Rugby is the closest thing the modern world has to gladiatorial combat. Thirty people, no helmets, no padding worth the name, putting their bodies on the line for eighty minutes. The referee is addressed like a judge, and obeyed like one too. The combatants shake hands before and afterwards, the fans mix freely, and everyone drinks and jokes together afterwards. It is dangerous, disciplined and decent all at the same time, great craic, and may be unique in sport.
But here is a partial list of professional rugby clubs that have died, been absorbed or been shut down in the last twenty years:
In England: Wasps, Worcester and London Irish inside twelve months, then Jersey Reds. The Premiership went from thirteen clubs to ten. In Wales: the Celtic Warriors in 2004, and soon Ospreys or Scarlets will disappear, with the Welsh Rugby Union having decided the country will fund three clubs and allocate the licences by tender. In Scotland: the Caledonia Reds in 1998 and the Border Reivers in 2007, taking the country from four professional teams to two. In Italy: Aironi, wound up in 2012 and replaced by a federation-created franchise. In Australia: the Western Force culled in 2017, the Melbourne Rebels wound up in 2024, and the Waratahs and Brumbies absorbed into the governing body rather than being allowed to fail. In Argentina: the Jaguares, created by the union in 2015, runner-up in Super Rugby in 2019, and gone by 2020. Add the Southern Kings, Eastern Province, Border, Boland, the Cheetahs and the Sunwolves for completeness.
Now the international game. The RFU turned over £228m in 2024/25, its second-best year ever. The Six Nations tournament company posted a £10.5m pre-tax profit in 2023/24. Rugby World Cups sell out. Test matches in Dublin, Twickenham, Paris and Edinburgh are among the most sought-after tickets in European sport, year after year. The Rugby World Cup is one of the most watched sporting events.
The sport is not poor, but most of its professional clubs are.
People usually explain this with reference to bad owners, overspending, Covid, or the general amateur hangover of a game that only turned professional in 1995. All true, none of these factors are the cause. The cause is a question rugby has never settled anywhere except perhaps in France, and only half-settled in England, and is a live discussion in South Africa: who owns the part of the professional sport that actually generates money, who bears the costs, and who controls it?
A game that turned professional a century later.
Historical context is important, because it helps explains the temperament of the current set up.
The old line says football is a gentleman’s game played by thugs and rugby a thug’s game played by gentlemen. Football made its peace with money in 1885, when the FA legalised professionalism in England rather than lose the northern clubs that were already paying players. Rugby in England faced the identical question ten years later and chose to split the sport in two (Union vs League) rather than answer it, and the union half then spent a century policing amateurism as a moral cause, banning men for life for accepting ‘boot money’. Rugby Union finally surrendered in 1995.
Football has been learning how to run a professional sport for 140 years, rugby has been learning for thirty. The governance philosophy in Rugby Union was designed for the amateur century, and is now being asked to do a job it was explicitly built to prevent. A good deal of what follows is simply that gap, which is still closing. The question is whether the sport’s clubs can survive the rate at which it closes?
Who owns the clubs?
Most people assume rugby clubs are independent businesses in the way football clubs are. Mostly they aren’t.
Ireland’s four provinces are branches of the Irish Rugby Football Union. The union contracts the best players centrally and decides where they play and how often. Leinster, the outstanding club side in Europe for a decade, is not a company anyone can buy.
Connacht very nearly ceased to exist in 2003 when the union proposed disbanding it, and survived because supporters marched on Lansdowne Road rather than because of anything in its accounts. South African Rugby is hybrid of this model, with part-privatised regional union entities.
Scotland’s two professional teams, Edinburgh and Glasgow Warriors, are owned outright by Scottish Rugby, which was funding them at somewhere around £5m each a year when it last discussed the matter publicly. In 2016 the union asked its member clubs for permission to sell all or part of them. All 171 delegates present voted yes. The union then acknowledged there was no immediate interest from any investor, and a decade later it still owns both.
Italy has two professional clubs. Benetton is backed by the Benetton family and is a real business. Zebre has been wholly owned by the Italian federation since it was created in 2012 to replace the collapsed Aironi. The FIR put it up for sale in December 2024, received one expression of interest, and in February 2025 decided to retain 100% of the shares.
Wales has the WRU owning Cardiff outright after a rescue, and recently deciding there will be three clubs rather than four, funding each equally with £6.4m of annual central distributions, rising to £7.8m, and awarding the licences by tender.
Australian rugby clubs have arguably fared the worst: Rugby Australia absorbed the Waratahs on 1 January 2024 and the Brumbies that July, and now owns both licences under a centralisation programme. It declined to hand the Melbourne Rebels licence to a rescue consortium and wound the club up instead. The Rebels’ directors are suing Rugby Australia. RA posted a c. A$37m deficit for the 2024 financial year, much of it the cost of taking those clubs on, and had been relying on an expensive A$80m debt facility to bridge to the 2025 Lions tour, which is when the host union receives a once-in-a-decade (or 12 years to be precise) financial shot in the arm.
