The end of 2023 sees rugby union still basking in the afterglow of a highly successful World Cup. Casual fans flocked back to the sport – as evidenced by huge viewership across the sport’s major markets – and the mood around the sport is positive for the first time in a long time.
The tournament’s success has sweetened an otherwise sour year. Rugby union has spent much of 2023 dealing with crisis after crisis: controversy over concussions and contact; financially insolvent clubs in England; Super Rugby’s struggles in Australia; the declining revenues of European club competitions – the sport has barely had a chance to breathe.
The sport’s global governing body, World Rugby, knows that one successful World Cup will not solve rugby’s deep-rooted problems. In a world of global on-demand entertainment, where a consumer has countless options for their attention from sport to streaming to gaming, rugby has been losing its relevance to the casual sports fan.
Historically resistant to change, the sport may have finally reached its pain threshold. In 2023, World Rugby broke the political shackles on reform across all aspects of the game. From sweeping calendar changes to safety issues and increasing participation, work has begun to fix the game’s problems and green shoots of optimism are growing.
The governing body says global participation increased 11 per cent this year, primarily driven by emerging nations and the women’s game. This is welcome news and a good platform from which it can grow, but the sport has no time to lose.
Rugby must adapt to the modern world or risk becoming archaic.
The global game
To date, rugby union’s ‘tier two’ nations have had nothing in the calendar that comes close to the exposure and quality of a World Cup every four years. Each tournament always provides hope for a new dawn, but with so little to fill the intervening time there is limited potential for Chile, Portugal and Uruguay to grow the game in their domestic markets.
World Rugby has now taken its first major steps to address this critical issue in the men’s game by announcing a new global calendar from 2026. The headline is a new biennial international competition comprising 12 teams – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Argentina, England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy and two others – and a 12-team second division, with promotion and relegation between the leagues beginning from 2030.
The men’s World Cup will expand to 24 teams from 2027 and a new annual Pacific Nations Cup contested by Japan, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Canada and the USA will begin from 2024.
The announcements represent the biggest shake-up of men’s international rugby in more than a decade and while not a panacea, they indicate the governing body’s desire – and the desire of national rugby unions – to broaden its appeal.
Plenty have tried to upend rugby’s existing structures, from the Rugby X five-a-side indoor tournament in England in 2019 to the breakaway World 12s tournament – dubbed ‘the IPL of rugby’ – that was ultimately blocked by the game’s institutional stakeholders.
Rugby’s biggest nations continue to benefit the most from these reforms as the first two editions of the new tournament are a closed shop, and some smaller nations claim the gap between themselves and the elite sides will only become greater in that time. But that the changes have happened at all is remarkable. Re-organising the men’s global rugby calendar had been considered a pipe dream for years. Now it’s happened, it could breathe life into other ideas for change.
Tom Hill, acting chief executive of Global Venue Services and former chief commercial officer of World Rugby, says the discussion around broader tournaments touches on a wider issue that international men’s rugby looks to be addressing.
“In sports, what people want is jeopardy,” Hill says. “There isn’t enough jeopardy in international rugby. Promotion and relegation would bring some.”
Rugby also recently managed top-level reorganisation in the women’s game with the new international WXV format, a three-tier global tournament designed to improve the competitiveness, reach and impact of elite women’s rugby.
Key to the creation of WXV was a lack of entrenched, powerful interests in global women’s rugby. That the men’s game achieved calendar reform despite its legacy structures, albeit in a more limited capacity, is cause for optimism.
The global game needs new audiences and the main issue as Steve Martin, global chief executive at M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, sees it is: “It’s always about what’s right for the governance or rules of rugby, but never really about what the fans want.
“It feels a very disjointed sport [now], but a coordinated global calendar would help engage more fans, who can get behind players both at their club and for their country. If you reframed the sport from the top for fans, you would engage a more diverse audience and keep more people interested because participation is pretty good.”
Participation
Greater participation is another area that World Rugby has in its sights. Rugby sevens, which sees two teams of three forwards and four backs compete on a 15-a-side pitch, has always been billed as the gateway to full-team rugby, thanks to its emphasis on speed and skill rather than strength. But it hasn’t been getting the job done, as issues over contact remain a key barrier to maintaining participation as younger players grow up.
Hill says: “You could place greater emphasis on tag or touch rugby for boys and girls, which should be encouraged if it means they stay playing.”
World Rugby has heeded Hill’s call. In October 2023, World Rugby launched T1 Rugby, a non-contact, simplified version of the sport designed for casual play. The format maintains the sport’s fundamentals – scrums, lineouts and kicking – but removes all collisions in a bid to make the sport more relevant and accessible to young people.
The governing body claims that new players of T1 picked up the rules in less than 20 minutes, a tacit admission of the traditional game’s complexity but also an indication that it is making tangible changes to grow the sport’s appeal among a broader audience.
Initiatives like T1 are crucial for the sport’s participation to grow. Rugby’s ever-growing emphasis on size and strength has turned many casual fans away from playing the sport as players – both professional and amateur – are larger than they have ever been.
