World Rugby funds the global game with World Cup largesse. One beneficiary is Sevens.
The arrangement has not worked for rugby, now losing 24 million euros a year, keeping Sevens in an awkward posture of utter dependence, diluting global tastes for the real code, and not acting as the ‘gateway drug’ to rugby claimed by backers against all evidence.
When rugby finds itself at the bottom of a hole, digging, the best thing is to stop digging. For every hundred million euros over a World Cup cycle the global game puts into a rival (albeit crossover) code, the hole deepens.
World Rugby is waking up to that fact.
Faced with losses of 24 million euros per year since assuming management of Sevens, World Rugby will cut both men’s and women’s series from 12 to eight teams, relegating the four lowest-ranked nations after the Singapore tournament: Brazil, China, Ireland, and Spain (women’s competition), and Kenya, Uruguay, Ireland, and the USA (men’s). Chances for promotion will also be shrunk. There has been no word on the number of stages on the circuit next year.
The cause? Long term disinterest of spectators, sponsors, and the media.
But what about the Olympics with leading stars Antoine Dupont and Ilona Maher?
Notwithstanding 66,000 fans packing the Stade de France for women’s Sevens in 2024 and the millions who follow Dupont and Maher personally, Sevens does not hold deep interest, generate jersey sales, attract enough sponsors, nor definitively bring Sevens fans to XVs.
One festival held in the middle of one of Earth’s largest sporting conclaves, full of captive spectators eager for an event to go to, and two influencers nonpareil is not enough.
Yes, Hong Kong packed in almost 50,000 a day in March for Sevens at the Kai Tak Stadium, but attendance has fallen steadily around the world, with only a few exceptions. The Sevens World Cup has been axed. The World Series has cut from 11 to seven events.
The Olympics addition was a boost for Sevens, at least short term, but did it benefit rugby per se? How do we quantify it? Is this one of those things which does not benefit a benefactor directly, but withdrawal of support would hurt the body?
Antoine Dupont and Maddison Levi pose with their World Rugby sevens player of the year awards for 2024. (Photo by World Rugby)
The few times I have attended a Sevens tournament, I was struck by how most of the fans I spoke to were solely Sevens adherents, unaware of or disinterested in the parent sport.
This makes sense. Sevens is a festival variant of rugby, begun in Melrose, Scotland around 1880: a diversion from the grind of proper rugby, and due to short playing time, maximum ball-in-play, and space aplenty, the scoring is far more prolific per minute, appealing to fancy dress fans.
Playing short a few players (at first, 11, in an era when rugby union was often 20 a side) was said to improve passing and handling; Sevens was essentially a training drill.
Short-sided rugby has been played in forms of Tens (devised in Malaysia; a big tournament in Cape Town each year anchors a wider carnival), Sixes (Huddersfield), Nines (northern England), fives (Rugby X), and Twelves, but Sevens won out, after taking hold as a fundraising device in the Borders and spreading to Aberdeen, Glasgow, and throughout Scotland, where it continued uninterrupted.
Sevens’ first sanctioned international tournament was held in 1973 to celebrate Scotland’s century of rugby. The Hong Kong Sevens ‘party’ started in 1976. The Commonwealth Games added Sevens in 1998 and boosted interest, but the Rugby World Cup Sevens (with 24 teams and attendance generally about 100,000 total) ended after the eighth iteration in 2022, predominantly because the International Olympic Committee’s 2009 decision to add Sevens to the Summer Games beginning in 2016 siphoned energy and resources. The irony of attaching Sevens to the Olympics was that it turned three Sevens stalwarts (originator Scotland, moneyed England and proud Wales) into just one team: Great Britain.
In places where rugby has not gained a deep foothold or staffing a fifteen’s side with the depth of beef is required to compete with the big boys, Sevens can gain appeal: only three forwards are required on the pitch, rucks are all fast, and scrums are figurative.
If highlights on phones, few drop-offs in phase play action, individual star power, and tries galore with very rate penalty goals are the way rugby wants to capture an audience, we should not be surprised if those who want that, just want that and not the other rugby stuff.
Herein lies the danger of Sevens.
Yes, Sevens players like Portia Woodman, Waisele Serevi, Werner Kok, JC Pretorius, and Cheslin Kolbe have been able to move successfully to rugby (it does not look like Maher can), but all began in rugby as kids and we cannot know but that they would have inevitably found their way back to their initial goals regardless; but not enough to justify 100 million euros every World Cup cycle as Sevens shows no sign of overall growth or profit.
The best rugby players in key positions surely can make the jump down to Sevens without an issue (Joost van der Westhuizen and Sonny Bill Williams did, but so would Louis Bielle-Biarrey, Hugo Keenan, Damian McKenzie, Kurt-Lee Arendse, Ange Capuozzo and Sam Prendergast, unless the sky is not blue). Thus, if pathway to XVs is the principle, the sooner we get a player into the top code the better; and if national ambitions or a fame burst beckons, just drop the five fittest, fastest, linebreak monsters into the Sevens format for a gold medal bid.
