World Rugby: Out of Touch
Rugby Union's governing body is killing off an already dying game
For the most part on this newsletter, I write about football. It’s the reason the majority of my subscriber base follows me on here. I love football, but I never had the talents to play the game at any laudable level in my youth. Kids with my body type were just never gonna make it on a football pitch.
A young man of my broad stature was much better built for Rugby. I was never going to be a future star of the game, but I earned a few notes as one of the best Props in the region in my late teenage years.
To this day, I love playing Rugby, I love talking about Rugby, analysing Rugby, and sitting back enjoying a rugby match being played in front of me, no matter the quality.
But I’m getting sick of it.
With Rugby World Cup final weekend looming, come with me and delve into how exactly those that have the decision-making power in this game, the higher-ups in each of the major national Rugby Unions and World Rugby (the game’s governing body) are tearing every bit of joy and hope for the future of the sport out of the game in the name of a more significant stream of cash in the short-term, rather than looking to the future and increasing the viability and love for the sport across the globe in the long-term.
On the 23rd of October, The World Rugby Council met in France to vote on the reform of international rugby, with the sport’s governing body announcing the changes.
Alongside some significant changes to the Rugby calendar and the structure of future Rugby World Cups, which should be welcomed, World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont announced the creation of “The Nations Championship”, a bi-annual tournament that will begin in 2026.
The new global competition will take place during the existing men’s July and November windows from 2026. It will involve the current Rugby Championship and Six Nations teams as well as two other nations – most likely Fiji and Japan.
There will also be a second division of the tournament that will consist of 12 of the so-called “Tier 2” teams. Canada, Samoa, The USA, Tonga, and Georgia are almost guaranteed to be involved, and there will be plenty of curiosity as to the identity of the remaining 7 teams.
Played in the July and November international release windows, it will provide crucial opportunities (and certainty of fixtures) for unions currently outside of the existing annual competitions, and in turn provide opportunities for unions and regional associations through to the second division,” World Rugby’s statement continued.
World Rugby states that this will create “a true pathway for all unions”; however critics of the game have noted that the competition will be ring-fenced until 2030, meaning no promotion or relegation from the competition for 2 editions of it at the very least, possibly even 3, as there’s been no confirmation yet of when the ring-fencing will end.
For some second-tier nations there is also a new tournament, a revamped Pacific Nations competition involving Canada, Fiji, Japan, Samoa, Tonga and the USA.
The Pacific Nations Cup, which will be played in the southern hemisphere release window of August and September, will feature two pools of three teams –- a North America/Japan pool and a Pacific Islands pool with each union hosting matches.
Curiously, this tournament will not include the likes of Uruguay and Chile, who beat off both Canada and the USA to qualify for the Rugby World Cup this year. It’s been reported by some sources that Rugby Sudamérica rejected an invitation to the tournament, but this writer can find no major sources that will back this up.
Beaumont said that this tournament would resolve fears expressed by coaches of second-tier nations during the ongoing World Cup in France of a lack of Test match rugby in the four-year cycle.
If Beaumont thought the changes would satisfy second-tier nations, his hopes have been well and truly dashed by a crucial figure in Samoan fly-half Lima Sopoaga. The 32-year-old told AFP the plans were "a slap in the face" for tier-two teams.
"Being excluded from this is incredibly frustrating, for me it's not what rugby is meant to be about, the so-called rugby values that everyone talks about," said Sopoaga, who previously played 16 Tests for New Zealand. Sopoaga said he was unsure what a better alternative was, but, "Not this one, that's for sure. Rugby's meant to be everybody's game but it seems like it's only for the rich and for those nations with money.”
Former World Rugby vice chairman Agustin Pichot unleashed a withering attack on the governing body. Pichot described the sport at the top level as being an ‘old boys club’, which is resistant to expanding the game and helping the emerging nations develop.
“Nothing has changed. It’s not a global game,” he told the Mail. “We can say, ‘Oh, Portugal beat Fiji’ but I strongly believe rugby is at a critical point. A lot of unions are trying to keep the old boys’ club.”