Argentina is the purest case of the lot, the shortest lived, and the most dramatic. The Unión Argentina de Rugby created the Jaguares in 2015, staffed it with the national squad, and ruled that players outside it could not be picked for Los Pumas. When the money ran out in 2020 the union released the players from their contracts and the franchise was gone. Buenos Aires had nothing, then a Super Rugby finalist and then had nothing again.
South Africa has four fully professional clubs warehousing the bulk of the mighty Springboks, but the revenue from the SA system has to fund 14 regional unions, a source of increasing tension with the private part-owners of the four URC clubs, who believe they are financing the losses.
That leaves England, where the clubs are privately owned but dependent, and France, where they are privately owned and not. We will come back to both.
Three sports, three answers
The NFL owns itself. Thirty-two franchises own the league, the league owns the product, and no governing body sits above it – taking a cut or deciding when its players are available. Revenue is about $23bn a year, a per-franchise hard cap of $301.2m (2026), and a collectively bargained agreement handing players roughly 48% of everything. All the upside lands with people who have a reason to reinvest time, capital, energy and initiative.
Football (Soccer) split the difference and gave clubs the larger half. Europe’s top-division clubs turned over €28.6bn in 2024, Premier League clubs alone £6.3bn. FIFA budgets around $13bn across a four-year cycle and books under $500m in a fallow year. The international game in football is enormous, yet structurally is secondary to the club game. When FIFA borrows players from clubs it pays for them, roughly $355m through the Club Benefit Programme for the 2026 World Cup. Clubs own the assets. The federation rents them, and both sides do very well out of it.
Rugby did the opposite everywhere. The unions own the international game, and the international game is now where the money is. During the Covid pandemic the RFU disclosed that around 85% of its revenue came from England men’s internationals at Twickenham. The WRU said much the same about the Principality: less reliant than the RFU, but internationals were still the lion’s share of the business. Twelve or thirteen fixtures a year funding an entire national governing body, making contributions to the community and participation sections of the game, and in Ireland, Scotland and Italy funding the professional clubs on top, and partially so in England.
What the clubs really own today in most countries is the cost base: academies, wages, medical departments, the years of development that produce the players who make those twelve fixtures worth watching. In half the countries listed above they don’t even own all of that, because the union employs some of the players directly.
That is the whole thing in one line. In football, clubs supply the international game and get compensated. In rugby, the international game part funds the clubs, and takes control as payment. Is this the best possible system?
Why the subsidy model is sub-optimal.
England’s version is the best documented, so we can use it as the worked example. The Professional Game Partnership commits the RFU to paying the ten Premiership clubs a total of £33m per season for eight years. In exchange, England gets considerably more say over England-qualified players: when they play, when they rest, when they stand down after a Test window. Some cash, for a significant level of control.
Three things follow from this system:
The clubs carry the union’s risk and get none of its upside. In 2020, when RFU revenues fell off a cliff, a clause in the agreement cut professional game funding from £33m to £12.2m. Ten businesses absorbed the revenue shock of a business they neither own nor influence. That is the difference between a grant/subsidy and equity ownership as a shareholder – rights but no responsibility. Typically, shareholders wear the downside because they own the upside, and have some control over the outcome.
The subsidising party often isn’t strong either. The RFU has been forecasting an operating deficit while writing the PGP cheques. Rugby Australia went into the red, largely by taking on the clubs it was already funding. Other unions typically run multi-year losses. In World Cup years, World Rugby becomes the boss of the Unions in a similar set up to the Union/Club relationship, and the Unions generally make less money in that year than any other year of the four-year cycle.
The subsidy changes who the customer is. When one of the biggest elements of your revenue is a payment from the governing body, the governing body is your customer, and you optimise for it rather than for anyone buying a ticket. The Hungarian economist Janos Kornai called this the soft budget constraint, and he developed the idea to explain why firms in centrally planned economies generally never became any good at anything. If losses get covered, and if there is no real responsibility, nothing forces improvement.
Rugby can be compared to a planned economy. Not by intent, but the machinery is identical, and it is running in Cardiff, Edinburgh, Rome, Dublin, Sydney and Buenos Aires simultaneously. A central body decides how many firms may exist, allocates the targets and funding, licenses entry, absorbs some failure while flagellating the management, and occasionally closes one or more club down.
The owners are plant directors
Follow that thought and you land on the club owners and chief executives, who are maybe the most misunderstood people in the sport.
In countries where the unions own the clubs, they aren’t owners at all. They manage a factory that’s part of the system. Whoever runs Zebre, Edinburgh or the Waratahs holds a job roughly equivalent to a Soviet plant director: accountable for output, not for the enterprise, working to a budget set elsewhere by the same people who set the production targets and supply the raw materials. They can be very good at the job. They cannot change the job.
The English case is stranger, and possibly worse. Premiership owners hold real equity and have put in real money, hundreds of millions of it across thirty years. What they don’t hold is a single real lever. They don’t have full control over the fixture list, which is built around a Test calendar they have no vote on. They don’t control the availability of their best assets, which is written into an agreement between the union and the league. Collectively, they control wages via a cap set to reduce their annual losses. They now control entry to the market, thanks to the removal of relegation and promotion. What they do control, in full and personally, is the downside. Wasps, Worcester and London Irish are what that looks like when the reckoning arrives.
