Fitz: OK, now let’s look at your global ambitions. As an Australian, you’ll be aware of the game called rugby league, I think? But as chair of World Rugby, when you survey the ground out there globally, does league even show up as tiny blip on the radar off your starboard quarter, or not at all?
BR: It’s there; we can see it, and I respect it, but it is not really a factor globally.
Fitz: But hang on, you must be
terrified, and I mean TERRIFIED of the NRL going to start their season in Las Vegas again? I mean, I know they only got an average of 50,000 watching the game last year, but maybe this year they really will get the tens of millions they mooted and actually take America by storm. You’ll see! By some of the breathless accounts, they’re just about to swallow rugby whole, and they’ve got America enthralled and about to fall to their charms!
BR: [
Laughing.] Look, with the greatest respect to rugby league, while it makes a lot of noise in this market, that does not really translate at all to the American market or global market, and ... we are ourselves seriously well advanced in our plans to make a huge rugby impact in the US. Last year we had the All Blacks playing the Fijians in front of 50,000 in San Diego. We’re going to have more Tests in Chicago this year. And our eye is on the prize of 2031 and 2033 men’s and women’s World Cup. Meantime, we’ve got an Olympic Games in LA in ’28 where the US and the Canadian Rugby Sevens teams will feature incredibly strongly, particularly in the women’s game. The women’s game is our next frontier and, later this year, in September, we’ve got a Women’s World Cup in England that’s going to be magnificent. We’ve already had significant ticket sales for the pool matches and for the finals. And there’s close to 3 million women globally playing rugby right now.
Fitz: Goodness! That is nearly bigger than the NRL’s venture to Las Vegas!
BR: We are projecting it will deliver £500-550 million of surplus for the game, more than $1 billion, which we can then reinvest in the game around the world. But while this coming World Cup in Australia will be the biggest and the best and the most financially successful, the next one, in America, will be even bigger, and we are projecting a surplus of about £750 million.
If rugby is the game they play in heaven, Australian Brett Robinson - the first chairman of World Rugby to come from the southern hemisphere - might be forgiven for having a God-complex. Mercifully, he doesn’t.
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