“Bill came to Argentina last year and I said, ‘Bill, I ran against you because you wanted to go down one path that won’t expand and be global.’ You can see it now. Nothing has changed.’
Pichot became World Rugby’s vice chairman in 2016 and ran against Beaumont for the role of chairman in 2020, but lost out by 28 votes to 23. He had campaigned on a promise to grow the quality of the game in many of the lesser Rugby nations, and that under him, World Rugby would put money towards the funding of a Rugby game for distribution worldwide.c Following that result, he vacated his seat on the World Rugby council and since then has regularly criticised the current regime.
“Call me in June 2026 and ask me about Portugal. It will be a déjà vu story. You have the Six Nations in one corner and the Rugby Championship in another,” he said.
“It’s self-preservation, survival. The system is done to protect the core. They have to see that bigger is better but they won’t take that risk. But they are already at risk. They are in the red. It has to be a discussion of taking risks for a bigger vision.”
The former scrum-half was a key player behind Argentina’s inclusion in the Rugby Championship, and joined World Rugby in the hope of developing other emerging nations.
“Bernard Lapasset, when he was World Rugby chairman, had this vision and that’s why I joined. He asked me to join to counteract the home unions,” he said. “I told Bill Beaumont, ‘I won’t bother you, I want to grow this game and you are a rugby guy so we will do it.’ Then he wasn’t allowed, because of the (RFU chief executive) Bill Sweeneys of this world and we went separate ways. Bernard had a vision. He asked me to join him to get rugby into the Olympics and I was with him all the way. What relevant thing has happened since 2015? What have we changed since, like Bernard did with the Olympics and with Argentina joining the Rugby Championship?”
Sebastian Pineyrua, president of South American rugby, also criticised the idea and warned that it may have disastrous consequences for the game.
“It’s the death of rugby,” Pineyrua said. “It will kill rugby. It will be impossible to compete with those teams in four or five years. They’re going to go up and the others will go down.”
And that’s not even the only critique we can level at World Rugby for their behaviour and ideas during this World Cup.
Half a century ago Brian Clough took to his soapbox to predict the death of football.
TV is a killer, he said.
“Coverage has got to saturation point. It has taken from the working man his ability to look forward to the pinnacle of his week, a Saturday afternoon or a midweek match.” Clough argued that the onslaught of live TV would mean grounds would be half-empty because fans would opt to watch games from their armchairs instead.
Clough is one of the greatest managers the world has ever seen. A man who inspired devotion from his players, he could speak the words “Become a Defender” to anyone on the pitch, and they’d play like they’d been one all their life. But he could not have been more wrong in his understanding of the media and the power of live action to set the game ablaze and draw in the most disengaged casual spectator.
Clough thought he was protecting the integrity of the sport, when in fact his narrow thinking was doing the opposite. The proliferation of broadcast coverage brought the game to millions more whilst at the same time driving the appetite for live attendance. Therein is the lesson that World Rugby would do well to learn.
It is the job of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to shut down, on behalf of the rights holders and the Rugby World Cup, the YouTubers and TikTokers who stick up broadcast clips to boost their own content. The DMCA is protecting the investment made by the broadcast media. Yes, it is only doing its job but in so doing, it’s harming a game that desperately needs more people to love it. Sport is business, and it’s understandable to protect business interests, but sport also needs to appeal to the widest possible audience to survive, and if it’s not doing that, those interests will die off quicker than you can say “50:22”.
Rugby is not like football, where the action is easy to follow. It’s a complicated game, elements of it not understood even by those who play it and officiate it every week. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve had a referee overturn his decision just because myself or a coach knew about a certain law of the game and could point it out to them on paper or on a phone. It’s pure confusion at the best of times.
To the untutored eye the pitch is smothered in chaos, the ball disappearing for chunks of time as it bundles about through rucks and mauls before leaping once more into the light. The contest is one of violent struggle, a mosh pit of aggression and jarring collisions impossible to fathom as an occasional viewer. It is the game’s visceral nature that compels the eye.
