and revenues had dropped. That’s not a sustainable business model for anyone, so we have needed to turn that around, and we’re consistently working hard to address that; at the same time investing in the right areas of the game and the business.”

He said there is a lot more that they’re committed to doing around the experience.

“We have brand-new big screens up and are replacing the floodlights. We have also changed the operation in the bars and upgraded our ability to take contactless payments.

"All these small things that go together to make a matchday experience better, we now need to push that forward.”