Women’s League WXV
This year we’ve seen World Rugby announce a complete women’s world league which starts, with their usual impeccable timing, in direct competition to this little competition called the men’s Rugby World Cup. I guess it’s the knockout stages, so the number of matches is tailing off, so the idea could be you’ll watch some women’s matches too? But surely starting the next weekend when you’re in the habit of watching some rugby makes more sense?
Nevertheless, it is up and will be running come October. It looks like, in future, it will occupy a slot slightly before the men’s November Internationals (or possibly in parallel). There are three tiers, each playing a four team round robin competition. In the first cycle, the tier one sides (New Zealand, France, England and Wales) are safe, there is promotion and relegation between tier two and three, and out of tier three. After that first cycle, there will be promotion and relegation between tier one and two as well. Honestly I’d prefer it if the tier one side had promotion and relegation from the start as well, but I don’t overly mind it being protected for only one round.
Men’s League
We have also seen a somewhat vaguer announcement about a men’s World League. This is going to consist of the six teams in the Men’s Six Nations, the four in The Rugby Championship, plus two more to be confirmed (Japan seems likely to be one of the two). It will start in 2026 and there’s going to be a tier two competition although there are even fewer details about that. We don’t really have any fine details except ‘make the June and November test windows more meaningfully competitive’. The aim appears to be to keep the Men’s Six Nations and The Rugby Championship as they are (although adding Japan to the latter would seem reasonable to many if it’s really going to one of the others) and each team’s results there would contribute to the league position, and then the existing July and November tests would as well in some way.
In most leagues, the teams play each once (as they used to in Super Rugby) or twice (as they do in all the Northern Hemisphere contests). The Rugby Championship is usually home and away, the Six Nations is play each other once. So the other two windows would look to let the Northern and Southern Hemisphere sides play their cross-hemisphere matches, probably once each since we have seven slots in the traditional, official window – four in November and three in June.
The November tests are already a mix, with the Southern Hemisphere sides touring around the Northern Hemisphere. For example, In 2022, Australia played Scotland, France, Italy, Ireland and Wales. If you can count, that’s five matches, but Wales was out of the official window, which resulted in all the players based in England being unavailable. In June we more typically see a test series. For example, New Zealand hosted Ireland in 2022 for three matches, and the other Southern Hemisphere sides saw similar extended series.
A possible change?
Will the traditional format change to suit this new league? It’s easy to imagine how the four matches in November readily contribute league points in a fairly even-handed way. But does a three test series work well or will there be a shake-up to the June tests. This would cause the Northern Hemisphere sides to actually the South more, which is not always desirable. Of course, we just don’t know yet, but it’s something to consider. If we (regardless of actual geography) assign the two ‘others’ to the South Group, three matches in June plus three in November gives everyone three home and three away matches. That seems quite fair, so it works from that perspective. It also leaves a spare weekend for some of the equally traditional matches vs lower tier sides. That approach would help World Rugby continue the idea of developing rugby through the world. I might prefer to forget Wales v Georgia in November 2022, but it’s a big part of their buildup to the Rugby World Cup. It was also a big part in the sacking of Wayne Pivac.
Current State of the Game
Of course the men’s and women’s leagues are in very different stages of development and are trying to achieve somewhat different things. Professionalism, certainly in the tier one nations, will have been established for over 30 years by the time this new men’s league kicks off – that means almost all the players have only been alive while the sport has been professional. Even the grizzled old veterans won’t have personal memories of amateur top level rugby. Professionalism, for the women, is still spreading. For a lot of the sides it’s really new – it was put in place just before the 2021 women’s Rugby World Cup which, thanks to Covid, actually took place in 2022. These sides are going to be coming up to two years professional. But even those teams which went professional first have been professional for less than a decade. Many of the nations you might expect to have a professional women’s team alongside their powerhouse men’s teams, such as South Africa, simply don’t.
Impact of the Leagues?
Some of this is clearly guesswork, or the hope/hype. However, some is fairly well founded guesswork. The men’s league is looking to extend existing games and make them all meaningful in a larger context and, hopefully, to develop rugby in tier two (and beyond) and raise the standards in these lower tiers. The women’s league, formally the WXV, is looking to develop a fully professional game at the upper echelons and expand the player base where, even where we do have professional sides, we have teams like Ireland who have to decide where to put their experienced players – in the 7’s or the 15’s. This year they put them in the 7’s to try and qualify for the Olympics and fielded a really young and inexperienced 15’s squad in the Six Nations, losing all of their matches, most of them badly, simply because they don’t have enough elite players.
The WXV, giving all the sides extra matches every year, and trying to match team of roughly equally standard but offering promotion and relegation, seems to offer that. It should help earn more money for the competing sides which, in turn, helps pay more to the players, convince national unions to pay players, convince more women it’s a viable career and so on. It would be nice if there was a Women’s Rugby Championship and a Women’s Pacific Nations Cup to run in parallel to the men’s competition in the same way the Women’s Six Nations does. Not necessarily contemporaneously but matching the contest and giving the women extra match time and exposure. At least the WXV will give them all some supported playing time outside of the Rugby World Cup, and a means to develop, as well as whatever matches they choose to arrange outside of this window.
Final Thoughts
It is easy to point the fingers and object to the Men’s League. How will the Six Nations plus The Rugby Championship plus two widen rugby? But there are three years to go and more announcements to come. There is the promise of a “shadow competition” and if that’s twelve more teams, then that’s a lot of sides playing regularly. If there are systems so that there is mixing and rotation of the teams – maybe two up and down between league one and two, two up and down between league two and whatever is underneath it then it might do a lot. Given the June tests might have to change, perhaps one approach would be to take The Rugby Championship, the November Tests and the Six Nations as the ranking tournaments each year, then use June for layered play-offs, rather like the WXV competition. The top four, the middle four and the bottom four play a semi-final and final each, hosted in the highest-seeded country each time. (Alternates could be arranged of course, so there’s always a series of matches in each of the big Southern Hemisphere countries.) Then you have a final ranking for the year, and off you go. Of course, that’s simple and fun, so I’m sure World Rugby won’t do it.
Setting up the WXV is, relatively speaking, easier than the Men’s League. Women’s rugby as a serious competition is relatively new. The Women’s Six Nations (originally the Four Nations) was established in 1996. That’s the year after the men’s game turned professional, and the same year as the first Tri Nations championship. Of course, Southern Hemisphere rugby, has longer roots than that, the Bledisloe Cup dates back to the 1930’s. However, Women’s Rugby certainly does have a history, and passionate advocates, but it’s not a long history. The original Four Nations started in 1883, and the French joined in 1910. June and November tests, in some form, date back for decades as well. Organising around these competitions, the existing league commitments and so on has been a nightmare, I’m sure. There’s a lot of money, certainly a lot of egos, and it appears from the outside not a lot of really smart ideas on the table. Certainly if you look at some of the other ideas World Rugby have produced you have to wonder what their thought processes were. They can certainly still get it horribly wrong, but let’s hope that, as it appears they might have done with the WXV, they get the Men’s equivalent right. Maybe not perfect, but good at least.