For the rest, those that haven’t a clue what’s going on, they hang in there, grappling to establish where the ball is and who is getting on top of the collisions, until suddenly an escapee explodes like a cork from a bottle, cartoonishly bouncing off tackles like they’re walls until eventually coming to rest. This is one of sport’s great reveals, which appeals to the non-aficionado, and when that cohort is engaged, then rugby is in business.
This is rugby’s big moment, a World Cup in France, with the final scheduled on Saturday night for an 8pm GMT kick-off, in the most visited capital city on earth. Yet so little of the heat is spreading beyond France and the rugby community.
World Rugby has done a brilliant job of hiding the Eiffel Tower, of making the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe disappear, of shutting up shop on the Champs-Élysées and effectively saying “There ain’t no World Cup, and there never was”. All has fallen silent on socials front, when YouTube and the site formerly known as Twitter could be amplifying the message.
What is wrong with a little loss leading. Nourish the soul of the believers whilst hooking in fresh meat with some tasty morsels. Let the enamoured fanbase show their illegal clips, rev up the world with one-minute immersions in wonder tries, drop-goals from the half-way line, rib-crushing tackles.
The game is short-sighting its way into a dead end. Before you know it, Saracens will be back playing in front of 200 people at Southgate. Leinster, one of the best sides in club rugby at the moment, will go back to struggling to sell out their home in the RDS for anything outside of their derby with Munster. It’ll be like that old riddle about a man who’s in a four sided room with no doors or windows. How did he get in? How will he get out? Except this time, the ceiling is covered. There is no escape.
The requirement of the Rugby World Cup is not to police content creators out of existence but to balance the protection of copyright with the need for the kind of aggregated, inclusive, impactful engagement that grows the audience.
Social media is not the enemy of World Rugby.
In fact, it could be a route to the new friends it so desperately needs.
So, what’s to be said about Rugby driving itself headfirst into the grave?
To start with, this new Nations Championship is effectively Rugby’s version of the European Super League. Jobs for the boys, none for anyone else outside of those spaces. It’s a ridiculous idea in this writer’s opinion, and will only cheapen the rare vintage of getting to see the world’s top sides face off against each other. It drags rugby away from the local rivalries that help the game to grow in favour of a short-term cash injection from sponsors and fans until people get bored of seeing these significant sides face each other so often.
The second-tier sides in this new competition won’t get access to the 1st tier until 2030, meaning until then, they won’t face Tier One teams outside of the World Cup. This is not how you make a sport grow in a country. Like Augustin Pichot has said, this idea serves only the old boys club. It doesn’t serve to benefit Rugby as a game in the long-term.
The same can be said for World Rugby’s stubborness around the use of clips from the Rugby World Cup online. So many of the major moments in this World Cup could have gone viral and acted as a free advertising method for World Rugby.
YouTube channels like Squidge Rugby have been vital in introducing casual or beginner fans to the rules and nitty gritty parts of the game, but due to this ridiculous DMCA takedown overload, Robbie and Will, the brothers that run the channel, have been forced into using sparse still images to paint a picture of the game, lengthening the time it takes to make videos, meaning they haven’t been able to cover some games from this fascinating World Cup.
When new fans tune in on a whim and watch games like New Zealand vs Ireland, or witness shock results like Portugal’s first draw and win in Rugby World Cup history vs Georgia and Fiji respectively, the interest in the game from these viewers needs to be fostered in every way, shape and form possible. Instead, these games haven’t even got any highlights videos up on YouTube.
World Rugby, Bill Beaumont, and the Old Boys Clubs in the Rugby Unions are killing this game. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe these old boys all need to be killed off (whether it’s literally, or just in their pockets) before we can have a true revolution in this game, to make it a sport for all.
They’re out of touch, and nearly out of time, but with my love for the game, I’m out of my head when it’s not around. Let’s hope someone can come to the rescue of the game soon.