The investors who funded those three clubs put in decades and fortunes, then watched administrators auction the training kit, and read the next morning that they had been the problem. Most were ordinary people with some level of wealth, who loved the game, mistook a licence for an asset, and found out at the worst possible moment which side of the balance sheet they actually owned.
A command economy manager had no authority and no liability. An English rugby club owner has no individual authority and unlimited liability. That is a strictly worse deal.
How do rational people operate within this structure? They stop trying to grow and start managing to a quota. Premiership senior salaries fell 11.4% between 2022/23 and 2023/24 while academy salaries (where every pound goes a lot further) rose 14.5%. The cap was £6.4m, came down to £5m, and is back up to £6.4m this year (lower in real terms thanks to inflation). Part of that is prudence in a collision sport with a congested calendar. But part of it is exactly what Kornai described in the socialist firm: when you can’t rely on inputs arriving when you need them, you hoard inputs. A 69-man squad (the latest available figure) is, among other things, insurance against a calendar somebody else owns, which no one wants to reform.
The analogy breaks in one place and it’s worth saying so. Soviet factories had guaranteed demand. Rugby clubs don’t. Nobody is obliged to buy a ticket, and if the product is dull the stadium empties.
Which gives you the actual arrangement, and it is worse than either pure system. Rugby clubs face a free market on the revenue side and a command economy on the cost side. They have to win customers like a private business while their calendar, their headcount and their access to their own best employees are set centrally by a body they don’t sit on. An exceptional operator can survive inside that vice for a while, and a few do. The fortunate ones have a benevolent funder who takes care of the losses. But there is no version of it that works as a system. It isn’t capitalism and it isn’t central planning. It’s the losing the better half of each system.
Who is actually making the big decisions and setting the long-term strategy?
The usual shorthand is that unions are run by ‘blazers’ with no commercial experience. On the executive floor that mostly isn’t true. Several of the major unions have hired chief executives with substantial corporate careers behind them, out of consumer goods, sports marketing, the Olympic movement, senior public administration. The mix varies. But you cannot explain thirty years of near identical outcomes across a dozen countries by pointing at whoever happens to be in the corner office.
What sits above them explains it, in our view.
Start at the top. The World Rugby Council has 52 seats and is the sport’s highest decision-making body, with the power to admit or expel unions and to set the shape of the global calendar. Under Bye-Law 9, every representative must be, or have been, a member of or hold an official position within the governing body of the union that sends them. No union may hold more than three votes. Read that again and notice what is missing. Clubs have no vote. Leagues have no vote. The organisations that employ most of the world’s professional rugby players and carry the wage bill have no seat in the room where the calendar those players must be released into is decided. By constitution, the room is unions and only unions.
The national bodies mirror it. Taking the RFU as an example: The RFU Council has 62 members, directly elected representatives of the constituent bodies, (The counties, the armed forces, and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the referees association). Premier Rugby Limited has one representative. The members are unpaid. They receive matchday hospitality, expenses and complimentary tickets, and the RFU’s own governance review noted that reform would phase those privileges out. Ed Warner, brought in as an independent voice on that review, described the model as a framework effectively established in the 19th century and clearly unfit for the modern era.
Then ask what this body is rewarded for. Not returns, because nobody holds equity. Not enterprise value, because there isn’t any to hold. Not the survival of the professional clubs, whose interests sit outside the electorate and always have. Elected officers are entrusted with preserving the community game. They are entirely disconnected from whether the sport’s commercial base and its financial security grows or shrinks. It is not a structure to encourage commercial development or any risk-taking.
England’s independent governance review recommended abolishing the RFU Council outright. The Council, invited to vote on its own dissolution, instead endorsed a phased reduction from 62 members to 44 by 2029, becoming an advisory body with the right to be consulted. Even that watered-down version went to a special general meeting in April 2026 and failed to pass. The union’s own statement recorded that an insufficient number of members had supported it.
Organisations whose electorate is mostly amateur clubs, whose officers are rewarded with perks and standing, and the feel-good factor of being part of something, and whose rulebooks were written for a sport that spent its first 124 years insisting nobody should be paid anything at all, are now the controllers or critical partners of the professional clubs and club leagues that are fighting for survival and to attract and retain ticket-buying fans, and TV audiences.
Twenty years of insolvencies across six countries are the evidence that the structures might not be the right ones.
To be fair to the unions, their job is to win Test matches and fund community rugby, and by those measures several of them do very well indeed. Asking them to build enterprise value and grow the pie via business-like initiatives is asking a trade association to run a business.
Ireland, which is meant to be the counter-example
Whenever we mention this set-up, someone says Ireland. Measured against on-field national success, and the success of Leinster, the Irish model works. The most centralised system in world rugby has produced Grand Slams, a world number one ranking, and the outstanding club side in Europe for a decade.
Look at what it produces commercially, though.
