Why should the clubs be spending a decent amount of time resting their best players, only for these players to be thrown about in the international arena? Why should it be the clubs that exclusively take up the burden? There is another solution to limiting gametime for injury-prone players: turn down the international teams. It's only as silly as asking players not to play for their clubs is tbh.
Well, for one thing, if the players rest their players during the season, then they will have fresher players for the all-important playoffs and HC knockout games at the end. See Leinster's defeat of Northampton and Saracens' Premiership win for examples.
For another, international rugby is still bankrolling domestic rugby. The vast majority of professional rugby clubs cannot afford to run themselves, or at least not at their current level, without union funds. Asking players to deliberately avoid international rugby would be a very risky undertaking as it could quite easily harm the clubs due to reduced funds coming in at international level, which means reduced funds to distribute. And, from the views of the players themselves, missing out on international games is likely to hurt more financially than missing domestic games, both in terms of missing game fees and reduced endorsements, and involves missing out of the chance of a higher and more prestigious level of rugby and trophy.
In short, its simply not practical for players to turn down international games, nor for their clubs to encourage them to do so; plus the clubs do reap rewards from resting players anyway. I'm sympathetic to any argument saying that clubs should receive more money from the unions for resting players, and that money should go directly to clubs rather than getting spread evenly; any argument that players should play less internationals needs to come with plans for increased funding from other sources attached.
Irish fans are really great at turning out for their regions and get some decent attendance going, whereas the Welsh regions seems to be suffering in that respect. As a result, the Irish will have a lot more money to flesh out their squads and keep hold of their best players as well as get in some decent overseas players. (Would any of the Welsh regions really have the money to bring Thorn in? And how many Irish players have gone to France?) That's why they're doing well.
You said clubs need internationals to bring the fans in; the Irish provinces do just fine even with their internationals missing about half of the Rabble Pro season.
And yes the money helps. There's a whole host of reasons why the Irish provinces are rocking along. But that doesn't change the fact they do it while missing all the centrally contracted players for about half the Rabble Pro season. And they manage to get past the disruption with only 6 NIQ players a season too. So, it's not the end of the world. Far from it. And frankly, I think the fact their players aren't played into the ground does have at least some part in their success.
p.s. The central contract is a big part in how Ireland have kept their best players at home incidentally i.e. direct money from the Union.
