Rugby Union Powers That Aren't
- cepmurphywrites
- 38 minutes ago
- 13 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Rugby Union, like a lot of sports, was first codified in the UK and as such the four home nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland) have traditionally been the heartland of the game. From there it spread to France where it became popular, helped by Vichy France banning the rival Rugby League code in 1941 and handing its assets to Rugby Union as League was associated with the pre-war socialist government. It also spread across the British Empire, in particular proving popular in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, which would become the three most successful nations in the sport.
These eight nations (England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand) are the eight traditional powerhouses of the game. Collectively they have provided all ten winners of the Rugby Union Men's World Cup, all ten runners up, seventeen out of the twenty losing semi-finalists and thirty one out of the forty losing quarter finalists. Out of the eighty teams to reach the quarter finals of the Rugby World Cup, only twelve coming from any other nations.
So this article is going to look at which other teams have broken into that elite and which teams which haven't could have done or might do in the future. Where is the potential for Rugby Union's next big international side or, as this is an alternative history site, the big international side that could already exist?
We will start with the only team from outside those eight teams to ever reach a World Cup semi-final, something they have done three times: Argentina. They are the only team to really successfully break into that elite to the point that nowadays it would be more surprising if Argentina didn't beat a team like Wales or Scotland to reach the last eight. So how did they do it and why has no-one else managed it?
Rugby picked up in Argentina in the first place for the simple reason that Argentina has a large immigrant population from the British Isles and was firmly economically and socially connected with British society as an informal colony. Because of this, Rugby Union, much like polo, was adapted by an Anglophilic upper class as a marker of sophistication and was taught in the fanciest private schools. More importantly, the rugby clubs became increasingly important socially as a way of forming communities of young affluent lads. This has led to criticism, recent murders in Argentina have been blamed on the gang-like attitude of these clubs, but the clubs created a sense of community among their members which meant those who played Rugby in school tended to continue playing it, if only to keep up the social aspects that surround the game. Likewise, the fact it has been mostly an amateur sport has allowed it to take on the image of a certain cultural purity as a counterpoint to the professional football league.
More importantly Argentina have seen huge improvement as a rugby team and each success has bred more enthusiasm. In 1965, when the Argentine national team went for the first time to South Africa and they beat the junior Springboks, this was reported with huge enthusiasm back in Argentina, leading to more players joining the clubs. In the first three World Cups, 1987, ‘91 and ‘95, Argentina, hindered by a policy to not pick players playing outside Argentina, struggled, winning only one out of nine games. But they had a resurgence in 1999, beating Samoa, Japan and Ireland to reach the quarter finals for the first time. Once again, this success led to further interest in the sport and so a new generation of players joining the clubs.
In 2007, Argentina went a step further still, beating France, Ireland and Scotland to reach their first semi-final. This success was followed by another quarter final in 2011 and, to take advantage of their newfound competitiveness, Argentina were added to what had been the Tri-Nations in 2012, giving them yearly matches against Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. While they struggled initially, the money and crowds this bought in as well as regular matches against the best in the world has seem them steadily improve. They won their first match in 2014, finished off the bottom for the first time in 2015, and in 2024 (the last Rugby Championship as I write this) managed to beat all three of their opponents once. [Alas they came fourth in this October’s Championship! – Editor]
Domestically it's less rosy. Argentina's professional team, the Jaguares, competed in Super Rugby from 2016 to 2019 with teams from Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa but that league collapsed due to the expense of travel costs and the covid pandemic and now most Argentinian players play either abroad or in a new South American league. Despite that setback, their national team is still a force. They can be inconsistent and struggle with discipline, but they belong with the top teams in the world now.
This then is the template for creating a new force in rugby. A country that, if not rich, at least has enough resources to be able maintain a healthy sporting scene (Argentina is hugely successful at football) which has had a thriving subculture of rugby that has survived barren years with its resources intact and then enough success to drive more eyes and players to that minority sport, which has then been rewarded with regular high profile matches.
And the most obvious country in that model is Japan.
Rugby was bought to Japan by British sailors and, while it never became the main sport, it became a mainstay of the universities and like in Argentina, a sign of the Anglophilic elite. The advantages Japan has in terms of economic development and population has meant that its domestic league has attracted numerous foreign players and tends to be well attended. It also had a team in Super Rugby from 2016 to 2020 but like Argentina that didn't survive the covid pandemic.
And like Argentina, Japan has had moments of success that have attracted huge television audiences and bought new players into the game. Japan is the only serious Asian team has qualified to every World Cup and while their initial record was awful, winning only one game of their first twenty four, they have improved rapidly. In 2015, coached by the Japanese-Australian top quality Eddie Jones and featuring the soon to be iconic kicker, Ayumu Goromaru, they announced themselves on the world stage. Japan won three out of their four group games, beating Samoa, USA and four times Rugby World Cup winners South Africa, in probably the game's greatest ever upset. They also, thanks at least partly to some dreadful refereeing in the game between Samoa and Scotland at Newcastle, became the only team to ever fail to qualify from the World Cup group stages after winning three games out of four.