The IRFU contracts a small group of elite players directly and distributes around €40m a year across the four provinces. Of the fourteen national contracts confirmed for the coming seasons, eleven are Leinster players. Two are Connacht. One is Munster. Ulster has none at the time of writing. The union’s own performance director has said publicly that Leinster remain the dominant force and are likely to stay that way for a long time. Ulster’s head coach has described the gap as ‘massive’. Leinster gets the biggest subsidy, despite having the advantages of playing in the largest and wealthiest city, full of players, fans and sponsors.
Faced with the discontent from the management, coaches and the Munster, Ulster and Connaught fans, the Irish union’s response has been to tax the result. Provinces used to contribute nothing towards the cost of a centrally contracted player. From 2024 they paid 30%. From August 2026 they pay 40%, and the money that frees up, around €700,000, is ringfenced for player pathways in Munster, Ulster and Connacht. Leinster supporters call it the Leinster tax, which is exactly what it is.
Read that as industrial policy rather than as a rugby story. A central authority allocates the scarce input, concentrates it in the firm that delivers the best return against the national objective, and then taxes that firm to subsidise the three it has just disadvantaged. Every individual step is rational. What the sequence produces is one large club, three that function as back-up, and a domestic rivalry whose outcome is broadly known before it start, but they still expect the Ulster, Munster and Connaught to run at breakeven.
Then ask the commercial question. None of the four provinces is a company anyone can invest in, fan or other. None can raise capital against its own future. None can grow beyond the allocation the union sets, and none carries the downside if it fails, because the union carries it.
Leinster is arguably the best club side in the world, and it has no enterprise value at all, because there is no enterprise. It is a department of the Union with a very good balance of players. The CEO himself has said Leinster is a not-for-profit. The system works well for Leinster, but less so for the other provinces.
That is the trade rugby has made, and Ireland made it more deliberately and more successfully than anyone else. Thirty years of professionalism, a magnificent national team, and a professional club system that is not at peace.
New Zealand ran the experiment of pricing a union
If you want to know what happens when somebody finally puts a number on one of these rugby institutions, New Zealand ran the experiment, and the result deserves to be better known.
In 2021 Silver Lake, the American technology investor, offered US$281m for 12.5% of New Zealand Rugby’s commercial rights, valuing them at US$2.2 billion. On paper the All Blacks are one of the most valuable properties in world sport, and here was institutional capital agreeing. Then watch what the structure did to the deal. All 26 provincial unions voted for it unanimously. The players’ association refused to sign, used its position in collective bargaining to block the sale, and commissioned rival modelling. Two years of failed mediation, leaked reports and open acrimony followed, with the union’s chief executive describing the relationship with his own players as at a new low. The deal that finally closed was 5.7% for US$129m, at a headline valuation of US$2.2bn, with the union remaining fully liable for the costs of running the game while selling a share of the revenue.
A two-billion-dollar asset, and it took a quasi-civil war to sell one-twentieth of it. That is what happens when serious capital meets a structure with no shareholders. There is nobody whose job is to say yes, everybody has standing to say no, and the argument is not about price but about who has the right to sell at all. The most commercially valuable institution in the sport could barely transact to secure funding it deemed necessary to find. South Africa attempted a similar deal for similar reasons, but the powers behind the professional South African clubs vetoed the transaction. Perhaps the national teams should refrain from engaging with commercial investors, but these examples shows the value potential of the game, and where the value currently sits.
The $2.2bn figure may be the most important one in this piece. Somewhere in a data room sits a document, priced by one of the world’s more hard-nosed investors, saying that the commercial rights attached to fifteen men in black jerseys are worth two billion dollars. If one union’s rights alone carry that valuation, despite the arm-wrestling that it took to complete the deal (which investors hate, and would have been taken as a very negative augur of the future of the relationship) what would a properly constructed rugby asset be worth?
France, and what owners are actually paid in
Which is why France is the interesting comparison. Top 14 clubs are independently owned, the federation is comparatively weaker, and it is the richest league in the sport: a turnover of €434m in the top-flight alone, growing at 9% a year, with the deepest squads, the biggest crowds and the best-paid players. Same game, same laws, same fixture pressure, different owners. No split as we saw in England in 1895.
The rejoinder writes itself: most Top 14 clubs lose money too. In the last published accounts only four of the fourteen operated in profit, the clubs lost €64.5m between them, and much of the gap was quietly absorbed by wealthy owners forgiving debt. If private ownership were the cure, the argument goes, France would be profitable. It isn’t.
But profit isn’t the only relevant metric. Fourteen of twenty English Premier League clubs lost money in 2024/25 on record combined revenue of £6.8bn, and Chelsea alone lost
£355m. Yet in the same window a consortium was negotiating £1.35bn for a 30% stake in Liverpool. Operating losses and rising enterprise value coexist in every serious sports market on earth, because owners are not compensated in dividends. They are compensated in appreciation. A football owner funds losses and holds an asset that has multiplied in value for three decades. A French rugby owner funds losses and holds the fastest-appreciating club assets in the sport. An English rugby owner funds losses and holds a licence controlled by somebody else. And Leinster doesn’t have an owner.