Samu Kerevi also played Sevens for Australia. (Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
The risk of boosting so similar, yet distinct, a code, shorn of tactical nuance and likely to increase rugby’s incessant self-critique, is that it devalues rugby whilst taking rugby value.
Nobody is disputing the ‘right of Sevens to exist,’ nor that it does not produce wonderful athletes to watch (Maddison Levi is a joy, as was Charlotte Caslick, and both Dan Norton and Perry Baker were lightning); the issue is resource allocation in a time when we have seen rugby lose ground and shut doors in Melbourne, Coventry, Cardiff, and Worcester, with Gloucester and Exeter on shaky books, and a couple of grand old unions in New Zealand and Wales in the red.
If enough fans want to see Sevens, the players will be there, as will the sponsors. Those festivals may indeed be grassroots in nature, with a couple (Hong Kong, Vancouver) being large enough to capture local sponsorship, but World Rugby has done enough to spruik Sevens to know whether it has good legs by now.
The situation is serious. By placing the World Cup in the USA. in 2031, chasing some of the world’s most lucrative sponsors and fan bases, World Rugby has placed a big bet. To back it up, World Rugby co-owns an MLR team in Charlotte, North Carolina (the ‘Anthem’), helped stand up the USA Hawks’ performance pathway, and unabashedly focuses on the North American market.
But Sevens, even as it shrinks, still pitches the largest ‘rugby’ events in North America, in Vancouver and Las Vegas or southern California. The US event has grown from 15,800 total fans to a peak of 80,700 in 2016 (in Las Vegas); now it has tapered off to 30,000 or so. If it falls another thousand, it will be the second-lowest draw since 2004.
Meanwhile, Major League Rugby has grown from seven to 11 franchises, even whilst shedding (for now) a few teams for missing financial benchmarks, and attendance is growing each year in total but also in average per game, with marquee matches cracking 10,000 in stadium and Seattle, San Diego, Chicago and Boston easily competitive with the smaller Super Rugby and URC crowd numbers.
Broadcast deals, player recruitment and retention, a rising calibre of coach: all good. Host cities have flocked to the idea of a World Cup, and the improved performance of the USA Eagles (up to No. 15 just behind Samoa, and deservedly above Spain, Uruguay, Portugal, Tonga, and Romania, built on an outstanding 2024 campaign) have created good vibes.
Rugby is not likely to crack the top five in American pro sports (football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey and soccer) in this era, but being in a top ten mainstream sport can vault the Eagles into the top ten in the rugby world, because two or three percent of a 330-million person market is still about the size of the Ireland proposition, with far more stadia.
But the major issue is the complexity of the game itself: knowing why penalties accrue and why kicking is usually good, not bad (as in American football). The last thing rugby needs in America is for Sevens to be the face or brand of the sport, with its oversimplification.
Is Sevens rugby? Should Sevens keep getting as big a share as now? When will Sevens pay for itself? We know Sevens can be a pathway for players to XVs but is Sevens a “gateway drug” for fans? Do Sevens fans tend to stick to Sevens, or do a smaller subset become grumpy fans of the code, pushing for more space and less set piece? What does the evidence tell us? Is it time to stop digging the hole? Cap the subsidy? Plan a gradual exit?
World Rugby includes the HSBC Sevens Series in its “portfolio of major events” making a bald assertion it is “instrumental in attracting new fans” (of which game?)
Compounding the ‘Sevens sickness’ is that perhaps a large portion of US Sevens fans were likely open to the XVs game but now their tastes were shaped and honed in a line-break-on-demand, speed of the essence, simpler to understand format.
Do they transfer to the ‘mother code’ in time? No evidence exists of that claim.
World Rugby does have money to burn, at times.
In the wake of another Cup in 2023, World Rugby had almost 578 million pounds in revenue, leading to a reported profit of 256 million pounds. The French rugby federation is staring at a stark loss, due to mismanagement of the event, and perhaps a bad bet on paying World Rugby about 120 million pounds up front to keep game day proceeds.
A year before: World Rugby had a loss of 127 million pounds from about 16 million pounds revenue. Before that, revenue hovered between 10 and 24 million pounds a year, with 2019 (another World Cup year) a 381-million-pound intake.
In general, World Rugby has a loss each year but lives off the spike of the Cup (in 2015, 189 million pounds profit from 344 million pounds revenue).
In 2027, World Rugby will pay Rugby Australia a flat fee, which will likely again end up in the global governing body’s favour because even if Australia goes no further in the tournament of 2027 than France did in 2023, they are surely better at the beer-swilling, food-slapping, fan-moving, toilet-providing mechanics of a rugby event? France took in 425,000 international visitors for the 2023 Cup and sold 2.4 million game tickets, but their ‘rugby villages’ were poorly located and designed, except in Toulouse.
With rugby suffering at times in heartlands like Cardiff or London, Johannesburg or Wellington, and even on the brink in major metropolitan areas known for sport in general (Melbourne comes to mind) World Rugby should cut Sevens loose to fend for itself; putting those hundreds of millions into grassroots rugby, saving clubs (the heartbeat of rugby) and let the Olympicization of rugby rise or fall on its own merits.
