South Africa and New Zealand supporters have snapped up their dedicated ticket allocations for the inaugural Nations Championship finals weekend at Twickenham, highlighting strong international interest for the competition’s flagship occasion.

The two southern hemisphere heavyweights have sold out their capped “Support your team” allocations of 1,000 tickets each, while England’s home quota was increased from 1,500 to 2,000 to meet initial demand. England supporters make up the bulk of ticket sales across both the pool stages and the climax at the 82,000-capacity venue.

Six rankings matches will all take place at Twickenham next month – two on Friday, two on Saturday and two on Sunday – in a culmination of the competition’s first edition. The grand finale on Sunday pits the top nation in the northern hemisphere pool against their southern counterparts. Second plays second, third plays third and so on.

Tickets are available for each day, as are bundles for all three days, or two of the three. To guarantee a ticket for a particular nation’s rankings match, “support your team” tickets can be bought.

Those for South Africa, the winners of the past two World Cups and top of the southern hemisphere table at the halfway point, as well as New Zealand have sold out. Tickets for England were still available on Wednesday for £164.80. Tickets were also still available at the same price for the other nine competing nations.

In total, 60-65% of tickets have been sold for finals weekend following a spike in interest after the July fixtures with organisers bullish that their promise to stage a “festival of rugby” is resonating.

England play three pool matches – against Australia, Japan and New Zealand – before the finals weekend. England’s last appearance at Twickenham was calamitous, a 42-21 defeat by Ireland during their worst Six Nations campaign.

Twickenham has come to be a home from home for South Africa, who have appeared there in fixtures against Argentina, Wales and New Zealand in recent years. There is a sizeable New Zealander expat population in London and the Springboks’ thumping 2023 World Cup warm-up win over the All Blacks was witnessed by a crowd of more than 80,000.

That was the last Test held at Twickenham on a Friday night and the Rugby Football Union will be anxious to see how November’s double header plays out. The union is awaiting Richmond council’s decision over its planning application to host more concerts at Twickenham.

According to submissions by residents in opposition to the RFU’s proposal, that Friday night match between South Africa and New Zealand was blighted by numerous examples of antisocial behaviour. Richmond council was initially due to return its decision this week but the worry at the RFU is that it will not do so until after this November’s Nations Championship fixtures.

Meanwhile, the England assistant coach Joe El-Abd will leave his position after next year’s World Cup to take up a post with Clermont. El-Abd, a close confidant of Borthwick, joined the setup in the autumn of 2024, initially as defence coach.

A year later, El-Abd was demoted to assisting with the forwards and contact skills. He has been regularly linked with a return to France – he was previously the director of rugby at Oyonnax – and is now set to do so at the culmination of England’s campaign in Australia next year.

• This article’s headline and text were amended on 7 and 8 October 2026. Owing to a misunderstanding, an earlier version said demand for England tickets in the “support your team” category was outstripped by the demand for South Africa and New Zealand tickets. In fact, while the latter nations’ quotas had sold out, England’s allocation was initially larger and later increased due to demand.