A 2018 study published in the British Medical Journal Open Sport & Exercise Medicine periodical found that the body mass of the average male rugby player has leapt from 84.8 kilograms in 1955 to 105.4kg in 2015.
In tandem with this, Rugby World Cup data from Stats Perform and Opta shows more than double the average number of tackles per team from the 1995 edition to 2019, and a halving of the number of offloads – a key marker of the game’s fluidity and speed – from the 1987 tournament to 2019.
Size is the primary contributing factor to these changes, and suggestions of collective and individual weight limits have been mooted to encourage a return to the flowing, running rugby that many of its players and fans grew up watching.
Hill enjoys the concept as a thought exercise but has reservations about the idea for elite rugby. Further down the pyramid, however, he feels it may have merit.
“You’ve got to consider what’s good for an elite setup but also an age-group game and organising around weight might encourage more participation, especially once boys and girls are old enough to play contact rugby, which is a big area when kids drop off.”
Safety
One of rugby union’s primary issues is player safety and wellness. The prevalence of concussions and other non-head injuries is one of the leading reasons for young people to stop playing the sport, while the lasting impact on professional players after their retirement is becoming more visible in light of advances in scientific research.
World Rugby is taking the issue seriously – the 2023 World Cup final was the first to see a red card issued for a head contact infringement – but the pace of change will be slow. England’s RFU attempted to lower the legal tackling height in rugby as an immediate mitigation of head contact, prompting a nationwide revolt from thousands of amateur players.
The publicity surrounding head injuries is at least partly so great due to rugby’s very public attempts to reduce them. Andy Hunt, chief executive of Podium Analytics, a UK NGO committed to reducing injury in sport, highlights the paradox rugby authorities face.
“It’s possible to say that rugby union, amongst all sports other than perhaps American football, has made the greatest effort in this area, and is doing the most to both understand what is happening and put in place absolutely consistent protocols at different levels of the game,” he explains.
World Rugby has recently committed to introducing ‘smart mouthguards’ that deliver impact data in real-time to prevent players from playing with undetected concussions – another welcome development. Despite this, the perception of rugby as a dangerous sport continues to grow in the UK, particularly among parents of young players.
In an annual survey conducted by Podium and YouGov, only 44 per cent of parents are confident that schools know how to manage a suspected sports concussion, with the figure dropping to 31 per cent regarding rugby clubs. These are worrying findings for rugby’s future.
Would lighter players and weight limits help? “I don’t think we categorically know that weight is a determinant of severity of injury,” Hunt responds. “You may think that players weighing 120 kilos and running into each at speed, the impact must be immense. But on the other hand, they have better strength and conditioning, and so may possibly be able to better absorb those forces and limit some of the injuries.”
However, again at youth level, Hunt says there is plenty of data about adolescent growth spurts and the long-term impact of injuries during these periods. With growing concerns over safety among parents, Hunt said some form of “bio-banding” – in which opposing teams are made broadly equal in terms of player height, weight and other physiological factors – could help alleviate worries and increase participation, but implementing this would be extremely complex.
Rugby may even have plenty to learn from American football and the NFL – a punishing contact sports league that has become the world’s richest by making teams play just 17 matches in a regular season – excluding playoffs – over 18 weeks. Reducing elite rugby players’ workload by playing fewer overall matches for club and country is an idea gaining traction within the rugby community.
Culture
Rugby’s struggles to modernise are often attributed – as in many sports – to the suits that run the sport being detached from how fans consume sport today, and what they want. A tired trope in some ways perhaps, but institutionalised thinking is an issue in many boardrooms. Could a leadership shake-up help rugby?
Hill, who spent years sharing rooms with rugby executives, thinks so.
“Rugby has to be open to having more independent thinkers on decision-making boards – not just reps of unions supposedly wanting to grow the game but really with their own union hat on when making decisions – otherwise they are just marking their own homework.
“If you want to attract a new audience, bring in external world class thinkers from other sports that have grown new audiences and listen to them – rather than just try and convince everyone they have to like the product that is currently being offered.”
The sport’s image to the casual fan differs from country to country, but Martin says discussions around rugby’s values are often interpreted by the casual sports fan through a lens of class or masculinity. Better communication and a lighter attitude would bring the positive foundations of the game’s traditions to the fore.
“It’s too ‘laddish’ still and that needs to be knocked on the head,” Martin says of the men’s game. “I hate seeing social media content of the guys in the gym lifting the biggest weights they can. It’s just prehistoric, you’re trying to attract a much broader audience.
“Rugby’s values have always been positive, friendly and classy. There needs to be a tone from the top of, yes, strength and performance, but also lightness, athleticism and fun. Each rights-holder isn’t just a team or governing body, it’s a marketing organisation for the sport, competing against all the other entertainment out there. Maybe lighten up a bit.”
Cultural change is often the hardest and slowest to occur, but also the most transformative. Adding this to the list of significant reforms World Rugby has already introduced would add greatly to the burgeoning rays of sunshine on what is currently a stormy horizon.