Three models, then. Profits, which nobody in sport reliably makes. Appreciation, which football and French rugby owners get and English owners might. And arguably nothing, which is what thirty years of professionalism has produced everywhere the unions own the game, when the competition for eyeballs is getting more intense, and the live spectacle is becoming more valuable. The idea that rugby is simply too small to sustain professional clubs does not survive a look at the French accounts. What it cannot sustain is professional clubs that nobody is allowed to properly own, playing in leagues they don’t fully control, with a dominant international game.
Now count the games
This is where the ownership problem turns into a wage problem, and the numbers are worth setting out side by side.
For context, an English Premiership rugby club, also playing in the Champions Cup, will play between 30 and 38 games a year, including Prem Rugby Cup.
From 2025/26 World Rugby capped elite players at 30 full games a season, with a maximum of six consecutive match weeks, five weeks off-season and twelve weeks of non-contact time. England had already been running a limit of 30 full games or 35 match involvements, based on research finding injury burden rises sharply beyond 31.
Of those 30 games, a first-choice international gives eleven to thirteen to his union: five in the Six Nations or six in the Rugby Championship, up to four in the autumn, two or three on a summer tour. In a Lions year, more. In a World Cup year, more again. Maro Itoje played 33 matches in 2023/24 and 33 again in 2024/25, over the ceiling both times.
So the international game takes something like 40% of a rugby player’s permitted season, and it takes the best players, the stars that draw the crowds at club games, the most.
Football looks nothing like that. FIFPRO’s workload monitoring found the three most-used outfield players averaged 73 matches in 2024/25. Under FIFA’s calendar from 2026, national teams get ten matches a year across four windows, with a tournament summer adding up to eight more. Ten to thirteen international matches out of seventy-odd. Roughly one game in six or seven. Rugby’s ratio is two in five, and the unions are not obliged to pay anything for the privilege. Most do, but not on a per-player, per-match basis.
Then the NFL, the cleanest case of all. Seventeen regular-season games across eighteen weeks, a maximum of four in the playoffs. There is no national team, so there is no release, no window, no negotiation. The league owns a player’s entire competitive year. Fifty-three players on the roster, 48 active on a matchday, and a spending cap of $301.2m.
The maths for rugby is brutal. A Premiership club operates under a £6.4m cap, spent about £7m including credits, and carried an average senior squad of 42 alongside 27 academy players. That works out at roughly £167,000 a head for a season of thirty-odd matches. Fly-half is the best-paid position in England at a mean of £259,602, wing the lowest at £132,303. A player with more than fifty Test caps, one of a few hundred of the best rugby players alive, averages a salary of £342,633, and that number has barely moved in years. The average NFL player earns around $3.2m. Not the stars. The average.
Put a face on the arithmetic. In every Premiership academy there is a nineteen-year-old who has organised his whole life around this game since he was eight, whose parents drove him to training four nights a week for a decade, and who is now paid rather less than a trainee estate agent to be run into by professional adults. If everything breaks right for him, and for the overwhelming majority it will not, the summit of his profession is fifty caps for his country, a body ten years out of warranty, and £342,000 a year. The far more likely outcome is a release letter at 23 and a CV that says rugby. His American equivalent does not exist, because the NFL runs no academies. It drafts from universities and pays first-year players on the league minimum roughly what an English club is permitted to pay its single marquee star.
The fair objection is that this compares a mid-sized sport with the richest league on earth, so use shares instead of sums. NFL players collectively bargain roughly 48% of all revenue. New Zealand’s players have fought for years to defend a 36.5% share of their union’s revenue, a figure the union has been trying to cut. An English international’s wages are paid out of a club cap set against club revenue, while the international fixtures he and his body create valuable revenue flow through a union whose revenue he never shares. The problem is not that rugby’s pot is small, though it is. It is that the players’ share is calculated against the wrong pot, and the right pot belongs to somebody who doesn’t pay them.
The mechanism runs in one direction. The fixture list sets the squad size, because you cannot get 42 men through 30-38 matches across three competitions any other way. The squad size divides the salary pot. The leagues pay wages that cannot make many of the players famous. A sport that cannot pay stars does not produce stars, and a sport without stars has nothing to sell to anyone who isn’t already emotionally committed to a particular club. Increasingly, younger fans come for the player, not the team.
Someone will object that the NFL plays 272 regular-season games, which is close to the 300 – 320 games played by the English Premiership. True, and beside the point. The number that matters is games per club and the meaning packed into each one. Seventeen NFL games means every single game is an event with consequences. Thirty-plus means some (most?) of them are filler, and the market prices them accordingly.
The evidence is in the attendance data, and it is not an English problem. The URC averaged 10,948 in 2025/26, with a low of 1,711 for Lions against Scarlets. Benetton averaged 5,051 at home. Zebre play in a 5,000-seat stadium. The Premiership Rugby Cup averaged 5,206 in 2024/25 with a low of 525. These are professional fixtures played into empty rooms, and every one of them burns a squad, a travel budget, a medical bill and a slice of somebody’s career.
