What Prep is Being Done for USA Hosting the Rugby World Cup?
What Prep is Being Done for USA Hosting the Rugby World Cup?
A Column by Alex Goff (transcribed from the below video)—One of the things that keeps coming up that people want to talk to me about on a regular basis is the Rugby World Cup—Not the one that's happening for the women in just a couple of months, not the one that's happening for the men just a couple of years, but the one that's coming around in six years which is going to be hosted by the USA.
That'll be the Men's World Cup of 2031 and then of course the Women's World cup in 2033. World Rugby a few years ago came up with the decision that they wanted to plan ahead a little bit better. And I think anybody who looks at any of these major world sporting tournaments kind of likes that idea.
The whole drawn-out bid process, the potential for corruption which we've seen in a variety, variety of places, variety of sports, variety of events, just is just sort of infuriating. And we hear especially like with the Olympics, but also with some of those other multi sport events, World Rugby said okay, let's map it out.
Let's just see what are we going to do for the next several years; we're going to go in 27 and 29 Australia, 31 and 33 the United States. Great. Makes sense, right?
And then that's all to say that World Rugby said 'look, let's plan ahead.' And I think that they're planning ahead secretly further than that and they should be, because at some point the Rugby World cup becomes far too big for major nations.
[in] 2011, New Zealand hosted the Men's World cup and a few years later they hosted the women and the women's still smaller tournament. So it could still be done. But 2011 was said to be the last time New Zealand would host the Men's World cup.
And it's because the country is too small, the infrastructure is too small, the number of hotels, the number of venues, all those things just not enough. Especially with this tournament expanding to 24 teams. Australia can do it. Bit stressed but they will see how they do it.
Pretty sure they can do it.
I think France has done a great job the two times they've hosted in two 2007 and then 2023. So yes they can host it. And why can France host it is because France is essentially square, slightly, I think slightly taller than it is wide, but it's essentially square, well connected with airports, roads and the tgv, the high velocity train, and then they have towns all throughout that square, that can host, that are big enough, have venues that are big enough to host Rugby World Cup?
Tellingly, and I think I mentioned this before, I think 2007 they had about 13 venues, and 2023 they went to nine. And I think that that is something that you'll see sort of a trend there is that Rugby World Cup is going to be moving toward a larger, venues, things like that.
So anyway, all of this is to say that people talk to me about the, the USA hosting and say what's going on? Are these people asleep at the wheel? We've heard nothing. Are they doing nothing? Are they just sit standing around hoping that something's going to happen?
Are they going to do a terrible job and American Rugby is going to look stupid and is USA Rugby going to lose a ton of money? And it's fair to ask that because American Rugby can on a time look pretty stupid. And as far as Hosting massive tournaments, 2018 Sevens World cup was a sellout, a huge success.
Lots of people came and USA Rugby managed to lose money on it. Why? Because they had a bad concessions deal and they had bad hotel deal. And that bad hotel deal was because of timing of announcing when they would host it before they'd secured their hotel deal. That's bam. That's it might be other factors but that's it.
Had they got a piece of the concession sales and had they worked deals before hotels jacked up the prices for hosting all those teams, USA Rugby would have made a lot of money and they would have been a lot happier. So I have spent some time talking to people about this now.
The caveat for this is that my main sources are Alan Gilpin, CEO of World Rugby and Ross Young, former CEO of USA Rugby, who is now in charge of the commercial entity that's possibly known as Rugby World Cup USA. But I think you kind of have to rely on my ability, to sniff out a little bit of BC. Maybe there is some there. Fine. But I also sort of have to get an idea of what they're thinking, what they're doing, things like that.
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And that was when the bid was, presented to World Rugby and approved. And everyone said, yay, let's go; 30 of those are in the United States. One was in Canada; that was Vancouver. We now have ... we're dropping down to closer to 20, 23, something like that. One or two have sort of said we can't sign on the dotted line that we're still interested, but we are still interested. Just check back with us. We've got city, elections coming up, state or provincial elections coming up, things like that.
So we just want to be sure before we say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's in the 20s, so a couple have dropped out. And probably maybe 30, 32, 33 venues that are under consideration.
It's not going to be that many. It's probably going to be closer to 13, 14, 15. It's still going to be probably the most venues any Rugby World Cup has ever had. And why? Well, we know why. The number one reason. It's, it's like, patently obvious. So they're going to hold, the World Cup in the time frame that they normally hold it.
September, October, maybe into the first weekend of November. And I'll talk. I'll tell you, let's go into the reasons why first. Parentheses into parentheses. We're already down a rabbit hole. Why hold it in September, October, November? Because they hold it in September, October, November, all the time. The time off for teams and the prep for teams is very important. Remember that Northern Hemisphere professional leagues are still playing, but they're kind of stressed and they've accepted that.
