In many ways, the announcement earlier this week that the Welsh Rugby Union's preferred course of direction is a reduction from four professional men's teams to two was hardly a surprise. There has been talk for some time about it, with players being told in recent weeks it was the likeliest option. Instead, it was the details beyond that which took more off guard this week. Greater WRU influence on the rugby side of things hasn't gone down well with fans of the clubs, while it remains to be seen how benefactors will feel over only being responsible for commercial profits. Yet it's the shared national campus that truly shocked many. Few would have had two Welsh clubs and the national team all training under one roof on their bingo card at the start of the week. WRU director of rugby and elite performance Dave Reddin admitted afterwards that it was the part of their 'optimal system' that he was expecting the most pushback on, beyond the two-club argument. Yet, you sense, it's the part that the former Football Association man is most excited by. The shared campus, as he calls it, is "unashamedly a radical decision" - one that is "about creating a defensive moat for Welsh rugby, it's about creating competitive advantage in the future". There are comparisons to be made to St George's Park, the impressive home of English football - housing all of their national teams. Reddin, of course, is familiar with that, but the difference in his blueprints for a national campus in Wales is that it would house not just the national team, but potentially two men's professional clubs as well - should the WRU's preferred option of going from four to two come to pass. Sign up to Inside Welsh rugby on Substack to get exclusive news stories and insight from behind the scenes in Welsh rugby. "And the national academies and the coach development," added Reddin on Wednesday, when asked what this new campus would contain. All in all, it would house the men's and women's national teams and staff, the men's and women's professional clubs and staff, men's and women's national academies, performance sport staff, commercial staff and development staff for coaches and referees. Around 400 players and staff, all in one location. Where that would be, the WRU don't know yet. Nor could they give an estimated cost. "Again, we've done work on that behind the scenes," said Reddin. "Capital funding is different from operational funding, and there are lots of different partnerships and opportunities if we're able to create something as inspirational as that." The WRU's proposal consider it an "aspirational world-class environment for rugby providing unrivalled access to elite facilities", adding it would be a "generational investment in a home for Welsh rugby". For Reddin, it's about how the WRU "supercharge collaboration and alignment" in a small nation with "real proximity". Similar campuses in New Zealand, Premier League football and Formula One have been cited. But, while Reddin has found examples of similar facilities elsewhere, there's nothing like it in rugby. "We want to lead," he said. "We want to be ahead. If we just sit here and say Ireland’s system is really good so let's copy Ireland, do you think that's going to be enough for us to exceed what Ireland are doing at the moment? I personally don't. "So we've got to continue to challenge ourselves. Let's be brave and lead rather than just follow." Of course, sometimes things haven't been done by no one else for a reason. "Look, there are lots of examples through history where things like that have happened," added Reddin. "When St George's Park was being proposed for the FA, there were a huge amount of people who said that it's just another Lilleshall. Why are we going back to that sort of thing? "And in the early years, people were really ready to criticise that. I think it's become a beacon for England football teams and coach development and exceeded that." Of course, and it's hard to escape the prevailing pushback against this idea, is that St George's Park - or any other examples from other sports that the WRU have looked at - don't house teams competing against each other. "Just bear with the narrative," is Reddin's plea. "We're trying to do something different here because we want a different future. "And my philosophy is if we're just going to copy people, we will always be behind. So it's uncomfortable. I understand that we're putting things out there that are different and in some cases radical. And I think that's a good thing because I think people actually want a radically different future. "That's what I think everybody is in vehement agreement with. We don't want to continue to perform like this. So let's be brave and have that conversation. "We don't want two teams wearing the same colours. They are two independent clubs competing against each other with separate identities inhabiting a campus with some shared spaces. "They'd have their own team rooms, their own dressing rooms. But they might share a gym, they might share a dining room, they might share other spaces and the environment allows people to bump into each other and have conversation. "So if we want to be the best in the world at the scrum and we really want to supercharge that, how does that happen at the moment? People are up and down the motorway, having formal meetings. "How do we make that better? How do we make that happen more quickly? By the informal collisions of people on a day-to-day basis the same as happens in advertising and other creative industries. "We've got to look outside the box if we want to try and do things differently. We’ve got to be brave enough to to lead sometimes and do things that no one else is doing and do the things that people think are a bit nutty or too different or too uncomfortable. "I think it's really easy to sit there and say that won't work. And what we'd encourage people to do in consultation is just sit the other side of that and say ‘how could it work?’ We want to hear both sides of that. “People are going to raise reasonable objections to it. That's fine. What I want people to think about is, how would we retain that identity and still make that concept work? "Because we don't have to be fixed and says it’s 24/7 every single day in that environment and never anywhere else. It's how do we think creatively around some of these concepts that do feel different, that might feel uncomfortable, but how might we make them work? "Because over history that's how people have evolved, that's how leaps have been made that in future people look back and everybody's doing it. But at the time, that was ridiculous. Why would we do that?" Already, there has been scepticism over the campus. Some don't even see it getting off the ground in the years to come. When it comes to a lack of identity, with two professional clubs and rivals sharing a base, Reddin is adamant that two training centres isn't an option the WRU really want to explore. "We haven't just sort of flippantly thought that's a good idea so let's crack on," he said. "I don't think it's a choice to continue to do what we're doing at the moment, a reasonable choice." The argument that there would be a lack of competition were the two sides under one roof doesn't wash with Reddin. He says he wants "creative tension", but also "inherent creativity". That said, the strain on player numbers and finance that has seen the four professional clubs, while useful, hasn't been seen as ideal. Arguably, this is an extreme extension of that. There's also the fact that Wales' national teams would be in the building too. Playing for your country should mean something more than your club - that's a stance that even those within the clubs would subscribe to. There should be a step-up. Last year, Wales were considering flying the players to Japan in economy for this summer's tour, but it was someone within the clubs who convinced Warren Gatland that playing for Wales should be the pinnacle. Does that step-up still exist if the professional clubs are just across the corridors from the national team? "We've just started to engage with the player group last night," said Reddin. "We'll have a number of meetings with players and we'll listen very carefully to them. "And of course, some of the things that you mentioned in theory could be objections to it. With all of this, we've got to test both sides of it. Inherently if there's a good idea there, how might we make it work because no one wants to be in exactly the same environment 365 days-a-year but equally there's opportunities to go out and train in different regions at different times. "Arguably the Welsh national team may well be tired of training at the Vale (of Glamorgan). It's been there for 20 years or whatever, so these things are always always need some sort of freshening up. "But I don't think inherently they're the reason not to do something." Over the course of the next month or so, that is the argument that Reddin will be making to stakeholders amid the pushback. Even then, beyond the many changes that will come before it, there's still a long way to go to get to Welsh rugby's "defensive moat".