Now take the same clubs and the same players, make the fixture rare, and stage it as an occasion. Stormers against Bulls in the URC drew 53,682. Harlequins against Northampton at Twickenham drew 72,735. The 2024 Premiership final drew 81,669.
Nothing changed except the framing and the scarcity.
Rugby already knows all this, which is the maddening part. The Test game is valuable because there are circa twelve of them and each is an event. The sport runs the scarcity experiment on itself every autumn, summer and 6 nations, and gets the right answer every time, then refuses to apply the finding to the club game, because the organisations that own the scarce product have no reason to create a second one.
“What’s rare is wonderful” has a side benefit. Fewer matches means healthier athletes, more revenue per fixture, smaller squads and a much larger wage per player from the same pot. That alignment almost never happens in professional sport, and it is currently being wasted.
The sport people watch and don’t play
Rugby has somewhere between 475 and 800 million fans worldwide, depending on whose census you believe, and roughly 4.6 million registered players, more than 80% of them in just twenty countries. Circa a hundred watchers for every player. When 857 million people watched the 2019 World Cup final, the audience outnumbered the sport’s entire playing population by nearly two hundred to one. Football’s ratio is closer to fourteen to one: three and a half billion fans, but a quarter of a billion people actually playing, because all it takes is a ball, a wall and an alley.
Rugby’s profile is the NFL’s: a small playing elite performing for an enormous audience with no intention of ever doing it themselves. Of course they don’t. It hurts. It’s technical. The gladiatorial commitment that makes the sport magnificent to watch is precisely what keeps the playing base narrow.
Meanwhile, on the participation side, rugby is being comprehensively lapped by a game invented in a private garden in Acapulco in 1969. Padel now claims more than 35 million players across 150 countries and built over 14,000 new courts in a single year. A back-garden game half a century old has seven times rugby’s playing base, acquired with no unions, no Test matches and no heritage, because it costs nothing to learn and nobody gets hurt. That is the type of recreational market rugby notionally competes in, and it cannot win there. Add football’s continuing growth on one side, padel and its cousins eating the leisure hours on the other, and screens eating everything else, and rugby’s geographic base, essentially parts of the former British Empire plus France, Italy, Argentina and Japan, with a World Cup that only began in 1987, starts to look like what it is: a bounded map.
A sport with a capped playing population and a bounded map has exactly one asset that scales, and it is the spectacle.
Now hold that against the governance philosophy described above. Every structure in this sport is organised around participation. The electorates are community clubs. The constitutions weight counties, provinces, associations – the wonderful organisations that bind communities together. The distributions flow to the grassroots, and the officers rise through them. All of that is honourable, but completely different to what drives the professional rugby side of the sport. Rugby has a one-size-fits-all approach: the whole is governed as a participation sport, while the business end is a spectator sport, and that single mismatch explains more of the last thirty years than any individual decision taken inside it.
The NFL understood its own version of this from the start. Almost nobody in America plays tackle football past school, and the league never cared, because it wasn’t selling participation. It built the richest sports property on earth on a small, spectacular and inspiring playing elite and a vast watching public that creates its own type of community. Rugby has the same endowment, the small elite, the huge audience, the physical drama, and has spent three decades trying to be a smaller football (soccer) instead.
The combinations nobody gets to see
Here is the strangest fact about professional club rugby. The best fifteen players in the world have never played together, and under the current structure they never will.
Football solved this a century ago and it is the single largest reason club football outgrew the international game. Real Madrid could put a Brazilian, a Frenchman and a Croatian in the same midfield, so the best football on earth happens every week rather than every second or fourth summer. Rugby’s best players are sorted by passport and then capped, budgeted and scheduled by the union that holds the passport. A club that wanted to assemble a genuinely global XV couldn’t afford it, wouldn’t be allowed to release it, and would have nowhere meaningful to play it.
Rugby players do cross borders, of course. The Top 14 is full of foreign internationals, and Toulon once assembled something close to a world XV and won three European Cups with it. But look at the mechanics. Nearly every union enforces some version of the same rule: play abroad and you will not be picked. New Zealand applies it absolutely, England in all but exceptional circumstances, Wales and Australia through cap thresholds. South Africa, the most successful team in the world based on world cup wins, has no such rule. The players who actually move fall into two categories. The first is men at the end of their Test careers, cashing out in France or Japan, once the jersey no longer holds them. The second is players who couldn’t make things click at home and emigrate to qualify somewhere else. James Lowe couldn’t crack the All-Blacks squad as youngster, joined Leinster, qualified for Ireland on residency and became one of the best wings in the world, and provided us with fantastic moments (Thanks, James!). But notice what kind of market that is. Football transfers move the best players in their prime to the best teams, on merit. Rugby transfers move the surplus and the retiring. The elite, in their prime, are held in place by selection rules that amount to a restraint of trade no other major sport operates. Charles Piutau, one of the most gifted backs of his generation, took the market rate at Ulster and Bristol and paid for it with his entire All Blacks career.