But what they don't want is, a lot of extra time which should be player off time going into preparation for the World Cup. So if you think about the English Premiership or the United Rugby Championship or the French [Top14] League, all of these things ending in late spring, you know, May to June, right after that, players are supposed to have time off.
Bam, June, get off your feet, fix what's wrong with you. Whatever. That's very, very important. If you start to start the World Cup earlier, it's really hard for them to get that time off. It's hugely important, not only for, the players, but also for the quality of the World cup and the professional leagues, the professional teams whose players are being asked to do this. So that's very difficult.
Second reason not to move it, to move it into the summer for the United States is in, case you haven't noticed, it is summer. It's hot in the United States in the summer. Not everywhere. Some places are very pleasant. But, heck, if they, if they could host the whole thing in, like Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, the weather would be fantastic. Although I think it was at the club, World Club Soccer World Championships, it was raining. So, rain's not the end of the world. A little bit of thunder and lightning.
That's rare. But usually in the summer it's great. Anyway, but you kind of say, well, you can't have places like Texas, Louisiana, Florida, even Southern California. Even the breadbasket, Kansas City, something like that, St. Louis. These very, very difficult places to say, yes, we're gonna hold World Cup stuff here. You could only do it, probably only do it at night. Limits your options. Things like that just again, complications upon complications.
So bump, bump, back we go. September, October, beginning of November. Fine. Well, what's the problem there in America? Football. Namely the NFL. College football as well. The biggest stadiums available are college football stadiums. However, they are in remote-ish areas.
And, I think that they are less likely to be, on the slate for venues for the Rugby World Cup simply because they're huge. You, could say, all right, look, New Zealand plays England in a pool match. And you say, that's going to be huge. Can you get 100,000 people to, Ann Arbor, Michigan? No. Just no. So, that's the understanding there.
Baseball. But there's a complication with baseball. I love rugby games in baseball. Stadiums. I think that the extra space that the baseball stadium usually provides is pretty cool. The unique configuration of the stands and a baseball stadium make it more fun.
Certainly baseball stadiums lend themselves terrifically well to Sevens tournaments because you can, as happened in AT&T Stadium in San Francisco. Everyone sort of hung out at center field, having a beverage or two while watching the games out there, which sort of cut across laterally the outfield and the infield. And that little crescent area of deep center field was where people were warming up so you could see both of them at the same time. It's really great. But I, think baseball teams are going to have a tough time, worrying about lines on the field, field getting chewed up with multiple rugby games on there, having to get rid of the pitcher's mound and then replace it.
It's a big job to do that. And going into October we don't even know who's going to be vacant and who's not. So you can't plan that until the end of September. First week of October is when you know who's playing or not. I suppose you could look at the All-Star Break and say, okay, we've got an opening for one more baseball stadium. Who's in last place? It's a bit silly. So ultimately we come to football, stadiums, probably NFL stadiums, plus some high end major league soccer stadiums or multi-use stadiums, plus the odd outlier stadium that might happen.
What they're going through right now. Ross Young, people working with him have been going across the country examining venues. Not only examining venues though, what they're also doing is meeting with and talking to the people who are in charge of the venues.
It's not always the same kind of people. Sometimes it's a football team, sometimes it's a convention and visitors bureau or a sporting entity. Or it might be the city itself. Sometimes, I think it's Baltimore, where the Ravens are essentially tenants in their own stadium.
They don't have control over who plays, what happens in there. Yes they have input. They can say, hey, could you please not put a country music concert on in the, or a tractor pull the day before a football game. Of course they wouldn't do that, but it's someone else. It's not necessarily the people playing the sport that are in control of the stadium. How do they decide whether they want rugby, the Rugby World Cup in that place?
It might be some places they sit there and go, this is great. We actually don't have a lot of football going on here or a lot of sport. This time we're going to fill it. We're going to make a lot of money with visitors and things like that. This is where they say, yeah, this is an option we want.
We're going to be available for multiple pool games all the way through. We'll be happy to do it. We'll even make, you know, something like that. We'll, we'll maybe make a tenant move for a bit or something like that. Okay. They're going around and finding out not only then which venues work, but which controlling entities are interested.
If they're not interested, waste of time. Okay. Finding the venues.
I think you heard that everybody's thinking big. They're not thinking about 10,000 seat stadiums. There's no point. It remains true. I found out another surprising piece of information, but that is true, that per-game Rugby World Cup outdraws the FIFA World Cup.
That's a surprise to me. But when I thought about it, I thought, actually, that does seem to work. There is a reason for that. What we did know, and we knew when the bid came through, that the number one attended FIFA World cup in total fans and fans per event was United States, 1994. Nobody's eclipsed that since. Why?
Everybody wants to visit the United States. It's a really fun place to visit. Lots of different places, Very, very different. So if you want to go to New York, you want to go to New Orleans, you want to go to Miami, you want to go to San Francisco, you want to go to San Diego, you want to go to Memphis or Nashville, you're going ... or Chicago. Right. You're going to very, very different places with different cultures, different food, different vibe, really interesting no matter what.
