A year ago on Sunday, England opened their World Cup against Fiji at Twickenham. Even though that bonus-point victory was as good as it was to get for the team, the Rugby Football Union went on to deliver the most profitable tournament to date, allowing it to leave a lasting legacy on the game in England and beyond.
This season, 190 new teams have been set up, junior ranks swelled by 30,000 players, the number of women playing the game risen by 30%, more than 500 secondary schools have taken up the sport in the last four years and the RFU is making a £50m investment in artificial pitches for member clubs.
The profits are not just being used for the benefit of the game in England: the RFU’s unity project has established links with 17 countries in Europe, including Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, to help rugby develop in its nether regions on the continent.
“The tournament exceeded expectations and the buzz it generated around the country raised the profile of the sport,” says Steve Grainger, the RFU’s director of development. “Our aim when we launched our legacy programme three years before the start of the World Cup was to ensure that by the next tournament in Japan more rugby was being played by more people more often.
“The normal way of doing something like this is to see how much money a World Cup generates and spend it afterwards. We managed to persuade people it would be too late by then and that we had to invest before the tournament so that things were in place by the time it started. We put £10m into developing the facilities of more than 550 clubs by September last year, determined to dash any perception that money coming into the game is spent on players, the Twickenham stadium and running the union.
“We were clear that the purpose of generating extra income was to put money back into the game at schools and club level and contribute to the growth of the game in Europe. It is our belief that our game will only be strong if the sport is strong in other countries; the more interest there is, the more rugby will be successful. And we can learn: some of the emerging countries have quicker decision-making processes with greater freedom and flexibility to act.”
When Georgia asked for help this year in maintaining their pitches, the RFU sent out Twickenham’s head groundsman, Keith Kent, to offer advice and after the World Cup had ended, items that had been bought for the tournament, such as tables, chairs, mini-fridges and even physiotherapist tables, were taken away from the grounds that staged matches with the help of the army and given away to clubs.
“What we were seeing was a long, slow decline in the number of people playing rugby,” says Grainger. “That did not show itself in clubs closing but reducing the number of teams they ran; instead of three or four it was in many cases one or two. By introducing the game into hundreds of schools [750 by 2019] in a £10m investment, we are making a simple intervention that is having unbelievable traction. We have based three schools in a geographical area with a club for support and the aim is to have more under-14, under-15 and under-16 teams in our clubs by the end of the decade.
“The artificial pitch investment is crucial because we found that by growing the game the way we wanted, grass pitches would become excessively played and trained on. We were ruining them and the maintenance costs were spiralling. While we are putting them in clubs, they remain our property and we are leasing them. They are for the use of all clubs so that come February when pitches are under water, we can move games.”
Grainger is liaising closely with Japan, the 2019 hosts, who are expected to announce their legacy programme in the coming weeks. Last year was the second time England had hosted the tournament, although in 1991 they showed matches with the other Five Nations countries. With World Rugby enjoying record receipts last year and hosts only able to make money from ticket sales, there is unlikely to be such a 24-year gap before the RFU next host the showpiece.
“We would be crazy not to be considering another bid at some point,” says Grainger. “It will do the rounds and the bids are in for 2023. You would assume at some point it would go to one of the Americas with the growth potential there, but you would be foolish not to want to have another crack at it at some point and see it come back to these shores. World Rugby are guaranteed a big pay day and it is something they will look at. It costs so much to stage a major sporting event that the pool of countries able to afford to do so is narrowing.”