Four years later in 2019 they would make their only appearance in the quarter finals, after beating Scotland, Samoa, Russia and (world number one team) Ireland in the group stages and while 2023 saw them take a step back, they still won two games, beating Samoa again as well as Chile. Japan are firmly within the top 12 teams in the world right now.
But that success has some asterisks. I mentioned Ayumu Goromaru but the other star players of the recent Japanese team included Michael Leitch, Kotaro Matsushima, Lappies Labuschagné and Male Sa'u, none of whom were born in Japan. Japan, more than any other team, relies on foreign born players who qualify because they play rugby professionally in Japan rather than homegrown talent. Moreover the 2019 Rugby World Cup was hosted in Japan and as such huge resources were put into the 2019 Japanese team so that they could impress during it. The team was removed from domestic competitions to train together so they could focus on the World Cup, a trick that paid huge dividends but simply can't be repeated regularly.
Japan has huge potential as a rugby nation due to its large population, skill, economic power base and enthusiasm for the game but they need to be able to prove that they can compete consistently if they want to take that step up that Argentina have. And World Rugby needs to back them, as they did in giving them the 2019 World Cup, with regular games against the other top teams, which they currently lack. If the ref had correctly ruled out Scotland's winning try against Samoa in 2015, giving Japan a quarter final against Australia, that might have helped. Likewise if the covid pandemic hadn't happened and so hadn't killed Super Rugby, Japan might be currently closer to that top eight. It would also help if there were other top teams in Asia they could play against regularly.
There is one other country in Asia that also has a thriving rugby culture: Sri Lanka.
The Sri Lankan Rugby team has never qualified for a World Cup or even come particularly close to doing so but it has more registered players than most countries in the world. Sri Lanka has produced one of the best cricket teams in the world and rugby is of comparable popularity at the school level, part of the colonial legacy of the country. However, that is only at the school level, which is where those players are registered. The money is in cricket and so most graduating rugby players either give up on sport or try and enter cricket instead. The hot and humid climate of Sri Lanka, the general small stature of their players and the overall poverty of the nation has prevented a culture of rugby playing as adults from forming as it did in Argentina. But a richer and more stable Sri Lanka, one which dodged the long Civil War, might well be a formidable rugby playing nation.
Another rugby loving Indian Ocean Island is Madagascar. Like Sri Lanka, they have never really come close to qualifying for the World Cup (Kenya, Zimbabwe and Namibia are far better African teams) but they get huge crowds for their domestic games. The main thing that has prevented that being converted into success is Malagasy poverty and malnutrition. Successful sporting teams require a certain amount of infrastructure and they require a fit and healthy population with spare time to train. Poor countries normally don't have any of that. A successful Malagasy team would probably have to be led by emigrants who grew up elsewhere.
This isn’t always true as there are three poor countries who do excel at rugby: Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, all Pacific Islands. Fiji have reached three World Cup quarter finals (in 1987, 2007 and 2023) and should have made it to two more if not for an awful referring performance in their game against France in 1999 and a last-minute collapse against Scotland in 2003. Samoa, likewise, have made the quarter finals twice (in 1991 and 1995). Tonga have never made the quarter finals but could have done in 2007, when they came within a try of beating South Africa, and should have done in 2011, when they beat both France and Japan but missed out because they lost to Canada.
All three are routinely competitive rugby teams within the top 10 and rugby is hugely popular in the Pacific, but all of these countries are pretty much operating in their best-case scenario. You can't make their countries more enthusiastic about rugby by giving them more successes because they already love rugby. They can easily make more quarters or a semi-final but that doesn’t change their long term position. Their problems are simply that not many people live in any of them, they are poor, and they are corrupt. That gives limits on their successes compared to richer and larger countries like Australia and England that it’s hard to imagine any long-term solution to, beyond them competing as a joint Pacific Islander team.
The same also applies for the Cook Islands, a nation of only 15,040, who nonetheless have managed to produce several exceptional players. They're simply too small to ever maintain a top seat at the table.
The only exception within the Pacific is Papua New Guinea, which has more than ten times the population of Fiji and twice that of New Zealand. That does give them a player base with potential of achieving something more and Papua New Guinea has produced some genuinely excellent rugby players. It's just they all play Rugby League. Papua New Guinea was an Australian colony, in the same way Samoa was a colony of New Zealand, and in Australia, Rugby League is popular than Rugby Union. As a result, PNG is overwhelmingly a League nation, reaching five quarter finals in the Rugby League World Cup but never so much as qualifying for the Rugby Union one. You avoid the split or change the nature of it and PNG is a potential Rugby Union elite team.
There have been thirteen teams to make a Rugby Union World Cup quarter final in OTL. England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Japan, Fiji, Samoa and finally Canada. Canada and the USA have long been the great what ifs for Rugby Union. They are huge, rich nations with sports mad populations who play games, American and Canadian Football, which have some overlap with rugby. There is a reason the USA is due to host the 2031 Rugby World Cup, and why a professional Rugby League has ran in the USA and Canada since 2017. It is seen as fertile ground for the game to grow in.