So, that's, that's one of the reasons why people want to visit the United States. It's also very easy to get around. An unmatched highway system, and airport system.
Really. Probably the only country that I can think of easier to get around is probably Germany. Or as easy to get around is Germany. So they're going to go big on venues. 60, thousand, 70,000, maybe 80,000. [The ] United States has a lot of those. They also have a pretty good amount of 20- to 30,000-seat stadiums, usually soccer stadiums. What the USA doesn't have a lot of is that 35, 40 to 55 [thousand] seat stadiums just don't have a lot of them.
If you look at different states, worldofstadiums.com. There's a great website that talks about that (see link here>>). And click on any, any state, and you'll see they'll list the stadiums and It'll be like 10,000, 12,000, 17,000 or 65,000. That's how it operates. Okay, so they'll probably be searching for a couple of the nice little Goldilocks stadiums, for a little bit of use, but for the most part, they're going to go big. Then they have to sit down and say, how do we fit the Rugby World Cup into the existing schedule?
Again, this is something you wouldn't know. You wouldn't necessarily assume it's happened. Rugby World Cup USA has met with the NFL and the NFL has come back and said, we'd like to work with you. They're perfectly happy to work with them. Say, look, you need us to schedule an away game, a bye week, an away game or something like that for a team, we can do that as long as we know early enough by a certain date, you come to us and say, this is where we need that.
They're going to work with Rugby World Cup, and then remember, Rugby World Cup is not just playing on Sunday like the NFL. The NFL plays almost every day of the week now, right. But they are always splintering the games through the week. One of the big lessons from the '99 World Cup, in fact, was that just playing on the weekends destroyed momentum for the tournament.
Sorry. Because you'd say, oh, great, yeah, did you see that game on Saturday? You see that game on Sunday? Okay, great. And then no games. There were like eight games on one day, and on the other, they're looking for like a maximum of four games in a day. And probably, I mean, they might do two in a venue. I don't know, they might do three.
That's hard. But they probably could do it. But spreading it out, but also leveraging when, a venue is available.
In the economic impact, what do we have to do? How much time do we have to spend on this? What do we have to do to change the venue? Clean up the commercial side of it. Things like that. They go through, bam, bam, bam. Hit those metrics. If you hit all the enough of those metrics, they say, yes, we want you.
And if you miss them, they go, no, never mind, thank you very much. Great. That's almost easy, right? You just say, yes, we do it or we don't. On the same side of it, World Rugby is dealing with that as well as, you know, rugby fields are bigger than football fields significantly.
So rugby fields are actually bigger than soccer fields. Technically. They're supposed to be longer. Technically. If you look at the soccer field, that dead ball line, that's the goalline for a rugby field.
So you'd want the in-goal, the end zone going past the dead-ball-line. Very often we don't do that. Very often. We pop that inside the field of play for soccer because of how much space is available. Now World Rugby has dialed back their insistence on, mandated size for the field.
What they instead are saying is there's a certain percentage we'll take of say maybe a little bit narrower or maybe a little bit shorter, or maybe the buffer zones around the edge are going to be a little bit smaller. Not all of those. If you're like narrower, shorter and not enough buffer, zone around the edge and it's a concrete wall that you're smashing into, they will say, no, that's not good enough. But if you're compromising on one or two of those a little bit, that's fine.
So now we've cut down to about 30, 33, whatever, venues. Maybe, one or two come in late. Remember, some still to be built. Right. It's six years from now. Some of them the, city is saying yes, but not that stadium we're gonna go with. We're building a new one. Or they could also be saying, yes, that stadium, that's gonna be not used by the time we roll around to the World cup because we're building a new stadium for, the football team in town.
This stadium's still perfectly good. Go ahead and use it all you want. Those things happen and finally, I think we've got some, Some key stadiums. You sit there and like, there are some stadiums just aren't available for a lot, but they are. They will be made available at a certain time. And you can say, well, this is perfect for the semifinals.
They may not host any pool games. They'll host semifinals. And those plans already be made, too. So I've got a lot to say about money. I've got a lot to say about locations. And also sort of how, how it all comes together. And we'll talk about that in another episode. I just wanted to start with perhaps a little bit of reassurance to the American rugby fan that people are actually doing something.
They visited cities, they visited venues, they've made plans about that. They have their metrics down. They have commitments to stay in the discussion. Eventually there'll be commitments to say, yeah, we're the the host city or host region. It's the host regions that are going to be on top of a lot of those hotel, deals and things like that. All of that will be pieced into a host region. So you can say, hey, we're going to freeze hotel rates at this and things like that.
But it is happening. I was drastically reassured about that. And yes, I mean, I think you have a lot of questions. I still have more questions. I have some more answers as well. But we're going to end with that. It's happening and it's going to happen in 2031.
They're building toward 2033 as well. They're still, they're planning that at the same time. And we'll talk about it more later.