It is not that the best fifteen players in the world cannot share a pitch. It is that the price of sharing one is their Test careers, so it never happens while they are the best fifteen. The unions do not just own the calendar. Through selection policy, they own the labour market too.
Two exceptions: and both times the answer is overwhelming.
The Barbarians made the point for a hundred years on a small stage: an invitational side with no ground, no league and no nationality, that people crossed continents to watch precisely because the combination was unrepeatable. Younger readers may not appreciate this given the BaBa’s have been more muted of late, but we remember the BaBa’s as exciting Galacticos playing unique games.
The Lions makes it at scale and on a 4-year cycle. It is not a country. It has no stadium, no league, no season and no supporters in the ordinary sense. It exists for six weeks every four years, assembled out of four nations, and it is one of the most valuable properties in world sport. In Australia in 2025 the first Test’s initial ticket allocation was gone in sixty minutes. The second Test drew 90,307 to the MCG, a record for a Lions match anywhere. The third drew 80,312. Across the tour, international rugby in Australia that year filled 93% of available capacity.
Sit with what that proves. Take elite players out of their national teams, put them in combinations that exist nowhere else, and 90,000 people turn up in a country whose own professional clubs are being wound up by the governing body for want of an audience. Same sport. Same players. Same continent. Same year.
The demand test has already been run, by the incumbents, at scale, in the last eighteen months. What is rarer, what is better, is wonderful.
Rugby already knows how to stage an event
The Hong Kong Sevens moved into the new 50,000-seat Kai Tak Stadium in 2025 and drew more than 110,000 people across three days, a tournament record, including a single-day high of 41,457. Over 30,000 were international visitors. The fan village outside the ground pulled 54,697 on its own. Kaiser Chiefs and Pete Tong played. The venue sold 82,000 litres of beer and 350,000 food and drink items. Corporate hospitality had sold out months earlier, and 138 temporary boxes were 99% full.
Most of those people are not rugby fans in the sense the sport uses the word. They bought a weekend. The rugby was genuinely excellent and it was also one component of the thing they bought, alongside the music, the city, the party and the company they came with.
Then hold that against a Premiership Cup tie played in front of 525 people, or a URC fixture in front of 1,711. The sport’s single most reliably sold-out club-free property is the one that stopped pretending the match was the entire proposition. Formula One did the same thing deliberately in the last decade: virtually identical cars, nearly identical drivers, reframed as a three-day festival with a documentary and stories attached, and the audience changed shape completely.
Rugby has both halves of the answer sitting in its own history. It has simply never put them in the same building.
So what can be done about it?
Own the calendar or you own nothing. Nearly every commercial failure in professional rugby, in every country on that opening list, traces back to a business that could not determine when its principal assets would be available to it. Club rugby can preserve local community and participation rugby, while elevating the elite, and preserving the international game.
Design for scarcity from the start, not thirty-odd fixtures. Squads assembled globally and openly, so that a French scrum-half plays outside a South African number eight with an All Black on his wing, week after week.
Build the league to properly reward the generational talent, at a level that makes them recognisable outside the sport. Costs can flex with performance instead of ratcheting a club into administration, and players become partners in the upside rather than a cost line to be squeezed.
Coherent rights packages, designed for streaming from the outset. Rugby currently has World Rugby, ten or more major unions, three leagues, a European organiser, SANZAAR and the clubs themselves all walking into the same broadcasters and sponsors, frequently bidding against each other for the same budget. Put the decisions in the hands of people who lose something when they get them wrong.
None of these are novel ideas. It is what every successful modern sports property has done, and it is what rugby’s own two most valuable non-club assets already do. The only thing preventing it is that nobody inside the current structure owns the upside of doing it, and everybody inside the current structure owns a reason not to.
So why has nobody fixed it?
The obvious question, and this article would be dishonest without it. Thirty years is a long time for nobody to change the system, if there’s not a better system. It is that almost everyone currently inside the game benefits a little from the way things are, while the people who would gain from change are dispersed, transient, or not yet born.
Run through the ledger of winners. The unions keep the only scarce product and all the control that comes with it, and control is a currency that institutions never voluntarily spend or give away. The elected officers keep the standing, the tickets and the trips, and many positions would not survive modernisation. The broadcasters do quietly well out of fragmentation, because rights sold by six competing sellers cost less than rights sold by one, and no buyer in history has lobbied to pay more. Ireland gets Grand Slams. France gets the best league in the world under the current arrangements and would be mad to disturb them. The players’ associations, oddly enough, hold more leverage against a weak union than they ever would inside a league with a collective bargaining agreement, as two years of the Silver Lake standoff demonstrated. Even the English owners, with the constrained size of their clubs, are invested in it by now: thirty years of sunk capital buys a seat at the table and the hope of eventual recovery, and hope is a hard asset to write off.