Rugby was popular in the United States in the 19th century, particularly in universities, but the desire to distance themselves from the UK resulted in the rules changes that created American Football, which quickly supplanted classic rugby as the sport of choice. Rugby did however have the chance for a renaissance in the early 20th century when American Football was seen as overly violent and was in a crisis. As a result, contrarians in California returned instead to Rugby Union, with both University of California and Stanford University replacing their American Football programmes with a rugby one between 1906 and 1914, and the USA won gold medals in Rugby in both the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. However, this was not to last, with the sport soon declining in popularity again and the California Universities returning to American Football (though Hawaii and Alaska would keep their Rugby culture going longer).
Modern analysis blames this decline on one single match, when New Zealand thrashed an All-American team 51-3 in 1913. This demoralised the Americans, proving that they weren’t capable of keeping up with the rugby elite and so they abandoned the game, not willing to be second best.
This is a simplification, a bigger reason was the unbalance between the University of California and Stanford; UC returned to American Football because they kept losing to their rival in rugby. Another reason was the war which meant many non-Californians were posted to California and they had never played Rugby before. It is also worth noting that New Zealand and Australia were outraged by the overly rough style of rugby California played and talked of boycotting them even if California had been more successful.
Nonetheless the loss to New Zealand was not helpful and as such the thriving minority subculture of rugby that could have been established on the West Coast never happened, and so it has remained a minority sport in the USA mostly of interest to immigrants from elsewhere. If that tour had never happened, and if Stanford were less good, it’s not impossible for California to remain a rugby state much like Hawaii did.
Canada has similar problems (plus the additional one of pitches freezing during winter and being unusable) but also a much deeper history with rugby. The sport has been pretty popular there since it was first codified, especially in the 1940s, and Canada was one of the best of the rest in the amateur era, reaching the quarter finals in 1991. The problem happened when Rugby Union went professional in 1995. This resulted in a lot of teams, across the world, going bust as they couldn’t afford to pay wages. Canada assumed that professionalism would soon be reverted and so remained largely amateur. This saved them money but also meant that they soon fell hugely behind the generation of elite players who had been fully professional and so had different training programmes.
Canada Rugby Union was deeply underfunded and as such had huge difficulty providing a path for their many youth players to go professional, meaning most simply dropped out instead. The only town in Canada for many years where professional players could play was Langford and due to the size of Canada and the cost of travel, many choose not to. Between 2017 and 2023 they did manage to have a second base for professional players in the Toronto Arrows, which played in the American League, but they disbanded after the death of their president. Canada as a result have been overtaken by teams like Chile and Uruguay and are now only the 5th best team in the Americas. It is hard to see this ever changing without serious investment when professionalism started, something that would be a lot easier with a major American league also happening to fund it.
In Europe, there has always been much hope of rugby catching on, as these are rich developed and populous countries. Spain, Germany and Italy all play rugby, but it is mostly a minority sport there.
Italy is the one where it is the biggest and few countries have been given more chances to succeed than them. In 2000 their national team were added to Europe’s biggest competition, what had been the Five Nations, a private yearly round robin between France, Wales, England, Scotland and Ireland; their domestic teams play in Europe’s biggest domestic tournaments. Despite this however the sport has never really taken off. Italy is a decent team but they’ve never truly challenged the elite, mostly losing to the teams above them and never finishing in the top three of the six nations or the last eight of the World Cup. They’ve never had that Argentina in 1999 or Japan in 2015 moment to bring eyes on their team and confidence to their players.
But they almost did.
In 2007 Italy beat Portugal and Romania to set up a deciding match against Scotland which was 18-16 to Scotland with five minutes to go when they won a penalty. If David Bortolussi had made that penalty, Italy would have won 19-18 and reached the quarter final for the first time ever. But the nerves got to him and he missed it and so Italy never got that big win that would see fans get enthusiastic about their rugby team.
Italy's main competition as the sixth best team in Europe is the ex-soviet republic of Georgia, which like Italy almost won a famous upset in the 2007 World Cup, coming very closing to beating an out of sorts Irish side who were knocked out in the groups. It has been theorised that if they had done so, there would have been pressure for a reform of the six nations which would have included them, but ultimately the financial reward for that extra travel isn't there. Georgia, much like Fiji, are an excellent rugby team who have never been given the opportunities of a Japan, a USA or an Italy because they're already a small rugby mad nation and so there isn't a vast new potential audience or player base to win over. Arguably the best result for Georgian rugby players, from the point of view of playing in the best Rugby team, would have been for the Soviet Union to hold together. That way the Georgians would be able to be sold to western markets based on the chance to win over the much larger Russian population, which do also play rugby,
There is a world where the quarter finalists of the 2023 Rugby World Cup are Italy, USA, Japan, Canada, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka and the Soviet Union.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.