Modern rugby union turned 30 last month. It was in the autumn of 1994 that Louis Luyt, president of the South African Rugby Union, announced that the game would turn professional after his country had hosted the World Cup the following year. Luyt was the first significant figure in the sport to say out loud what everyone else was only talking about in whispers. He was right. It took another 12 months, the actual anniversary of the International Rugby Board meeting at which the decision to go pro was made falls next August, but once Luyt had opened the box there was no closing it again.
Thirty years is no time. Rugby is at once so old that no one’s even quite sure exactly when it was first played, and so young that it’s still figuring out what it wants to be when it grows up. “We’re still very new relative to a lot of other professional sports,” says Mark Robinson, the chief executive of New Zealand Rugby. Robinson, who played nine Tests for the All Blacks in the early 2000s, has been their CEO since 2020. He has been doing the rounds this week, shuttling between interviews and meetings in advance of the World Rugby Council meeting in Dublin on 14 November, when he, and the other powers that be, will debate the game’s best next steps.
Related: First Nations Championship rugby finals to be hosted in London then Qatar
You’ll be able to see some of what they’ve got in mind for it on the field this weekend. The international matches, England v New Zealand, and Scotland v Fiji, are the first of the last autumn Tests. In 2026, they are due to be replaced by a biennial Nations Championship, a 12-team two-conference competition that will build towards a final between the best sides in the northern and southern hemispheres. The Tests will also include the use of the new red card trial law, which means players who have been sent off can be replaced after 20 minutes in some cases. Robinson is a key proponent of both developments, and is keen to make sure they become permanent.
Which is why he wants to see the former Australia flanker Brett Robinson win the race to replace Bill Beaumont as the chair of World Rugby. Robinson is up against Italy’s Andrea Rinaldo, and, this is where things get interesting, the charismatic Frenchman Abdelatif Benazzi, who has the support of Qais al-Dhalai, president of Asia Rugby, among others. Asia Rugby may be a minor player historically, but they include some very rich federations. Not least Qatar, who offered $800m to host the first four Nations Championship finals. Robinson says himself that the All Blacks want to “keep an open mind” to the possibility of playing in the Middle East.
But he is less keen on the idea of France taking over the running of World Rugby. It is just about the only country in the world where the club game is thriving, and the authorities there have their own ideas about how the sport ought to grow. Among other things, they are the only major nation to completely reject the new red card trial law.
They argue that it’s putting spectacle ahead of player safety. Robinson says the two sides fundamentally disagree on that. “There’s absolutely no change to the way you would sanction a player under exactly the same event,” he says. “We feel that the time is right for the game to modernise in this area. There’s no doubt that the threshold for red cards has changed significantly. There’s just a lot more unintentional and accidental events that lead to red cards. We need to make sure that player welfare and safety is absolutely preserved, which it is under this proposal, but that the enjoyment of the fans is considered as well.”
For Robinson, both the new trial law and the new Nations Championship are a part of a set of solutions to the same problem. “We need to be attuned to the participants, the players and the fans, and put them right at the centre of the things, and that means making the game more accessible, more inclusive, and more safe,” he says. “The fans want faster games with shorter durations, fewer long interventions and simpler rules.”
Robinson sees the Nations Championship as the sport’s chance to reinvent itself. “This is a competition where you’ve got to win every game because you want to make a final, so all of a sudden it creates a totally different narrative around your competition. It’s going to lead to new opportunities in the ways that fans follow the sport and the players.” He also says “it could be potentially used as an incubator for innovation around the laws of the game”.
At the same time, the All Blacks are also reviving what Robinson called the “old school” tour. They are planning to play a three-Test series against South Africa in 2026, including five tour matches against provincial sides. “Again, it’s being driven by the fans,” he says, “people said: ‘This is something we want.’”
Listening to him, there’s a lot of talk about what the fans may want, less about what the players might need. “We just have to simply be bolder about taking on those opportunities as a sport,” he says. “And that’s why the upcoming vote around the future leadership of world rugby is so incredibly important. We see that as an opportunity for the sport to take further steps forward and becoming more progressive.”
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