Now look for the losers, and notice what they have in common. The players lose the most, but a career lasts a decade, the jersey is sacred, and no generation has ever been willing to spend its own few years at the top fighting a structural war it would not live to benefit from. The supporters lose, but they are loyal precisely because they don’t think in enterprise value, which is the most admirable thing about them, but even the loyal supporters might lose hope eventually if the system is not fair. The clubs that died can no longer vote. The stars who never became famous do not know what they missed. And the biggest beneficiaries of change would be the players, clubs and audiences of the next thirty years, who are not in the room, because future people are famously bad at lobbying.
Concentrated small benefits beat dispersed large ones in every political system ever studied, and rugby’s governance is a political system. Everyone in the system has little bit of power, but not enough power to fix the commercial side of rugby.
The Warm Part, Plainly
Everything above is cold, so let us say the warm part plainly, because it is the reason to bother with any of this.
Rugby does something to the people who pass through it that very few institutions still manage. In 2009 the sport’s unions codified integrity, passion, solidarity, discipline and respect as its defining values and wrote them into the laws of the game, and for once the corporate language describes something real. It is visible every weekend in the one convention football has never managed at any level: the referee is addressed by the captain alone, as you would address a judge, and is obeyed. It is measurable too. When Premiership Rugby ran its values through a schools programme, independent evaluation by Demos found pupils’ self-efficacy rose 9%, problem-solving 9%, empathy 8%, cooperation 9% and team-working 10%, across more than 17,500 children in the pilot year alone. And it lasts. Ask anyone who played, at any level, and they will tell you about the network: the global family of people who share an unwritten code, who will pick up the phone forty years later, who came out of the game with something closer to what the best regiments and the Scouts used to hand people than anything modern sport provides. In an international survey of players, more than half said the game’s effect on their mental health and wellbeing was extremely positive. A sport that manufactures character and community at that scale is not just a business with a governance problem. Rugby has changed lives for the better. It is a social asset, and social assets that go bankrupt do not come back.
The honest ledger has a debit side, and it has to be faced rather than footnoted. This is a collision sport. Hundreds of former players are in litigation with the governing bodies over brain injuries, the science on concussion is getting harder to read comfortably, and the gladiatorial inheritance that fills stadiums carries a bill that lands on the players decades later. Nothing in this essay works if that is denied. But notice that it points exactly where the commercial argument already pointed: fewer, bigger fixtures mean fewer collisions per career, more recovery, smaller squads and better-paid, healthier athletes. The NFL went through precisely this reckoning, settled with its former players, changed its protocols and emerged more valuable than ever. A combat sport that manages its dangers seriously and pays its combatants properly can be sold for another century. One that denies the dangers while underpaying the men absorbing them is finished, and deserves to be.
That is the stake. A culture that turns teenagers into people who shake hands with the man who just spent eighty minutes trying to flatten them, and one of the few mass, passionate sporting events on earth where the crowd needs no segregating. It is worth nurturing, protecting and building for, and at the moment nobody with the power to do so has any incentive to try.
But where might our thoughts be wrong?
Anyone making a case for changes in rugby has to concede or at least consider a few things:
Rugby might simply be a national-team sport. The customer has been voting for a century and a half and the verdict is emphatic: Tests sell out, club games mostly don’t. That is a revealed preference, not an accident of governance, and any new competition has to prove it can create demand rather than move it around. Nobody has done that in rugby yet.
The redistribution pays for real things. Community clubs, referees, the women’s game, academies, entire unions in developing rugby nations that exist on World Rugby distributions. The NFL carries no grassroots obligation because American universities do that work for nothing, and rugby has no equivalent subsidy anywhere. In a sport with a playing base this narrow, the pipeline is not sentiment, it is the entire talent supply. Any structure that takes players but does not invest in where next generation comes from, and paying for it, is free-riding and will be called out as such.
The new start or modernisation record is mixed. World Series Cricket and the IPL changed their sports permanently and built valuable franchises. LIV showed money buys players but not necessarily audiences, and that splitting a mid-sized sport can shrink the pie for everyone still in it. The best precedent isn’t LIV. It’s the 1992 Premier League, which broke away from the governance while keeping every club, ground, rivalry and supporter exactly where they were. You can restructure ownership without asking anyone to abandon what they already love. Football’s Super League tried the opposite and lasted 48 hours.
And the Irish objection is a real one, not a debating point. If the measure is Test results, centralisation has beaten every alternative model in the sport. Our argument is narrower than it sounds. This structure has decoupled sporting success from enterprise value, and rugby has quietly chosen the international game over the club game. That is defensible. It just shouldn’t be made by accident, or treated as costless while clubs keep going under on three continents.
£280m moved through one governing body, in one country, in one year, and comparable sums move through half a dozen others. Silver Lake priced one union’s commercial rights at two billion dollars. The sport is not poor.
What it lacks is anyone whose job is to make the money grow. Almost every pound in rugby sits with an institution whose mandate is to hand it out, answerable to a constituency that will always prefer distribution to reinvestment, and represented by people whose rewards arrive whether the balance sheet improves or not.
Nobody builds for upside they don’t own. But a game that asks its players to put their bodies on the line every weekend is entitled, at the very least, to institutions prepared to risk something too and continuously strive for better.
30 Year Test 