Tag: Sport

When England stand and face the haka (uncontroversially) on Saturday afternoon, in front of 82,000 people paying a minimum of £99 to be there with millions more watching round the world, it will be hard to believe that rugby union is in crisis.

But it is undeniable that the sport is at a crossroads. It faces a number of existential problems, from dwindling domestic attendances, to the demise of rugby in schools, to concussion and player welfare in the professional game, to the global calendar. Any one of those problems, all of which are interlinked of course, might be significant enough to take the sport from struggling to extinct.

“I just hope the right people are doing the right things behind the scenes,” Danny Care tells i. The former England scrum-half is in the last year of his playing career but says he is unlikely to take up a formal role in helping to save rugby. (His burgeoning media career may inadvertently play a part in that though.) However, as one of the oldest players in the Premiership, he is acutely aware of the pain the sport is going through.

“We lost three amazing clubs in the last year or so. That’s quite close to home, because I’ve been there playing against these clubs since I was 18.”

Care has seen a number of close friends lose their livelihoods since 2022 as Wasps, Worcester and London Irish have all gone bust. These are not failed upstarts either. These are clubs with a combined 296 years of history and significant pedigree in the game, but now no longer exist. The top professional tier in England now has just 10 teams playing in it, and profit margins – where profits can be found – are razor thin.

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“I don’t know enough about economics of the game, but if the economics don’t work, it’s not a sustainable business,” says John Barclay, the former Scotland captain.

“The people who are far smarter than me can configure that one out.”

Unlike Matt Dawson, who recently revealed he would be encouraging his two sons not to play rugby over safety concerns, Barclay has three children, two of whom are already playing the game.

“I think the issues around concussion in the professional game, the way the game’s played professionally is obviously getting faster and faster and faster, ball in play time is very high – but the kids’ game has never been safer,” Barclay adds.

“Kids are the same size as they were 20 years ago, and that awareness around concussion… I coach the kids and if there is, any doubt, they’re out.”

The two issues – finance and safety – are intertwined. An ongoing class action legal battle between hundreds of players and the governing bodies of rugby could bankrupt some of them and set precedent for more cases on a domestic level if it falls down on the side of the players: the NFL recently settled a suit that cost them $765m (around £590m) over concussion and links to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Rugby faces claims that failure to protect players from concussion has left many with elevated risk of early-onset dementia and other neurological damage.

For several years, World Rugby has been trying mitigate head injuries in the game by changing the tackle height and introducing more severe penalties for high contact. A flurry of red cards led to fans to accuse authorities of killing the game. But Ireland legend Brian O’Driscoll thinks the opposite.

“We’re still seeing red cards, but I think we’re seeing the tackle height piece come into effect through how high the score lines are in rugby at the moment,” O’Driscoll tells i.

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“Are attacks that much better than defense? No, I think it’s because defenses can’t wildly go into collisions anymore and so maybe it’s taken longer than we thought, but I think it’s getting there. The sport is trying to manage that.”

But a perennial optimist, O’Driscoll is also keen to make sure rugby does not “beat itself up” too much

“You can never lose sight of all of the upside and the positive message around what rugby offers,” he adds.

“I think every time I hear the negativity, I’m always there to promote the positivity around life values, around friendship, camaraderie, respect and hard work. They are all things that serve you well, no matter what you do. You see so many rugby players coming out of sport and not knowing they have these skills to put into the corporate world.

“There’s so much stuff to enjoy with us that project and elevate it – as much as we do have to talk about concerns and new fans and capturing the imagination of Gen Z, or whatever the next generation.

“But we make sure that we tell everyone that we do offer a huge amount of value to those that love the game, and I’m certainly a huge ally of the sport and will always be.”

O’Driscoll wants to make sure rugby keeps telling those positive stories to new audiences and new fans, phrases that unite all sides of the debate within the game.

As former All Blacks captain Sean Fitzpatrick puts it: “I don’t think we have enough fans watching the game.”

It’s easy for northern hemisphere fans to assume that New Zealand exists outside of the fraught ecosystem. After all “the international game is in an unbelievable place” insists Care, and the All Blacks are the embodiment of it, even if recent results have undermined that status a little. But the financial stability of the brand seems assured, even if it does not run much deeper than the 1st XV.

“The only part of the equation that makes money is the All Blacks,” Fitzpatrick reveals.

“All the other grassroots, provincial rugby, Super Rugby, it’s an issue. Silver Lake [the US private equity firm which bought a stake in the All Blacks two years ago] when they came on board, said we had close to a billion fans globally, but we only had 700,000 registered fans. If you could fix that…

“We need to make the game more accessible. The way we consume in the game is different than what we used to 10 years ago, five years ago, yeah, and I don’t think we do that very well.

“Both my daughters are F1 fans now. They were up to 11 o’clock last night watching F1. They’ve never been to an F1 race, they just love all the content.

“It’s easy to consume, you can watch it on your phone, easy to understand, great stuff to watch in terms of the on-board riding. All these things we’re just behind. So we’ve got a real job on our hands to make it entertaining, fun to watch, easy to consume, and financially stable.”

Solving those problems and winning the race in the way Formula One has – rugby has tried the Netflix documentary approach and it didn’t make much of a dent – is the million dollar question faced by every sport that is not football. Even the Olympics is facing growing existential dread.

But Jamie Roberts, the former Wales and Lions centre, has an idea.

“It’s a supporter demographic that traditionally has been middle-aged, and the challenge is being able to engage the younger audience, and making sure as a sport that it stays relevant and remains a sport that is attractive to watch. Because above all else, this is an entertainment business,” Roberts tells i.

“I’m a big believer as well that rugby needs to find an alternative version of the sport that we’ve seen in other sports. We’ve seen the NFL do it with flags [a non-contact version that will feature at the 2028 Olympics], we’ve seen cricket do it with T20 and with the Hundred.

“Rugby sevens for me is a different sport. It’s actually quite far removed from the 15s game, it requires a different sort of athlete. My question would be whether that’s so far removed now that rugby needs to innovate and develop a version of the sport that the kids play. It’s the entry into the sport. Whether you’re making a faster, safer version of sport that’s a bit shorter, a bit more engaging with kids that maybe could eventually become a professional sport in itself.

“Rugby has a great opportunity and as we’ve seen with cricket, the purists gravitate even more towards Test cricket. It kind of makes people go ‘actually, there’s room in the ecosystem for everyone, and all these different formats’. And rugby, to grow the game, can it do that?”

It’s the question everyone is asking. Over the next four weeks, the biggest teams in the world will play each other in front of sellout crowds in London, Dublin, Cardiff and beyond. Rugby’s future, whatever that may be, comes next.

Every match of 2024 Autumn Nations Series is exclusively live on TNT Sports and discovery+. Watch The Autumn Nations Rugby Show, free-to-air on Quest every Thursday at 10pm